Dance’s free, and fierce, expression

His torso gleaming with sweat, 6-foot-2 Jones Welsh is surprisingly agile as he hurls himself around the floor to the techno sounds of Austrian duo Kruder & Dorfmeister. He does a one-armed cartwheel here, a twisting yoga-like posture there and a series of kaleidoscopic turns that ends in an unexpected back flip. When a second dancer, the very petite Maria Gillespie, joins him, their duet becomes a flowing interchange of energy and weight as they take turns supporting each other.

This high-risk, experimental form of dance, which explores the physics of lifted, jumping and falling bodies, is known as contact improvisation. Developed in the ‘70s by modern dancer Steve Paxton and others, it has been embraced by contemporary dance artists and, with trust and egalitarianism part of the equation, is continuing to grow in popularity.

Indeed, once regarded as a poor cousin to choreography, improvisation -- in all its many permutations -- is now considered a separate genre, with annual festivals sprouting up in major American cities and throughout Europe. And although Los Angeles may have been a bit slow to jump onto the bandwagon, Seattle-born Welsh, 25, a member of the locally based Diavolo Dance Theater, is bent on changing that.

He and his presenting organization, Making Faces Productions, are producing the first Los Angeles Improv Dance Festival this week at Santa Monica’s Highways Performance Space. Featuring a series of workshops led by such practitioners as Nina Martin, co-founder of San Diego’s Lower Left Performance Collective, the event will culminate this weekend with performances and free jams.

“Everywhere else I’ve lived there’s been an improv festival,” says Welsh, also a trained gymnast, who received his bachelor’s in theater and dance from the University of Washington and moved to L.A. two years ago from New York. “So part of my inspiration was to give a format for the dance community to learn and perform improv.”

Of course, choreographers have long used improvisation, either by themselves or with dancers, to help them arrive at finished work. More recently, some members of the dance community have argued that improvising is often superior to set-in-stone movement.

“When improv succeeds,” Welsh maintains, “it can be more effective than developed choreography. The audience knows it’s created for them and nobody’s going to see it that way ever again.”

But by now, says Martin, who taught choreography and improvisation at UCLA for three years before relocating to Marfa, Texas, “the whole issue of improv being as valuable as choreography is becoming moot. Good improv, when the artist identifies an interesting problem to solve and follows through, is what concerns me.”

L.A. native Simone Forti agrees. A pioneer in the field, Forti, who will turn 70 in April, is unable to participate in the festival only because she is conducting workshops in Switzerland.

“I love to dance, I love to move,” she says. “But I don’t like to do movements that someone else has told me to do or even that I prescribed. I like to follow my thoughts in movement. It’s closer to what jazz musicians do, where there’ll be some structure and decisions have been made.

“There’s some tradition of how to do it,” Forti adds. “But in the moment, you’re following the music -- for a musician -- or, for a dancer, you’re following the movement and the possibilities unfolding.”

The basis of some forms of improv is so-called body therapies, or holistic systems, which explore various ways of moving efficiently. For example, Alexander Technique, which became popular in the ‘60s, is concerned with alignment, posture and breathing.

Another such approach is known as release technique. It stresses shifts of weight as dancers release muscles, joints, tension and old patterns. It can also result in especially fluid partnering, with leaps and lifts appearing almost casual.

Developed in the ‘80s, release technique can be seen in the work of postmodernist choreographer Trisha Brown and in pieces by the locally based troupe Tongue, whose artistic director, Stephanie Gilliland, says that moving “from the skeleton” allows muscles to respond the way they need to.

Both techniques are being taught at Highways this week, as is a workshop called “The Moving Image.” Led by Welsh and Holly Rothschild, it will incorporate improv with live video projections that offer singular perspectives on the body.

Modern dance isn’t the only genre to embrace improvisation. In New York, Tony Award-winning tap sensation Savion Glover is jamming to classical musicians playing Bach and Vivaldi. Spontaneous movement can also prove exhilarating in such disparate forms as flamenco, the classical south Indian idiom bharata natyam, and butoh, in which Los Angeles performing artist Oguri often improvises to the live sounds of world music.

There are those who find improvisation self-indulgent or characterized by meaningless movement. For Carmela Hermann, a onetime pupil of Forti and a 15-year practitioner of the form, improv can get “mushy and lost when performers aren’t following a thread.”

“But,” says Hermann, “it can be as focused as choreography, because there is a way of approaching improv where you prepare as much as you would for a piece of choreography. It has an element of spontaneity, though, that choreography doesn’t.”

Like any other means of artistic expression, according to Forti, it is a discipline.

“Sometimes I compare choreography to oil painting and improv to watercolor,” she says. “In improv, you’re still working with the same elements of choreography: You have to have a starting point ... basic elements that you’re exploring.”

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Los Angeles Improv Dance Festival presents ‘Opening the Gates’

Where: Highways Performance Space, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica

When: 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday

Price: $15

Contact: (310) 315-1459

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