Celebration Weekend

David was introduced to Contact Improvisation by Felicity McDonald while studying music at Melbourne University.

Alongside his work with Flux, David has performed with Two Suits, Bird on a Wire, Yspace, and in a long-standing duet collaboration with Jacob Lehrer, among others.

David initiated the CI jam in Canberra and the South Coast Jam in Victoria, contributing significantly to the development of improvisation communities in Australia.

Alongside his dancing, David founded and edited Proximity, a magazine devoted to dance and improvisation, for close to a decade.

Fifteen years ago, David became a doctor and has since worked as a general practitioner alongside his ongoing engagement with dance and music.

Jacob has been dancing and performing since he was seven years old. He went on to study dance at the Victorian College of the Arts, where he first heard about something called a "contact jam". Curious, he went along and met Rinske Ginsberg, who quietly whispered Contact Improvisation into him. The whisper seems to have stuck.

Jacob joined State of Flux, where he spent more than a decade researching, teaching, performing, and building communities around improvisation and Contact Improvisation. During this time, he also began a long-standing artistic collaboration with David Corbet.

Jacob currently teaches Contact Improvisation at WAAPA, performs and is a movement director. He enjoys supporting dancers, actors, and performers in developing greater physical awareness, confidence, and responsiveness. His teaching explores listening through touch, weight, momentum, and shared risk, creating spaces where people can experiment, discover, and connect.

Basically, he has spent most of his life mucking around and is delighted to discover that this can occasionally be called work.

Janice completed a Grad Dip Movement and Dance (Melb Uni) in the 1980s. She was first introduced to CI during a 3-month course with Anna Halprin in San Francisco eons ago.

Later, after acquiring a disability, she worked with US wheelchair Contact dancers, attended residencies with two inclusive UK dance companies. She also attended summer schools with Joan Skinner and Stephanie Skura in Seattle over three years.

Since 1997 she has been the Artistic Director of Weave Movement Theatre, a disability dance theatre company. She has directed and performed devised works and curated many collaborations with respected artists.

She received the inaugural Disability Arts Award from Creative Australia (2019) and recently an OAM for services to disability and the Arts. Weave received a Green Room Award for their 2025 show Flesh Mirror.

In her day job, she advocates to the Arts industry, to improve access for Deaf and disabled artists and audiences.

Llewellyn studied dance intensively in the late eighties in Sydney, after completing a bachelors degree and working in children's services and local government. Contact improvisation study and practice began at that time with Helen Clarke Lapin who was a direct line to many significant CI lineage holders.

Helen's influence and inspiration were far reaching, leading eventually to 4 years of Body-Mind Centering® (BMC) practitioner training in Massachusetts with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen BMC's founder along with a move to Melbourne for further post graduate study. Llewellyn was the first Australian to become a certified BMC practitioner in 1994.

The synergies between BMC and CI were self-evident, Llewellyn found his true north in these movement culture forms and applied these practices in multiple contexts from early childhood education specialist practice to professional learning, to work with elite level athletes and coaches and in tertiary education.

For the past 15 years Llewellyn has worked at Deakin University as a lecturer and researcher in early childhood education and now as a senior lecturer with ongoing post graduate course director responsibilities. He is an active member of Surf Coast CI.

Martin studied contemporary dance as part of a bachelor degree and went on to work with a number of dance and street theatre companies in Australia and overseas.

Over the years Martin has taught CI in a wide variety of contexts around the world to all age groups and abilities. In particular he taught dance at the Victorian College of the Arts for nearly 20 years.

With his wife Fiona Cook, he founded Cecil Street Studio: a centre for dance and performance improvisation in Melbourne that ran for 21 years.

Martin supports his dance habit by moonlighting in computer programming.

Before dance, Wendy worked in the community sector as a youth worker, community development worker and Community Legal Service volunteer manager.

Dance entered her life when she met Australian contemporary dance pioneer Margaret Lasica, leading her to undertake intensive training at Extensions Studio in Melbourne.

During this time, Wendy discovered Skinner Releasing Technique® and travelled regularly to Seattle, USA, to study with its founder, Joan Skinner. She eventually became Australia's first qualified teacher of the technique.

Alongside her dance training, Wendy developed expertise in remedial massage and Pilates, establishing her own studio, Studio202, which she successfully ran for 15 years.

Wendy also contributed significantly to the development of many of Australia's dancers by teaching Kinesiology at the Victorian College of the Arts for 22 years.

Justin Holland is a musician, pianist, rhythm facilitator, and performer whose work spans theatre, dance, community arts, and improvisation. He uses piano, percussion, and live looping to create rhythmic and melodic foundations for the trio's explorations.

Charlotte Roberts is a vocalist, facilitator, and creator of The Musical Body. Drawing on her experience with voice, rhythm, movement, and improvisation, she brings a playful and expressive quality to the ensemble.

Doreen Ooi is a violist and improviser with roots in classical music, martial arts, and Contact Improvisation. Her sensitive and lyrical playing adds depth, texture, and spontaneity to the trio's sound.