Sunday Contact Jam Teachers

Bryn Bamber

Bryn Bamber danced hard for years in bars, clubs and at music festivals until in 2010 she stumbled into a contact improv class in Montreal and she knew she had found her people. Since then, she's studied contact improv with Martin Keogh, the Kaejas, Sharon Fridman and Kathleen Rea. She is also currently studying Kizomba, a partner dance from Angola. She loves flying, lifting, floating and healing dances.

Charlie Halpern-Hamu

I've been doing comedy improv since 1995. It started as a father-son practice-English-as-second-language activity. It quickly became my primary cooperative-play outlet, and a guide to living my life: focusing on the improv mantra of “yes, and”: accept and advance. For over a decade, contact improv has been my primary opportunity to collaborative create something that brings satisfaction to all involved.

Daryl Vineberg

Daryl is a mover who has been in love with contact improv for almost 20 years.

In his time off, he works as a psychotherapist and is a dad to two boys.

Erica McDowell

I am a local contact dancer with 10 years experience, completing training in Pilates, Yoga, Alexander Technique and Myofascia Release (J. Barnes MFR). Like many other people, suffering chronic life pains was my impetus for paying attention to body matters, thus was the slippery slope I slid upon into the realm of somatics. I have persisted with this special interest not because of a prerogative to optimize life, but because of my hedonism; being fundamentally about feeling good. Before then, a lot of my focus was spent on fulfilling a BFA at OCAD in printmaking, and feeling alive through the art of recreation/sport. My most enduring love has been swimming. Now that that's public, you might never be able to un-see and un-feel me swimming in our dances together.

Gibum Dante Lim

Gibum Dante Lim is an actor, dancer, and theatre maker.

He has trained with renowned clown masters such as Philippe Gaulier in France and Giovanni Fusetti from Italy, specializing in Clown and Bouffon. Additionally, he has studied under various distinguished teachers across Toronto, Montreal, Italy, and the United States, focusing on Jacques Lecoq's pedagogy. Gibum is a graduate of the George Brown Theatre Conservatory.

He has participated in several independent projects, including a short play titled 'Winter Story' performed alongside five fellow GBTC artists at the Distillery Winter Market Village, and a work-in-progress dance piece, 'Two Bodies and Nobody', which was presented and supported by REAson d'etre.

Gibum has performed with Corpus Dance Projects in 'Transhumance' and 'The Alpine Merry Sheep Choir'. He is excited to return to work with them on 'Camping Royale' and 'Les Moutons' in Canada and Sweden. He was also part of the creative ensemble for 'Last Landscape', produced by Bad New Days and directed by Adam Paolozza, which recently received numerous nominations, including Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble. Currently, he is a member of the creative ensemble for Suzanne Liska's 'Tea with Mara', set to be presented at Citadel + Compagnie next year. Additionally, he is an ensemble member for REAson d'etre Dance and is participating in their Axis Syllabus x Contact Improv Research Project.

Gibum serves as an apprentice teacher at George Brown Theatre School, where he teaches Neutral Mask and Character Masks under Vrenia Ivonoffski. He also teaches Lecoq pedagogy alongside Shanda Bezic and Chase Jeffels. An avid Contact Improvisation dancer, he trains in Axis Syllabus with Kathleen Rea, and he has received training from Galiya Tzur from Israel, Claire Turner Reid, and Kerwin Barrington.

He is drawn to the discipline and readiness that Clowning and Dance require, fully embracing the unpredictable and vibrant responses that emerge in each moment, both physically and energetically. Gibum believes that this dynamic interplay is what makes the theatre experience transformative.

Henry Wai

Henry Wai started dancing at age 44 and have been having fun exploring a world of movement possibility ever since. For Henry, dance has been a joyful, embodied pathway to presence — our ability to listen and respond to each moment, as well as for connection and realising potential. His practice of dancing Contact Improvisation has benefited most from:

• dancing with dancers of all experience levels in places including Seattle, Winnipeg, Ann Arbor, Kitchener, Montreal, Boston and Washington
• learning from the classes and workshop of many generous teachers
• experience facilitating Contact Improvisation classes (especially for newcomers)
• presence cultivated from practices of Nonviolent Communication, tai chi and vipassana meditation.

Jessica Houghton

Jessica Houghton is a Dance Movement Psychotherapist, teacher, and dance artist, with 25 years of experience studying, facilitating, choreographing, and performing dance in Toronto, across Canada, and throughout Europe. After completing her professional dance training at York University's BFA Honours Dance program, Jessica decided to bridge her passions for dance and healing by pursuing her Masters in Dance Movement Psychotherapy at Roehampton University (UK). As a performing dance artist, she has worked with many choreographers, including Holly Small, Janice Pomer, Colin Anthony, and Valerie Calam, as well as performing her own works and co-founding Lîla Ensemble, a dance and music improvisation collective. Jessica has been dancing contact improv for 8 years, and is excited to share her extensive background as a professional dancer with the contact community.

Kathleen Rea

Kathleen Rea danced with Canada's Ballet Jorgen, National Ballet of Canada, and Tiroler Landestheater (Austria). She fell in love with contact improvisation (CI) 21 years ago and has been involved in the CI community ever since. She has choreographed over 40 dance works and been nominated for 5 DORA awards. Kathleen has a learning disability that throughout her life has meant that writing takes 4 to 8 times longer than the average person. It is one of life's great surprises and mysteries for her that despite the struggle she developed a love of writing and is a published author (“The Healing Dance”, Charles C Thomas Publisher, as well as blog and academic writing). She has a Master's in Expressive Arts with a minor in Psychology. She has a passion for functional movement and is a teacher candidate of the Axis Syllabus. She is the director of REAson d'etre dance productions a not-for-profit contact improvisation based dance company that produces a weekly dance jam in Toronto, the Contact Dance International Film Festival and dance-theatre productions. Being on the autism spectrum she also identifies as being neuro-atypical and works to educate the world about neurodiversity.

Kim Simons

Kim Simons enjoys exploring classic elements in contact, like weight sharing, rolling point and sharing momentum, both as the surfer and the wave. Her dance is a mix between athletic and goofy and there is nothing impressive or dancerly here in her bio. Most of Kim's life she was too frozen to dance. Finding contact was a revelation and has helped her reconnect to her body and sense of play. Her kinaesthetic creativity unlocked, she now shares with others, on occasion, as a way to serve the form.

Leslie Heydon

Leslie Heydon grew up in a household of amateur yet dedicated dancers and began dancing 5Rhythms over twenty years ago. In January 2016, after many years of toe-dipping, she began the practice of Contact Dance Improvisation in earnest. Her passion is to explore and guide, whether in the wilderness outdoors, or in the internal wilderness of the soul. Of her many learnings in CI, the most recent is: don't get a pedicure with nail polish an hour before a jam.

Mateo G. Torres

Mateo G. Torres (GUETCHA GUARITCHA) is a Colombian-born multidisciplinary dance artist based in Toronto. He started his dance training in Bogota at an early age, and deepened his studies in the USA, Cuba, and Canada. His work is highly influenced by his Latinx American background, often politically charged, and inspired by social subject matters. Mateo fuses his eclectic movement training within his choreography creating a distinct movement quality. He has performed professionally in Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Germany, Mexico, and Panama.

Mika Lillit Lior

Mika Lillit Lior is a performing artist and scholar interested in dance as an intersection of social, personal and spiritual processes. Her practices include contact improvisation, choreography, samba and capoeira and her research focuses on ritual dance practices in Bahia, Brazil. Lior's ethnographic dance film, Ogum's Story, premiered in São Paulo at the 2022 International Eco-Performance Film Festival. She lectures in Dance Studies at The University of Malta's School of Performing Arts.

Milan Horvay

Milan learned social dances like ballroom in his youth in Slovakia. He then gave up dancing and became an engineer and contractor. On the side he paints and played bass guitar in several bands. A few years ago, he found contact improvisation and began to study with many teachers including Aham, Jonathan Lilly, Suzanne Liska, Olivia Proudfoot, Kathleen Rea, and Mark Young. Milan likes contact improvisation for its attention to physics, its expressive potential and for the playfulness. He is familiar with the Axis Syllabus and works to incorporate its concepts into his dancing. He feels there is so much more to learn and in this way the contact improvisation will never get boring for him. Right now, he feels comfortable co-teaching or assisting another teacher as he feels hits let him pass on his knowledge of being a base in a way that is supportive of the community but acknowledges that he is still new to the form. He can be found jamming at the Toronto jams most weeks.

Olivia Proudfoot

Olivia Proudfoot, a former gymnast and breakdancer, has been dancing Contact Improv for this entire millennium. In 2018 she became a certified Kaeja Elevations Instructor.

Pablo Grinszpan

I'm from Mar del Plata, a coastal city in Argentina. I've been practicing Contact Improvisation (CI) since 2012. Through classes with CI teachers, festivals, seminars, and jams, I've deepened my interest and curiosity about my experiences during this dance. Since discovering CI, it has inspired me, moved me, challenged me, and sparked my imagination, emotions, and inquiry. These experiences have been truly transformative. As a psychologist and therapeutic assistant, my background also informs and enriches my experience with CI.

Sarah Jones

Sarah Jones is a Contact Improvisation dancer, teacher and performer. She has served as Organizer for the Sunday Contact Jam in Toronto, as a Safety Committee member for the jam, and as a teacher has taught many classes at the Sunday and Tuesday Contact Jams in Toronto over the last 9 years. She particularly enjoys introducing CI to dancers for the first time. She has performed in live community dance productions with Create Move Connect and in numerous Contact Improvisation and Ecstatic Dance films.

Suzanne Liska

Suzanne Liska is a teacher, choreographer, dancer and researcher specializing in somatic practices, dance/theatre, contact improv and ensemble improv. She has received grants and awards through the Canada Council for the Arts, Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, York University and SSHRC (Canadian Graduate Scholarship). Suzanne has an MFA in Choreography and is a Certified Alexander Technique Teacher. She teaches professional dancers, actors and community dancers. She is contract Faculty in York University's Dance department and George Brown College Theatre School. www.suzanneliska.com

Tanya Williams

Contact improvisation has become a life-transforming practice for me in “being with” whatever is happening... including change, complexity, and the unknown. The practice teaches me to find delight in my learning, and trust that autonomy & connectedness can co-exist in the dance of relationship. In my classes, I love creating the conditions for a flow-state to emerge, sharing pathways into the experience that feel both practical and magical. So far, it’s been 25 years of cross-pollinating the practice of CI with other pathways into presence and play, such as physical theatre, ensemble improvisation, authentic movement, dynamic fascial bodywork, and Alexander Technique movement education.

Tim Spronk

Tim Spronk has been dancing for 25 years. He started training at the School of Alberta Ballet in Edmonton, Alberta. After completing a B.F.A. at York he joined the Newton Moraes Dance Theatre performing in Brazil, Canada and Germany and had since worked for a variety of independent choreographers and companies. He was a founding member of the Chimera Project and danced with Kaeja d'Dance for eight years. Currently a member of the Arabesque dance company and orchestra, Tim has most recently appeared at the Canada Dance Festival with CORPUS. When he isn't dancing Tim focuses his time on parenting and working as a personal trainer and kettlebell class instruction. Tim has actively practiced Contact Improvisation for 20 years, and he is eager to share his knowledge of strength training, dance partnering and internal martial arts to help fellow students expand their skills for safe, dynamic play in Contact Dance. Tim Spronk is also a personal trainer and martial arts practitioner, and can help you find the best fitness routine to empower yourself, move better and feel great!

Twyla Kowalenko

Twyla Kowalenko, MSW PhD, is super passionate about holding space for people to connect to the wisdom of their bodies and full self-expression while expanding the reach, relevance, and accessibility of embodied, somatic practices. With a masters in social work and a PhD in somatics, she has been a voracious learner of countless embodied, dance, movement, somatic, shamanic and personal growth practices. One of Twyla's favourite space holding activities is facilitation and teaching, which she’s been doing for over 20 years. Twyla facilitates through her body, in deep connection to others and the moment, drawing on her well of experience, and she loves helping others foster this capacity through improvisational activities. Twyla brings her life to the dance floor and the dance floor to life, supporting her students and clients in developing their embodied responsivity. To find out more about Twyla, visit somaing.ca.

Vivek Patel

Vivek Patel has been exploring contact improv for over 15 years. He still learns something new every time he dances. Contact deeply affects all aspects of his being — physical, mental, emotional and Spiritual. As a martial artist who has been teaching and practicing Ninjutsu for 30 years, he deeply integrates martial arts principles into his dancing. Vivek helped co-organizing the first Consent Culture in Contact Improvisation Symposium in April 2020 at Earthdance.

Zita Nyarady

Zita Nyarady is a Canadian independent dance, theatre and circus artist. Zita has taught contact improvisation in Toronto at the Sunday and Wednesday Jams as well as George Brown College. Internationally, Zita has taught contact in Sweden, Jamaica and the States. As co-artistic director of The Grand Salto Theatre. Zita's interdisciplinary performances have been presented at Rhubarb, Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival, Toronto Festival of Clowns, Edmonton Play the Fool Festival, Guelph Contemporary Dance Festival, NBacts Theatre Festival, Clay & Paper Theatre, Theatre Passe Muraille, Harbourfront Centre and fringe festivals across the country.