Cathie Caraker

United States
Year of starting to practice
1981
Year of starting to teach
1986
Cathie Caraker

Cathie Caraker is an international dance artist and teacher based in San Francisco. She has been practicing and teaching Contact and other improvisation for over 35 years. She fell in love with CI while still a dance student in Amsterdam and worked extensively with Nancy Stark Smith, Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson and others in the 80’s and 90’s. Her interest in movement research led her to the School for Body-Mind Centering®, where she became a certified Practitioner of BMC with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. A pioneering teacher in the field of dance and somatics, she has shared her work at dance institutes and festivals worldwide, including the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam, Contact Festival Freiburg, Movement Research NYC, the New York and Seattle Improvisation Festivals, Goa CI Festival, l’Association Hayyou’Raqs in Tunis, Contredanse Brussels and ODC in SF. She has been on the organizing team of wcciJAM since 2013-ish. Her writings on somatics and dance education have been published by the Belgian dance journal Nouvelles de Danse. www.cathiecaraker.com

Significant teachers
Nancy Stark Smith, Steve Paxton, Karen Nelson, Andrew Harwood, Lisa Nelson, many others