A word to all the single men of Los Angeles: whether your intentions with her are short-term or long, always —and I repeat, ALWAYS— find a way to incorporate puppies and/or kittens in to all of your first dates. You may know we fancy them, but it’s beyond that. Watching adorable little bodies rolling around all over each other = one of the biggest aphrodisiacs known to female-kind. 

Even better? Seek out any and all opportunities where those bodies are actually human. Take your ladies to The LA Improv Dance Festival (aka iD Fest), for example, which features a full weekend of inspiring contact improvisation to get your juices flowing.

What the hell would one expect to see at an iD Fest, you might ask? Festival organizer Jones Welsh describes it as “an exploration & celebration of improvisation movement styles and alternative dance techniques, featuring contact improvisation, performance structure, ensemble movement, and integrating sounds, voice, and sets into performance.” Er, yeah. Just Google it. 

This yearly event begins with a week’s worth of intensive improv dance workshops by some of the world’s best teachers and is book ended by a handful of performances that mixes the veteran and new talent in a wiggly potpourri. The 2009 Festival brought in several special guests from the U.K. and was hosted by Venice’s Electric Lodge.  

A total of five 10 to 15 minute pieces followed the theme “Communication in Performance.” Only two used any verbal language at all (and only then sparingly and obtusely), reminding us that most communication is non-verbal. The theme of the show should have been “Body Language”… or is that a dance cliché? 

It was actually a lot like watching puppies play. The dancers were a little more coordinated with their limbs, but otherwise, this free-form dance has the same kind of natural accidental magic. The performers tumble around, often on each other, in a moment-by-moment creative expression that draws from their impulses, their built-in technique, the music and —at their best— total freedom and focus, concurrently. The dances can be slow and undulating like a silken braid unraveling, but they can just as easily be rambunctious and dangerous like firecrackers in the living room. Though there is no set choreography, the skill of the players is obvious; they must listen to one another with every cell of their being, lest they punish (or be punished) in the face with an errant body part. Truly a spectacle—an original spectacle—each time. 

The dance pieces varied greatly—from a single dancer’s exploration of a drop leaf table, to three women in a voyeuristic inter-generational relay, to the spicy dueling of a gymnastic quartet! 

I did not go holding the hand of any kind of romantic interest (someone missed out!), but I was turned on enough to commit to exploring my own talent for contact improvisation at one of the weekly “jams” in LA where I can learn. Oh, and now I really want a puppy…