How The Idea Was Born?

It began from the attention garnered by a short video (above) captured by chance by Aaron Brando during the Ibiza Contact Festival in 2011. In it, ContaKids founder Itay Yatuv is seen with his daughter, Sophie. While on her way to bed in her pyjamas, with mommy and her pacifier, she ran into a tent where her father was participating in a movement jam session. 

The footage of the toddler girl thoroughly enjoying the interaction with Itay aroused much curiosity about how parents can increase physical contact with their kids, and also unwittingly invited them to jump into the happy waters of play and free dance with their little offspring.

In the past three years, Itay worked on developing the methodology that he calls ContaKids, designing it for children aged from two to four and their parents, to share dance and physical play based on various foundations of Contact Improvisation. Through leading dozens of after-school programmes, he has motivated parent-child pairings to roll and jump—around and on each other— and helped them learn to breathe, listen, make choices and compromise, together.

The response from the parents and children who have participated has been wonderful and encouraging to Itay. It has also been a inspiring learning experience, far beyond his expectations when he began it all.
What is ContaKids?

Tactility is a fundamental sensory experience of our environment. As children, we first make sense of the world physically. As we grow into adulthood, we lose much of our dependence on touch to observe and learn, as our other senses—like vision and hearing—develop to become the dominant channels to our intellect and imagination.

Contakids is a methodology that pushes the idea of using physical contact to develop a deeper form of communication between parents and their children, that both will find enjoyable. By working with bodily movements, the child can enhance their motor skills and self-confidence, while the parents get to develop a bond of trust with their young.

It aims to foster confidence in our actions, by reinstating the physical abilities that we were born with. This energetic assuredness flows directly, in an unmediated form, to our little partners in dance. As we tend to lack it as adults, the hard work is ours to bear right now.
Benefits of Contakids:

• Parents and children develop a deeper form of communication that both find enjoyable, through movement, working with the body, and physical contact.

• Children enhance and improve their motor skills and self-confidence, while parents build a bond of trust between their child and themselves.

• Children learn self-reliance and develop an independent spirit, and parents learn to interact with them as equals that they support unconditionally.

Development of the Methodology

Ever since his daughter Sophie was born, Itay has been observing her. The manner in which she learns and experiments with new forms of movements—such as rolling, falling, picking herself up off the floor— has helped him decode a child’s motor development process.

From these observations and the connections he derived, the numerous possibilities that physical play can contain are emphasised through the manner that the adult interacts with the child, which are summarised below.

  • The best form of learning is experience, and failure is a key aspect of this process; let the child encounter everything, while minimally protecting them; allow the child to fall as much as possible, for it has a crucial impact; aim to understand where they could really get hurt and interfere specifically; the rest is within the range of important experimentation.  
  • As adults often coddle or hold, the child becomes accustomed to being passive, and feeling heavy; instead, when the child is the one responsible for being off the ground, then they are active, holding themselves, and aware of the possibilities available to them on the bodily terrain of the adult.
  • When the adult refrains from using their hands to keep the child on their body, they develop motor skills by finding new angles and positions to stop the little one from slipping off; the ability to sense and receive information through the skin is awakened, so one becomes acutely aware of the child’s exact location on themselves, the manner in which the child is staying in place and the position that they are in, be it upside down or on their side.
  • Adults tend to act on the child—pick up, turn over, and so on—although the environment is stimulating enough for them to discover what deserves their attention; the desire to create a “pleasant encounter” causes one to work in a very narrow manner that focuses on a specific goal and misses out on other opportunities out there; instead practice setting the child’s interests apart from the experience that the adult wants them to have.
  • Dancing together places the roles of adult and child on an equal footing; each has the freedom to choose their next move and nothing is forced upon the other; the child develops their independence with the support of the parent, allowing for a more open physical movement.