EUGENE–Dancer and choreographer Jacky McCormick will perform contact improvisation with her group Contact 2000 at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 1, at the Museum of Art, 1430 Johnson Lane on the University of Oregon campus.

The free performance will be presented as part of MusEvenings! which also offers refreshments and extended viewing hours from 5—8 p.m. for current Museum of Art exhibitions, including "18 Points of View," a showcase of artwork by UO fine and applied arts faculty members. That exhibition continues through Jan. 2, 2000.

A graduate of Bedford Community College in England and of Mills College in Oakland, Calif., McCormick currently teaches contact improvisation and performs in Eugene and in the San Francisco bay area. She has been a dance teacher and choreographer in England, California and Oregon for more than 17 years and started her own contact improvisation dance company in 1985 after a year of touring Europe and the United States.

"Contact improvisation hovers somewhere between gymnastics, wrestling and improvisatory dance," she says of the dance form that has greatly influenced her teaching. "It is unchoreographed, growing in the moment … from a point of physical contact between two dancers. [They] … work with mass, momentum, gravity; with themselves, each other and the floor. They explore balances, finding new ways to support each other, to free each other to fly."

Open from noon to 8 p.m. Wednesday and from noon to 5 p.m. Thursday through Sunday, the Museum of Art is accessible to people with disabilities. Suggested admission is $3, except on Wednesdays when MusEvenings! offers free programming to all. Museum members, students with ID, UO employees and children are always admitted free.

For more information, browse http://uoma.uoregon.edu or call (541) 346-3027.

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