Wow, amazing experience!

I am so happy!
The two things I love most about music and performing are:

Sense of enesemble between performers and
Improvisation

Tonight I had those two in spades!

I remember once having a random improv session with someone that I strongly disliked. While it was happening and for a short while after, I had respect for him and enjoyed the experience.....

Tonight, I was having an experience like that but with skilled improvisers who are good nice and enjoyable people! I can barely describe how elated that left me feeling. This was the group I had mentioned before - primarily dancers but also a few musicians who get together for Jams. In theory it could be scary - 10 dancers, a pianist, bongo player, guitarist, random percussionist and a painter/sketch artist getting together and each improvising something.
I was amazed at how much cohesion there was within the group. Musicians were all doing a great job of communicating within themselves and the music as a whole was speaking to the dancers. At the same time, the dancers were speaking to the musicians and there was a conversation between individuals. Sometimes the dancers were individual, sometimes they came together in similar movements and formed one entity. The sketch artist was drawing images of what he was seeing the dancers were doing and then other dancers would see/dance with the pictures and bring them into the organism that was developing. It must have been about 45 minutes long, but it barely felt that long - every change was organic and it felt like one idea that changed and morphed as the jam went on.

In order to warm up / get everyone to open themselves up we played a game/exercise which was amazing and fun! There were 2 versions which we did and they made everyone feel at ease and laugh.
First - We all stood in a circle so we could see everyone. The game was about passing and recieving. Someone would 'throw' and action and a noise across the circle to another person. The other person would recieve the action by mimicking the motion and the noise. They would then pass another action and noise to someone else.....etc. Quickly, people were laughing and losing their inhibitions and then it was getting too fast for people to realise what was going on and it ended up in a pool of laughter.
Next - A more serious version of the game where you passed the 'tone'. The starting person would hold a note/pitch/sound and then pass it to someone. To recieve the note, you had to emotionally connect with the other person by imitating the gesture and sound along with that person until they felt you were inline with them. Once you had recieved the tone, you would transform it by some emotional reaction in terms of sound and body and then pass it along to someone else.
Both of these activities were amazing. It necessiated direct eye contact in order to communicate who was being sent the action. The second activity also made it so you would try and understand the other person and then take the time to reinterpret the sound.
As you can guess, these were a great starter to get people into the realm of non verbal communication and from the jam that came after, I feel it was very effective.

I'm very excited to do this again next week, and hopefully throughout the year. I'm so glad to have stumbled upon this group!