Open Dance Ensemble explores, promote and develops new improvised dance strategies and offers young dancers the opportunity to create new work with them. We created a new technique, one in which dancers conduct each other while dancing through a set of gestures and hand signals to bring compositional coherence to the individual improvised movements of dancers. Since 2017 we have created and presented dozens of new structured improvised performances using self-conducting and other approaches for diverse audiences, from abstract dances to ones with narrative content.