This could be a powerful place for artists to brooks 35 brooks also points out that racialized culture always operates whether or not we acknowledge it. The predominant whiteness of CI spaces has been questioned for a long time. The group acknowledges their positionality as white and middle class and centers a part of their discussion arou nd the fact that sometimes it is price preventing other demographics from participating, but in other cases, like or solution, and it seems few have since t hen, but it is important to note that these conversations have been happening for over 40 years.
Silvy Panet s actual ability for women to expand their roles as creators and leaders as well as the pervasiveness of toxic masculinity for males in the form Hennessy He ist 3 In many early editions of CQ, people are referenced as only their first name. I was unable to find a last name for Mark. PAGE 14 10 new age distinctions between women and men, between female and male energies, that further alienate queer and non Hennessy 5.
In addition to questions on gender roles or lack thereof in CI, there is much discourse in issue of CQ , she investigates the first rule of C ontact I.
With privilege comes power, which can lead to instances of violation. She parallels the role of the first rule in themselves in a high I must note a helpful definition of the first rule that I found after reading article. Keriac explains, In Transactional Analysis there is a concept called the rescue triangle , containing the roles of the victim, the prosecutor, and the rescuer.
According to this schema, when a person tries to help someone else by taking care of her , they create a victim who will later resent and persecute them for it.
The way to avoid this dynamic is by not doing more than 50 percent of the work. To do more is taking over someone Contact duet, you only do 50 percent of PAGE 15 11 in some situations you even extend help to your partner, but you do so in a way that. Keriac and Pritchard 35 Beaulieux confronts, but it may be helpful to contextualize. In addition to CI being a place of discourse for feminist movements, it is also a place for discussion around queerness.
At the same time, CI seems to be a mirror of society and may unintentionally and subconsciously reproduce inequality, anachronistic patterns, and social This relates back to my earlier discussion on how practitioners who focus only on the p hysical form miss out on an opportunity to use CI as a tool for change. They also mention ideas like being empowered and taking up space, something CI aims performanc e spaces, the dancers are generally physically isolated from one another Turner more on this later.
Our habit to maintain this is to shrink in and crowd ourselves in order to avoid crowding others Turner PAGE 16 12 in Turner CI can work as a vessel for creating freedom from societal constraints surrounding gen der and sexuality. Several months were spent encouraging people to stay at home. Eventually masks were recommended, and guidelines suggested remaining six feet away from anyone you did not live with. For dancers, choreographers, and dance teachers, this would mean over a ye ar of training through video conferencing platforms, studios with taped out boxes to maintain social distancing, no partner work with others outside of your household, and no live in person performances.
To Contact Improvisation, this meant a halt to the typical practice. Practitioners turned to partnering with furniture and abstracting the principles of CI to scenarios without touch.
I began this research as an exploration into how a form that necessitates touch can survive a year of social distancing and the loss of one of its leaders.
This section investigates the cur rent practices as well as previous history that may guide Contact Improvisation through this challenging time. Contact Quarterly I mention the topics in the previous section , however briefly, to showcase the way that this form has given a concrete place f or important discussions to take place. While some critique CI specifically, the conversations are reflections of our society as a whole.
As I mentioned previously, CQ was the solution instead of incorporating into a formal company. The originators of CI were concerned about the spread of the form that could lead to fragmentation, as well as the possibility of dangerous teaching Novack The issue of containing a form that seemed to exponentially explode due to the fact that it requires a partner to do, the dance spread quickly as dancers taught in order to have people to Elitism a continuing dial discusses his experiences at his first Harbin Jam, where the idea of an ethics committee was proposed.
Koenig points out the fault in this Koenig came to the same conclusion that the founders of CI had come to exactly two decades prior. Nancy Stark Smith commented on the decision to not try to seize control over the fos tering communication between all those doing contact and encourage those less experienced As CI was rooted in the principles of movement rather than specific steps or exercises , it was decided that a centralized place for writing CQ could serve as a unifying force instead Novack As time went on, CQ has printed fewer articles directly about CI, but has developed as a forum for discussions related to the concepts of CI N ovack This has also meant that voices other than Paxton and the original founders have become influential Novack 82 , increasing the possibility for discussions like those mentioned above.
I think that a lot of people are grasping for parallels in order to inform us how to exist in these and I really do hate to say this The reality is that the transmission of COVID 19 is unlike to my knowledge any other virus that the modern dance world has experienced.
I believe this may be due to two reasons: 1 How to M ake D ances in an E pidemic , he discusses how dance critics would not speak directly about AIDS, even when writing word AIDS DS was affecting how Contact jams were formed or how people were interacting with the form, but no one wanted to talk directly about it.
Originally written for a conference in PAGE 19 15 words are eerily contemporary to much discourse in and but yes I will have voted since I f ear a continuation of the old regime it is difficult to write this without some sense of anxiety high sadness, anger, etc. PAGE 20 16 b etween those who could buy access to health and those who could not and many of our friends in this age range are dead or dying of the new plague and other stress related diseases and our conversations switched from real estate to death Reitz 11 W e once talked about art, then daily conversations had to be about what the president has with the forty fifth president in one way or another , and for the past year about death, dying, and illness.
The simu ltaneous pandemics of institutionalized racism, capitalism, patriarchy, climate crises, etc. Touch Starvation What is particularly unique about the pandemic we find ourselves in currently is the fact that we cannot physically touch one another. Since CI requires touch, only those living with other contact improvisers have been able to practice as normal. Those of us without that have been left distanced from those we dance with.
As over a year has passed with minimal hugging or handshakes, let alone practicing C ontact I mpro visation, many including myself might be facing the consequences of touch starvation. Asim Shah, M. It is cited that touch starvation increases stress, depression, and anxiety and that the skin communicates positive and negative touch stimuli to our sensory neurons Pierce.
Shah e xplains that video chatting is about 80 percent as effective as in person contact Pierc e. PAGE 22 18 So while touch is crucial to both CI and to us as human beings, we have needed to find other ways of being for the past year and foreseeable future. Current Practices Current guidelines on COVID 19 say that the virus does not live on surfaces, but we should continue to social distance at least 6 feet apart and wear a mask or two if possible.
This has led to a year of classes through video platforms such as Zoom and Instagram Live. Several artists have figured out keen approaches to teaching CI principles of weight sharing and touch based conversation through their Zoom and socially distanced classrooms. Benny Simon approached counterbalancing through the use of Therabands, enabling Dancers wrapped the long strips of elastic around their wrists and ankles to feel the give and take of their partners.
Prompts included following the line of the string with different body parts, moving over and under the lines, and putting se t material inside of the newly defined space. I t almost felt like being back in a C ontact jam, where you would be doing a series of movements only to find yourself face to face, underneath, or laying on top of another person or in this case, string! For me the practice of CI is a rigorous commitment to embodied listening, agency, and spontaneity.
This practice can lead many directions and be used as a tool to create community, to foster self-awareness, to inform partnering choreography, to understand a three-dimensional body in space, and to inspire nuanced choreographic structures.
The form can be used to inspire or train for performance and as its own performance modality. Witnessing the sheer magic that lives in an unplanned moment, executed by individuals with a mature practice in the unknown.
Writer Taja Will is a Twin Cities based choreographer, educator and improviser. Skip to main content. But I also mean it in comparison to other social dance forms, where the main purpose of the dance is not to be performed like in ballet, modern or contemporary dance techniques but to be danced like in Ballroom Dancing, Salsa, Swing or Tango Argentino.
It is almost a surprise that CI became a social dance form. It was and in a way still is practiced mainly without music. It could have developed into a physical performing art. For a while in its highly physical and acrobatic beginnings it was referred to as an arts sport.
Maybe it became a dance because the originators where so strongly connected to the dance world and they performed it as a dance piece. The social aspect appeared already in the very beginning in the research settings.
The original way to practice CI and also to perform it was the round robin, which creates a sort of stage and separates the practitoners into dancers and spectators. This format lost its dominant status in classes and other frames to practice CI. It has the disadvantage that only a few people could dance at the same time. Watching was a main part of the practice, which also created some creative pressure on the dancers. Especially for new-comers this is often very hard in this dance form, where perception got the stronger emphasize than the beauty or excitement of the visual shape.
Instead jams appeared, where everyone could make his or her own decision to dance or to witness the dance. If the space is big enough easily more than hundred people can share the dance at the same time. Contact Improvisation created a format, which is similar to other social dance forms like ball room dancing, Salsa or Tango Argentino. People meet to purely dance together.
Usually the development goes the other way. From the social dance form to the performance. Later on it became more normal that the best ones created Tango dances for the stage, where they needed to adjust the dance to this different situation.
On the other hand ballet and its following generations of modern dance and contemporary dance techniques kept their focus on being performed. Classes and trainings gave the physical ability. In the rehearsals the piece was developed. But the stage is essentially the frame where the rehearsed steps are meant to be danced.
To practice it is enough. In my understanding of it it seems that most contemporary dance students never find settings to bring their practiced knowledge into pure dancing? They practice a dance but never dance it. How strange. Contact Improvisation made this miraculous way from being a performative dance to becoming a social dance form that can be actually danced. Contact Improvisation is essentially a research.
CI started as a research project. He understood CI as a research work that has its appropriate place in a simple studio. But still the spirit of research seems to be characteristic for CI. There is a basic attitude in dancing to invite something new to happen. Contact practitioners are supposed to have the urge to break their habits to not get stuck in what works and what they know.
It feels like a very different attitude compared to other movement forms that use improvisation like Tango Argentino or Capoeira, where the research is the duty or luxury mainly of the advanced practitioners, who already integrated all the basic vocabulary.
Among contact teachers there is a lot of exchange happening. Co-teaching in alternating constellations seems to be rather common, where the teachers meet in advance to develop the material they want to teach. And teaching itself is for many teachers a multi-layered research. We can use our own questions as a core direction for our teaching. There is also a rather strong labbing culture in the CI community, not only among teachers. Getting together with a few people to dance, to discover new things and to explore them.
I like to emphasize this point because there are also many people in the CI community, which are mainly attracted by the warm hearted sense of community they find. I guess if the social aspect becomes the main driving force of the CI community the dance form will loose its core. I believe that it is the practitioners who constantly bring the spirit of discovery and curiosity into the dance space are the ones who keep the CI community going and connected.
The heart of Contact Improvisation is its technique with two connected layers:. This seems to be the one thing that makes CI unique, outstanding from all other movement disciplines.
And these weight shifts are possible without using hands and arms to hold or hook. Dances with this focus cultivate the option of loosing balance together. It is not about stability and balance.
It is about using the momentum of two physically connected people to loose balance together and to redirect their pathway through all spacious levels.
We see dance partners in physical connection falling down and up and in all horizontal directions. The communication happens through touch taking advantage of the ability to read the laws of physics in order to deal with weight in a highly efficient way. The partners follow the point of contact, which is changing most of the time through rolling and sometimes through sliding.
It is only describing the uniqueness of CI on a technical level. We can dance in slow motion, in very stable positions not moving through space at all, using highly inefficient movements and it can be wonderful. Only the state of listening and the negotiation of making choices in a dialogue with each other are essential then see the technique of improvisation. They might not choose this option. Sharing weight is based on trust — on a very fundamental, physical level.
I am sure that these experiences create connections to childhood experiences, where we were so familiar with trusting, being carried and taken care of and if not we connect to a lack of an essential experience. I guess that is a reason, why CI can touch us easily on a rather deep level, even though it is first of all a physical technique. Growing trust is part of the form. It can only be learned through daring to trust, which includes to acknowledge the fear instead of ignoring or pushing through it.
In CI we are testing in a very physical sense our limits, the edge of our comfort zone, where trust and fear have their inspiring and challenging meetings. It looks like that there is a rather big awareness of creating safe environments in CI classes and — if we are lucky — also in jams. These safe frames are the precondition for a healthy growth in the direction of more trust. I am very fascinated by the idea that the work on sharing weight is the deeper reason for the warmth and strength of the CI community.
This is the reason why I believe that the CI community would start to dissolve if the focus got too much into this socializing aspect.
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