"…as a basic focus, the dancers remain in physical touch, mutually supportive and innovative, meditating upon the physical laws relating to their masses: gravity, momentum, inertia and friction."
— Steve Paxton talking about Contact Improvisation.
He also said
When an apple fell on his head, Isaac Newton was inspired to describe his three laws of motion. These became the foundation of our ideas about physics. Being essentially objective, Newton ignored what it feels like to be the apple
it’s been a while since i taught just a skills class in contact improvisation. but that’s what i did this arvo last weekend at CDT.
i usually enjoy a more balanced class involving states or tasks or scores as well as some defined skills. today though, i thought i’d just push skills, so we worked on pop-ups, perches and pivot points, plus a little bit of pelvis on pelvis thrown in just to solidify the alliteration. it was a lot more ‘work’ than the regulars are used to, but it was nice to convey some body information in a didactic manner.
what emerged for me - after the class - was how while doing these distinct exercises we’d actually been working with different ranges of tone in the body without focussing on it. and, as could be expected, this came out in the dances that occurred in the jam that follows the class.
my friend Hellene Gronda wrote her PhD some years ago, entitled Dance with the body you have, which is an often used phrase in contact improvisation (sometimes used with dance the dance you’re having). i’ve been rereading the introduction recently and thought it might be worth posting some of it up here.
Dance with the body you have is a phrase I learnt in the practice of the dance form, Contact Improvisation. This contemporary dance is an unchoreographed duet technique based on communication through touch and weight, and relies heavily on body awareness skills to facilitate safe and exhilarating interactions. In Contact Improvisation, dance with the body you have is a phrase that encourages a close attention to the moment by moment physical reality of your body’s capacity to bear weight and negotiate falling. The dance is a spontaneous physical interaction with a partner that could involve any part of your body, and often requires reactions much faster than conscious calculation. Consequently, it develops a three-dimensional, intelligent body awareness. The practice cultivates integrity as the integration of all parts of yourself: valuing the slow, tired parts as much as the flexible, responsive aspects.
I thought this was a good description of contact improvisation - and the more the better i reckon.
at ACIC a few weeks ago jacob and i were team teaching a fundamentals of contact improvisation class.
there was a point when i started talking about how we use the term “listening” a lot. and that it is a analogy that, like all analogies, will eventually break down and be limited in scope. i then, in a moment of not knowing, stumbled towards a definition of what we really mean when we say “listening”. it was a poor fudged description.
but, this morning, after a bad night’s sleep i was lying in bed and found myself thinking about that moment.
i find the verbal communication analogy extremely useful for teaching contact, but sometimes it annoys me as well. because we’re not talking about listening at all, we’re talking about focussing our awareness on physical sensation. what we do is attune our sensory system to shifts in weight exchange, pressure, friction, and movement and allow this information to provide us with motivation to move. this is the basis of the ‘finger dance’ - and of much of the body of ci.
at least that’s what i thought at 5.30am
:)
