Contact Improvisation. The two words that I hated hearing throughout my A level dance practice. To me Contact Improvisation meant being scared to touch people that otherwise you wouldn’t even say two words to down the corridor. So as I went into week one of this practice it’s safe to say I was a little apprehensive.
Before I went to class I read this weeks’ set reading from Steve Paxton’s ‘Drafting Interior Techniques’ and that scared me even more. Why did he think contact improvisation was a technique ‘best described negatively’? (Paxton, 2003, 175). It was here that I decided to find out in my own way why he disliked the technique so much! As we started the class Kirsty showed us some examples of contact improvisation and now I began to see why people could enjoy it. Ultima Vez’ ‘Blush’ introduced me to movements I didn’t realise could even be excecuted so well, and I started to realise that maybe I would enjoy this technique after all.
We started off the class by being very grounded and moving round the space through the floor, I noticed that this began to become more natural to me as the exercise went on. As Heitkamp says in ‘Moving from the Skin: An Exploratorium’, ‘the skin is not merely a simple shell’ (Heitkamp, 2003, 257). I could tell as I carried on moving around the space that the skin makes connections with the floor, and it is harder to push or pull yourself in some directions than it is others. The fact that your skin is not just the shell of your body, but does in fact influence what movement you are able to excecute, means that you have to move where your skin ‘tells you’.
After carrying on this exercise for a while we were then told to find a partner and watch how they imporvised, picking up on habitual movements they used. As I watched my partner Sophie I saw that she did not play with levels much, her work was all very grounded. She also always used her head to start momemtum off, which made sense to me as the head is the heaviest part of your body. After telling these pointers to Sophie we then switched over, after I had finished my 2 minute or so improvisation I realised how dizzy I felt, and after hearing the pointers from Sophie I realised why. I start all of my movements from a circle whether it is a shoulder roll, or just rolling on the floor and it was this reason why I felt so dizzy! In order to change these habitual movements I feel I need to slow down and think about what movement I am going to do next. This is something I want to work on in the upcoming weeks. The ‘pulling, pushing and rolling’ movements that we had focused on this session actually gave me a lot of inspiration and made me think of the different ways I could move my body parts away or towards each other.
‘Being present is also an important element of Contact Improvisation’ (Heitkamp, 2003, 259). I believe you have to really think about your body and how it would react to other people’s in order to be successful in Contact Improvisation. While we were doing a hugging exercise in which we had to walk around the space with our eyes closed and hug other dancers, I began to see how different people’s bodies reacted to my touch. Some people would become rigid and awkward whereas others would just relax into the moment. In order to be good at contact improvisation I think you have to make yourself accessible to everyone and this is something I plan to do more in the coming weeks.
I can officially say I am no longer scared of Contact Improvisation. Something I never thought I would say!
Heitkamp, D. (2003). Moving from the Skin: An Exploratorium. Contact Quarterly/Contact Improvisation Sourcebook II, Vol. 28:2. 256-264.
Paxton, S. (2003) Drafting Interior Techniques. In: Nancy Stark-Smith A Subjective History of Contact Improvisation. In: Albright, A. C., & Gere, D. Taken by surprise: A dance improvisation reader. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 175-184.