Contact Improvisation Research Articles

The cruel optimism of contact improvisation: Dancing between neoliberal subjectivation and practices of commoning

Within the social world of Contact Improvisation, the question of class relations remains conspicuous by its absence. Whilst ongoing debates in the global Contact Improvisation (CI) community and recent scholarship have foregrounded the problem of Whiteness, there have been few attempts to provide intersectional analyses of the racialised, classed subjectivation of contact dancers. To make such future enquiry possible, this paper dismantles originary CI myths about ‘natural’ movement, also attended to by Bojana Cvejić, and explores the question of social antagonism through analysing the dance form’s discursive norms and movement vocabulary. As this essay argues, the contact dancer occupies a paradoxical subject position: between a neoliberal embrace of risk-taking and precarity, and a cruelly optimistic prefiguration of the commons.

Making space for the wimp-subject in contact improvisation

This is an autoethnographic article that unpicks the author’s experiences of navigating the form and the social world of contact improvisation (CI) as a crip bodymind that routinely passes as normative and (very) ‘able’. Drawing on fieldnotes made across a year of practising and studying CI in London, it considers what kind of subjectivities and social relations this dance form summons, encourages and constitutes. This article proposes that the ideal subject of CI is characterized by vitality, agility, intense desire, openness to risk, an ability to attune to oneself and to others and a combination of self-reliance and willingness (and capacity) to cooperate. The article draws parallels and (dis)continuities between these features and the aspects of subjecthood fostered by late capitalist ‘risk society’ and the risk subjects it conjures. It then enquires whether this ideal subject is compatible with certain neurodivergent and other crip ways of being-in-the-world. The article proceeds to consider how, and if, space can be made in CI for what is ironically defined here as the ‘wimp’ subject: less disposed to embrace risk; not adept at quick decision-making; not thrill-seeking, and easily overwhelmed by sensory and nervous stimulation.

Indian Classical Dancers in the Diaspora: How Free Improvisation and Contact Improvisation Programs Help Enhance Dance Proficiency, Improvisation Competence, and Forming Multigroup Ethnic Identities

ABSTRACT This article reports a quasi-experiment on the impact of contact improvisation (CI) sessions and free improvisation (FI) interfaces on dance proficiency, improvisation competence/output quality, and multigroup ethnic identity formation of Indian classical dancers in the United Kingdom, United States, Singapore, and Australia. FI participants reported higher scores on dance proficiency, improvisation competence, and multigroup ethnic identity formation compared to those who participated in the CI sessions. FI was most effective for diaspora female Indian classical dancers, Bharatanatyam dancers, dancers with 9–12 years of dance education, who had an advanced/higher diploma formal education in dance, who attended 21–40 (>50%) FI interfaces, and completed 21–40 (>50%) FI homework sessions. FI is a performance technique foregrounding spontaneity and a modality to augment the repertoire of Indian classical dances to speak to an international audience by adapting western aesthetics. It is a way to bring contemporariness into Indian classical dances and shape postcolonial dancer identities.

Touching across: Performing new dance ecologies through dialogical choreographies

Postmodern dance and somatics have foregrounded the sense of touch via the skin as a subject of inquiry and a catalyst for change, nowhere more so than in Paxton’s Contact Improvisation (CI). Touch continues to be explored choreographically, beyond CI, in contemporary dance to increasingly stage more daring, excessive sensuality and erotics between performers and performers/audience for mainstream theatre. Such tactile strategies and displays, I suggest, raise timely questions about the politics of touch and what touch constitutes. This article is the second instalment of a wider research project that attempts to unsettle Global North and the dance discipline’s presuppositions about physical contact. Here, I build upon one of Paxton’s lesser-known theoretical influences that spurred the development of CI, namely his research into mother–child touch communication and ask: how might a feminist reassessment of maternal relationality – its haptics – generate new knowledge about touch and neo-liberal economy? How might such reconception move us towards different bodily practices and ethics grounded in the twenty-first century in dance and beyond?

Unmaking Contact: Choreographic Touch at the Intersections of Race, Caste, and Gender

AbstractThis article interrogates “contact,” understood by Global North contemporary dance discourse as choreography that is mobilized by shifting points of physical touch between two or more bodies, by attending to inherent, and often ignored, power asymmetries that are foundational to such choreographic practices. This “unmaking of contact” is undertaken by deploying the lenses of race, caste, and gender in order to argue for an intersectional, intercultural and inter-epistemic understanding of “choreographic touch” that may or may not involve tactility. It starts by examining contact improvisation (CI), and its now ubiquitous choreographic manifestation of partnering, as an aesthetic that can work in colonizing ways on South Asian dancers who train in primarily solo classical dance forms. The article then moves on to place South Asian bodies, philosophies, and discourses at the heart of its interrogation of choreographic touch, and foregrounds the culturally specific politics and powers that govern them.

The Body’s Memory Archives in the Process of Generating an Aesthetic Movement and `Flow Experiences` for the Audience in the Production of the Performance tXc -TOXIC (after F. Richter’s play Rausch)

"The present enquiry is particularly interested in the performer’s body archiving memory while generating poetic movement on stage. The main site of investigation is a theatre-dance performance and the work engaged by the performers of tXc-TOXIC (after the Falk Richter’s play Rausch, an Insula Creative Hub production, directed by Cristian Grosu, choreographed and co-directed by me). The focal point of my argument is that, with proper and sustained body training, performers can easily incite and produce aesthetic movement after engaging the CI (contact improvisation) means of accessing movement and body memory. Keywords: (Non-toxic) body archives, aesthetic experience, embodiment, dance, performance "

Contact Improvisation and Dance Narratives – Body Memory and Embodied Knowledge

This article concerns embodied knowledge closely connected to dance experience. I position my research project primarily on three autobiographic dance narratives concerning my involvement with the dance genre known as contact improvisation (CI). In making the argument that practicing CI creates experience and knowledge that become embedded in the body, I attempt to give the dancing body an “audible voice”, and apply theoretical concepts that are helpful in interpreting and elaborating my narratives. Key words: Dance-based research, autoethnography, body archive, intercorporeality, contact improvisation

Sources of Embodied Creativity: Interactivity and Ideation in Contact Improvisation.

Drawing on a micro-phenomenological paradigm, we discuss Contact Improvisation (CI), where dancers explore potentials of intercorporeal weight sharing, kinesthesia, touch, and momentum. Our aim is to typologically discuss creativity related skills and the rich spectrum of creative resources CI dancers use. This spectrum begins with relatively idea-driven creation and ends with interactivity-centered, fully emergent creation: (1) Ideation internal to the mind, the focus of traditional creativity research, is either restricted to semi-independent dancing or remains schematic and thus open to dynamic specification under the partner’s influence. (2) Most frequently, CI creativity occurs in tightly coupled behavior and is radically emergent. This means that interpersonal synergies emerge without anybody’s prior design or planned coordination. The creative feat is interpersonally “distributed” over cascades of cross-scaffolding. Our micro-genetic data validate notions from dynamic systems theory such as interpersonal self-organization, although we criticize the theory for failing to explain where precisely this leaves skilled intentionality on the individuals’ part. Our answer is that dancers produce a stream of momentary micro-intentions that say “yes, and”, or “no, but” to short-lived micro-affordances, which allows both individuals to skillfully continue, elaborate, tweak, or redirect the collective movement dynamics. Both dancers can invite emergence as part of their playful exploration, while simultaneously bringing to bear global constraints, such as dance scores, and guide the collective dynamics with a set of specialized skills we shall term emergence management.

Bodyminds in Movement: Embodied Cognition in the Practice and Discourse of Contact Improvisation

Contact Improvisation (CI) has grown into perhaps the most influential form of contemporary dance improvisation, yet is relatively seldom reflected upon in academic discourse. This article argues for a closer understanding of embodied and environmental aspects of consciousness and lived experience in the study of CI. Broaching the challenge of capturing such corporeal insight in the form of written analysis, this article is an attempt to reflect upon CI’s potential contributions to humanities thought on embodied cognition. Embodied cognition theories assert that embodiment constitutes a fundamental and inseparable part of human cognitive and perceptual capacities, and thereby of human consciousness. CI calls to experience the body as “an intelligent practitioner rather than instrument” (Novack 1990, 185), with no full separation between “physical” and “mental,” nor between sensation, perception, and thought. CI may thus offer a highly potent territory for manifesting and further examining the radical inseparability between minds and bodies. First, this article provides an extended introduction of CI, discussing the difficulties of defining the form, the interconnectedness of its practice and discourse, and the challenges these pose for “objective” or “unbiased” academic analysis – which CI does not allow for. Next, I turn to the link between CI and the writings of two central philosophical thinkers on embodied cognition: Alve Noe and Brian Massumi. This article proceeds to examine, through the link to CI, key tensions between Noe’s and Massumi’s framing of the inter-relationship between the somatic experience of movement and vision, perception and navigation. Understandings of this inter-relationship relate to the question of whether highly attuned embodied experience can potentially escape the limits of phenomenology. The article concludes by laying out arguments for both answers to this question, fusing Noe’s and Massumi’s positions to the tensions between conceptualizations of CI as “physics” and “chemistry.”

Los espacios como dispositivo de la construcción de prácticas corporales y coreográficas contemporáneas. A propósito del <em>contact improvisation</em> en el contexto español

En este artículo se categorizan y analizan los lugares donde se baila contact improvisation (CI) en el contexto español entre 2010 y 2015. Partiendo de la idea de que el espacio no solo es construido, sino que a su vez define cuerpos e ideologías en concurrencia con distintas prácticas, se identifican distintas direcciones, confluencias o tensiones que se establecen entre las técnicas corporales, artísticas, educativas y terapéuticas junto a las que la danza CI radica. Tanto el análisis de contenido como el trabajo de campo indican una expansión en el número y variedad de los lugares para la práctica de CI en España; destaca, al respecto, el incremento de espacios rurales residenciales junto a un conjunto amplio de espacios urbanos de danza, interdisciplinares y polivalentes. Estas tendencias en el uso de los espacios de CI dan cuenta de su (di)solución actual y también de la existencia de un espectro de tendencias coreográficas y de movimientos sociales con los que comparte principios estéticos, éticos o pedagógicos y algunas fórmulas de gestión colectiva.

Age and Gender in the European Contact Improvisation Community

Abstract This article examines issues related to age and gender within the European contact improvisation community (ECIC). In particular, my research interest is to find out more about experiences related to values in the dance genre of contact improvisation (CI), and how they relate to the values associated with democracy understood to be embedded in CI. From 2014 to 2017, I conducted interviews with seven persons who are CI dancers and teachers from different European countries. The interview material shows that a double set of values is communicated in the ECIC: one that is taught, spoken, written and understood to be holding on to and embodying ’the social ideologies of the early ’70s which rejected traditional gender roles and social hierarchies’ (Novack, 1990, 11) and a second set in which traditional gender roles and social hierarchies are active and experienced by European CI dancer-teachers and dancers when participating in CI events.

Movement in the Men’s Movement: Contact improvisation and social change

Abstract During the 1970s and continuing through to the 1990s, a significant number of American men participated in activities that became collectively recognized as a ‘Men’s Movement’. Nearly simultaneously the development of Contact Improvisation (CI), questioned many of the gender roles in traditional dance, allowing for a much broader range of physical interaction for both men and women. This article looks at intersections between these two ‘movements’ and argues that CI and related body-based performance practices were, and can continue to be, significant tools for social change.

Contact improvisation as an art of relating: The importance of touch for building positive interaction

Abstract This article analyses the specific characteristics of Contact Improvisation (CI) that can support building positive interaction and well-being in community contexts. It examines the possibilities of the dance form to widen attitudes towards touch and to build skills in touching and communication, also with people experiencing difficulties with touch. CI practice proposes a different way of being and relating to people, challenging normative behaviour and creating communal feelings by emphasizing togetherness and connectedness. It can have many positive effects, including enhancing awareness and encouraging playfulness and mutual support, as well as increasing the joy of life, as demonstrated in my study with professionals and women in vulnerable positions. The article also suggests that, although the potential for negatively experienced touch needs attention in CI practice and in society at large, building skills and awareness in qualities of how to touch can reduce such experiences. In terms of currently acceptable modes of touching in contemporary culture, touching in particular ways can also be seen as political, suggesting a strong potential influence of dancing on everyday life.

Contact improvisation, the non-eroticized touch in an ‘art-sport’

Abstract This article is from the first chapter of a Ph.D. thesis and introduces some pivotal experiences and emerging beliefs that inspired the past two decades of professional practice, incorporating contact improvisation (CI), Body-Mind Centering® (BMC®) and Dance Movement Psychotherapy (DMP). The purpose of this article is to indicate the epistemology of my professional self, a touch specialist, presented in three emerging roles: the CI practitioner/teacher, the BMC practitioner/teacher and the DMP practitioner/teacher. Through the practice of CI and BMC I learnt essential touch and movement skills, and sharing them with deafblind people had an unexpected outcome – I discovered the effects of touch deprivation. In working with people who experience social exclusion in the context of socially inclusive arts projects I learnt that I too had been deprived of the universal language of touch. My personal and professional paths became intertwined as I undertook to work with touch-based methods in health contexts and encountered the dilemma of working in a non-touch culture and the negative effects on patients. CI and BMC combine as effective methods within DMP practice as they operate within the territory of humanistic and body-oriented psychotherapy and enrich this with specialist skills including reflexivity, hermeneutics and self-enquiry.

Restructuring the self-sensing: Attention training in contact improvisation

Abstract In this article, I discuss how contact improvisation (CI) can be seen as a form of attentional training – training attention-to-attention while moving – and how this practice can change the sense of self that dancers have. It proposes that identity in CI is an action of giving: one that generates new potentials through relations that support complex actions. Identity in an active practice of relations is associated not with bound physicality, but rather with active sensing. This active practice opens up the possibility of another politics of attention. I draw upon my experience as a teacher to make clear the relation between practices of attentional skill and theoretical claims about what attention can do. Working through the relational concepts of performance theorists and contact improvisers, this article offers new language with which to understand the political significance that CI brings into the twenty-first century as it continues to grow.

Naturaleza estética y pedagógica de las jams de danza Contact Improvisation en España

Contact Improvisation (CI), a dance technique that emerged from New York in the seventies, introduced new pedagogical and choreographic approaches, among them, the collective improvisation sessions called jams. The objective of this study was to define

Effects of a short duration, high dose contact improvisation dance workshop on Parkinson disease: A pilot study

This study explored the feasibility and possible benefits of contact improvisation (CI) as an exercise intervention for individuals with PD. This was an uncontrolled pilot study. Eleven people with PD (H&Y=2.4 ± 0.4) participated in a workshop of 10 1.5-h CI classes over 2 weeks, dancing with previously trained student CI dancers. Measures of disease severity, balance, functional mobility, and gait were compared 1 week before and after the workshop. Participants demonstrated improvements on the Unified Parkinson Disease Rating Scale-Motor Subsection and Berg balance scores, along with increased swing and decreased stance percentages during walking. Backward step length also increased. Participants expressed a high level of enjoyment and interest in taking future CI classes. This pilot study supports the feasibility of CI as an intervention to address mobility limitations associated with PD.

Discovering New Ways of Moving: Observational Analysis of Motor Creativity While Dancing Contact Improvisation and the Influence of the Partner

Contact improvisation (CI) is a form of dance based on motor creativity, improvisation and the physical contact between different improvisers dancing together. This will generate different ways of moving and a varied use of motor creativity depending on the dancers involved. This study aims to observe the differences in movement generation depending on the partner by using OSMOS (Observational System of Motor Skills; Castañer & Camerino 2006; Castañer et al., 2009). Four contact improvisers were video‐recorded while dancing in duets. Data were analysed by three observers using Theme Coder software (Magnusson, 1996) for the detection of T‐patterns and the production of event frequency charts. The results show that (1) the motor skills that appear most frequently are the conduction of partners, elevations, spatial level changes and turns; (2) motor creativity is affected by the partner, as there is a reciprocal influence in the dance; and (3) motor creativity is enhanced by interaction with a partner.