Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Posting by Jordan Beyeler

The old saying, things aren’t always as they appear describes my exploration of the improvisational art form. I had walked into improvisational exercises with the initial feelings of discomfort and a preconceived notion that I wasn’t good enough to excel in this foreign dance style. To me improvisation wasn’t worth all the stress because this style didn’t seem as valuable as perfect technique. My first semester in contact improvisation opened my eyes to a world where improvisation was not only used as a perfect tool for getting in touch with one’s body, but also choreographing routines. Once I was asked to form my own definition of improvisation I stumbled upon a paragraph that really opened my eyes to how closed minded I was towards the idea of improvisational aspect of the contact improvisational technique. According to Ann Cooper Albright in Taken By Surprise, “we read that it’s the process of letting go of the minds thinking so the body can do its moving in its own unpredictable way” (6-7). After researching, I found this definition to be far from the actual experience and technique of any improvisational form.

The first common misconception within this definition is the idea that to improv one has to “let go” of thinking. The improvisational technique is full of awareness that is found through a deep relationship between the mind and body. The art form includes actions where the dancer is required to think in advance and actions where the motion requires the dancer to become more conscious of the physical tendencies of the body. These actions keep the mind constantly thinking in a state of “hyperawareness” where both the body and mind can come to an agreement of the movement they would like to initiate. In contact, this idea is even more important because the dancer has to be aware of the needs of their partner almost more than that of themselves. This is hard to do if the dancer hasn’t established a strong bodily awareness within himself or herself before attempting to understand another individual. With improvisational dancing, especially contact, the dancers aren’t in a state of choice between following the body itself or the mind (isolated self). The body is not an object within this style and after many years of silence needs to be re-taught how to develop consciousness (Albright 15). This consciousness will allow the body and mind to acquire that hyphened relationship to engage the individual into the improvisational form. The dancer needs to gain an “awareness that expands to hold entire self” (Albright 22).

Another element that separates the contact improvisation from other dance forms is not just the formation of a mind and body relationship, but being able to listen and adhere to the physical desires of the body and compromise this with the partners desires as well. In Bruce Curtis’s essay, the idea that improvisational dance is not about controlling the body but “to listen to it, accepting whatever movement was inherent” is quite different from that of ballet (Albright 16). The style focuses more on what the body needs than what is technically perfect so there is no stress or strain on the body thus allowing it to feel less venerable. The mechanical mode that dancers constantly place on their body is difficult to break, yet once broken it becomes easier for the dancer to keep focused in the deep bodily communication. Thus, the excitement of the performance comes from the dancer’s constant fading in and out of listening to the body and its connection between another individual. This sense of uncertainty is the experience many often mistaken for “being free” and “letting go,” giving the improvisational technique the inaccurate definition it has come to hold.

Before further studying the complex technique of improvisational dance, I would have referred it to it as a way of releasing the mind and just dancing. Now I have come to realize the more almost spiritual technique to the form that is both a dance experience and sensation of dancing combine. I now have a greater respect for contact improvisation and when asked how to describe it to newcomers I would have to say it is the ability to listen to the entire body while extending this hyperawareness through to their partner making an immediate formation of natural movement that satisfies both souls.

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Posting by Maria Sullivan

I have come to recognize that the topic of breath in everyday life, in movement, in relaxation and focus has become a challenge and evolving thought process and practice in my current state. I have been questioning myself how have I evolved with breath, concentration in all forms, and within the subject of contact improvisation, allowing others to take my weight. Easy breathing and relaxation comes easy to some, however with much practice, I have come to learn that breath can focus me, bring me into my body, connect the movement between others, and myself and inspire movement.
The process of inspirational and focusing breath does not come easily, and full concentration is still not there, but I feel comfortable relaxing and coming into the room with determination to move forward.
While evaluating myself, and my progression in contact improvisation, I judged in terms of where is stood in the beginning, the middle and the end. At the start of this course, I often laughed at everything; got stuck in strange, and at the time, very uncomfortable situations, especially on the floor and I always found myself going back to simple hand contact. Once we were introduced to new moves and ways to transition to and from the floor, it became easier to contact others and become fluid. The dreaded awkward moments have now been replaced with new movement options, many possible scores, tempos, etc.
There will always be awkward moments, but I have noticed the pauses happen less often, especially when actively concentrating on my partner, and what I would like to accomplish. I have experienced that feeling of, “yeah, this is awesome,” a few times while dancing with classmates. Everything was working out, the movement was fluid, and little thought was involved. I enjoy doing contact when I have a good experience. Not only does is make me feel that I have learned how to interact with others through skin and movement, but I feel that when dancing with someone, and all goes well, it is also possible to have a well presented dance. I am well aware that not all contact dances will go as planned, and feels fluid; for me, that is where the learning process continues. I find some people intimidating, those with confidence, love for the style and obvious comfort. Therefore I feel that dancing with them may be difficult, but the amount of information available to obtain from someone talented, confident and skilled would be very beneficial.
A constant fear while dancing with someone is the weight exchange. I am often nervous to give my weight to others. I constantly fear that they will not be able to handle my weight, possibly because I am not as comfortable in my own body as others are; so I find myself questioning, “if I am not comfortable, how will others be?” Due to this doubt and resistance, my dances with others have moments where weight could add such an interesting dynamic to our movement, but I opt out, and move to something different, something safe.
I would like to explore what movement creation can stem from contact improvisation. Simple contact between others in choreography can be a very powerful aspect to a dance, and being that I am interested in choreography, I am happy to have learned some of the basics to contact, so I can further experiment and see what comes of it.
Focusing on my breath has become a constant practice in my improvisation classes. Connecting to myself and focusing seems to come easier in contact because we have the designated ten or fifteen minutes to get into our bodies. With that time, I find that I do not move. I can find my breath, and feel it in my stomach, down to my feet, and out through my arms when I am just lying there with closed eyes. The common saying in dance “leave everything at the door,” is often difficult to accomplish, but with the given time, I have found being present in the room with my peers comes through my breath and relaxation.

Monday, December 28, 2009

Posting by Dana Cosgrove

Looking back on the semester of contact improvisation I have really seen my growth as an individual. I have not become an expert at contact improv but I have become proficient with many of the skills that have been taught to me during the course of the semester. Going back over my strengths and weaknesses from the midterms and I can gladly say I have overcome all of them especially my biggest struggle, giving someone the control and going upside down.

Giving someone all of the control has always been hard for me not only in dance but also in life itself. I felt that if I didn’t have that control it was a way for me to become vulnerable as well as a way for me to get hurt. As I slowly came to grasp with pinpointing my fear it was easier for me to push past it. It wasn’t until the class before thanksgiving where I really felt I have completely let go of my weakness of always having to be in control. It was during a round robin, where I just let my body get into the dance and ignore what was going on around me by focusing on the point of contact with the other body. This made my movements flow together and disregard any awkward moments due to the commitment between my partner and I. I finally let my dance partner take control at times and that being so turned it into a satisfying dance.

As far as my other weakness of going upside down that too also has to do with being in control. I cannot say I have fulfilled my goal with letting myself go upside down but I have come really far from where I use to be. It was during a class exercise where we had to go up in inversions and have our partner catch us when they thought we were ready. This exercise made me realize that my dance partner was not going to let me fall and they were there to catch me, all I had to do was use my breath and push past my insecurities.

My last weakness was getting out of the awkward moments and I can now say I don’t even realize when there is an awkward moment in a dance anymore. Now that we are at the end of the semester and have learned many different skills, it is now easier to get out of an awkward moment by moving the dance into something else we have learned throughout the semester and just letting our movements flow.

Sunday, December 27, 2009

Focusing in Contact by Maria Parise

In the Contact Quarterly article Harvest: One History of Contact Improvisation, Nancy Stark Smith informs us that one of the most challenging aspects of performing contact is focusing on your partner. In my experience throughout this course, I have found that to be entirely true. Focus is a very difficult but much needed aspect of contact improvisation.
Steve Paxton created contact improvisation in the early 1970s. One of the first exercises of this new dance form came from his dance State in which a group of people performed the small dance. The small dance consists of standing in one spot and just allowing your body make the little adjustments that it needs. This exercise takes immense focus. In a room filled with external stimuli, you must stand completely silent and intently focus on your body. As one of the first exercises we learned in class, it helped prepare for the focus that is needed when contacting with a partner.
Along with the small dance, many other exercises also work on focus. In the article, Smith tells us that Steve had them identify small sensations in their bodies by using different images of the skeleton, expansion of the lungs, and flow of energy. We did a similar exercise to this in class by moving from different parts of the body such as skin, organs, and skeleton. These exercises forced me to internalize my focus and pay attention to where every movement I made was coming from. Rolling point of contact is another exercise that works on focus. Being one of the first exercises we did with a partner, it helped me to get used to the idea of focusing on the movement of another person. In all other dance forms that I have studied, focus is solely on yourself. It is a much different experience to have to listen to the needs of another person. Another exercise that strengthened focus was walking shoulder to shoulder with someone and getting your pace in sync. Your attention must be on the other person’s movement as well as the point of contact between you.
Throughout these exercises, I felt like I was progressing, but still had not quite gotten the entire concept of what it meant to be completely focused on the dance and your partner. I still felt like my focus would drift from the dance; my mind would wander to other things. I was stuck in a rut and was not sure if I would ever be able to get past this awkward stage. Then we focused on breath for an entire day of class. This is when I feel like I finally ‘got it’. Breathing helped me to clear my head of all the distracting thoughts that would normally affect my duets. I felt like when I began to dance with my partner, I was able to stay in tune with them. This made me available; I was ready when my partner needed me. This also helped me tremendously in coming up with new movement and ways of doing things.
Contact improvisation is a form of dance that requires a specific concentrated focus. According to Smith, “You are following the point of touch, and if your mind starts to wander, you lose contact. And that wakes you up to the fact that you’re not focusing on the present, on the touch. You’re somewhere else. And then you come back.” Before the day of breathing, I never understood this. However, once I realized what it was like to be completely focused on the moment, my dancing changed. From then on, I felt like every duet I had was successful in its own way. I could finally identify the moments when I was not entirely focused on the dance and was able to bring my attention back to it. For me, focus was the most difficult concept to grasp in contact improvisation but ultimately the most rewarding.

Saturday, December 26, 2009

Hey Stranger, Let’s Roll on the Floor by Dylan Roth

After completing almost a full semester of contact improv, I truly do feel I have learned a lot of useful material to use later on in my dancing career. At the beginning of the semester, I did not know too much about contact improv. I was not too comfortable with the idea of touching someone and roll around on the floor with them, especially if I did not already know them. This minor fear distracted my focus and did not allow my attention to be at a hundred percent. I had the trouble of getting in a rhythm of getting into a contact improv dance. After several classes and exercises learning how to develop a trust with a partner, the touching has become more comfortable and therefore I am able to focus more productively and produce a substantial contact improv dance.

The main battle I found I had to conquer for myself was definitely establishing a type of trust between my partner and me. I always found the warm up dance to be very awkward, because it was the first person I would be touching for the class. However, the warm up dances did help get a lot of the awkwardness out of the way so it would not occur later on during class. Naturally as time went on, the overall level of awkwardness lowered and lowered, but when we stopped having warm up dances I was relieved and scarred at the same time at first. I was relieved I would not have to deal with any awkwardness, but I was scared that some awkwardness would still be present in more important dances, not letting me perform well.

Around the same time though that we eliminated warm up dances, we started spending most, if not all, of the class period with the same partner. At first I would be thinking “okay, when are we going to switch partners” but then that feeling would past and at the end of class I would realize I had a really good dance. Since I had spent so much time touching and rolling with the same person, the awkwardness was not there. After spending many classes with one person (a different person at each class) I feel now and in the future that I will be able to automatically match up with them and have the trust automatically established.

After watching some partners closely, I realized time can be very helpful. A contact dance does not have to be really slow or really fast. Speeding up at moments and pausing with stillness at others changes the dynamic greatly. I need to start incorporating the use of time because I keep feeling like everything needs to be continuously and constantly going in a dance. Having the reminder of stillness is great. Stillness allows me to give all of my weight into my partner and lets me feel all of their weight as well. Stillness also lets me have time to clear my head for a second and prepare for whatever will come next. As I watch other duets, I see some really cool moves that are produced and wonder if in my duets I am giving off the same vibe. It is hard to not “grab” your partner and take control, and is equally as hard when my partner is “grabby”.

During the December 7th’s class, we did the “soul train” line. I really enjoyed this because we were partnered up instantly and had to do a contact dance right then and there, but it did not last for a really long time. I felt since the time period between duets was so short, that I needed to try and make everything count and not just float by. At the end of the class Julia told us we were starting to look like real contact improvers. I am not so sure if that is so true for me, but I defiantly feel ten times better as a contact improviser now than I did at the beginning.

Friday, December 25, 2009

Eyes Closed by Daniell Filetti


At the start of the semester I was very skeptical about contact improvisation. I did not know what to expect going into the class, but I was excited at the same time. I have seen people do contact before and it is an art form that I did not know how my body and mind would react to. As the weeks went by the class became more interesting and I was becoming more open minded about contact. As the semester went on everyone started to become closer to each other and more comfortable trusting each other with our bodies. Some weeks felt better then others, but overall I have learned a lot and received a lot more tools for coming up with movement material. It opened my mind up to a lot of possibilities that I will use in the future.

During the middle of the semester we did an exercise with a partner. We had to dance with our eyes closed while our partner watched us and examined our movement. During our dance our eyes had to be closed and while our partner watched us they were also looking out for us so we did not collide with anyone else in the class. During this exercise I initiated a lot of movement with the weight of my head. I felt off balance and it really helped me find the movement that felt right in my body. There was a point where we were told to keep dancing but open our eyes and once I opened my eyes everything fell apart. I lost my sense of letting my body do whatever it wanted.

As I talked to my partner, after the dance, I realized that I find it easier for me to do contact improv with my eyes closed. This is from a post on Yahoo Answers ,"Closing your eyes stops you from processing information about your surroundings and moving objects, and your position in 3-dimensional space. Less information is sent to the middle ear and balance mechanism loses its equilibrium and falters." This quote made a lot of sense to me because I was wondering after that exercise why everything changed so suddenly when I opened my eyes and also why I could keep up with the fluid movement my body was doing. Once I opened my eyes my equilibrium came back and I saw others dancing and the 3-dimensional space I was in. It was harder to become off balance and let my body take over because my eyes were taking in too much information from the space around me. This did not allow me to listen to what my body wanted because I was processing the space around me. This made me think how this can apply to me and how I feel when my eyes are closed while doing contact.

Another thing I realized during the semester was the more weight you give to your partner the better off you will be. This is what I have put in my head every time I do contact because it helps me get into the mind set and get my body to do what I need it to do. Being more open to movement and having my body be relaxed enough to let my partner feel my weight was helped by the fact that my eyes were closed most of the time. After I had this light bulb go off in my head I investigated this idea more. I tried to keep my eyes open for a whole dance and it brought more ideas to my head and it felt totally different. This was exciting for me because, as a dance maker, I am always trying to find new ways to create movement. It was an interesting experiment for me to put on myself and I learned a lot from it and received a lot of information from it.

Over all this class has taught me a lot. I learned different techniques for creating dance movement and found a different way to dance. Dancing with my eyes closed really opened my eyes to a lot of different possibilities and I am glad I opened myself up for this class and was able to take a lot from it.

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Contact Improv and Other Partnering Styles by Jessie Wise

Through taking contact improvisation, I have learned some good techniques for partners to learn how to get in-synch with each other. I have done a lot of ballet partnering and have also been involved in swing dancing for a while now and have really enjoyed learning and doing ariels. In general the lifts are very momentum based. After taking contact improvisation, I feel like it would be valuable for swing dancers to learn a little bit more about weight sharing.


I think that swing aerials would benefit from using gravity more effectively. Sometimes I feel like my partner and I “muscle” through some of the lifts. The lifts would probably be easier for the both of us if worked with using the momentum of weight sharing and more connection between the two of us. To start off, I think that some of the beginning exercises that we practice would be good to get connected and in tune with each other. One exercise in particular that I thought would be very helpful is when two people grab hands and lean away from each other and play with weight that way. Working with the tension between the two of them would help with some of the ariels that deal with swinging and momentum. Another exercise that I thought would be very helpful is when one partner stands, bent at the waist so their torso is parallel to the ground, and allows for the other one to lay on their back and really melt their weight into the standing partner. Many lifts have moments in them in them where you sort of pose in a position and I think that it would be more comfortable and less straining if both people were giving their weight appropriately to each other instead of being stiff and resisting against each other. And one last exercise that I think would be valuable is the one in which one partner runs and jumps into the other’s arms, and the other catches and uses momentum to swing the “jumper” around. For a lot of swing lifts, the dancers start apart; this exercise would help the partners get in tune and timing with each other and teach them how to use momentum to their benefit. I think that some of our contact improv exercises would definitely help two partners to be in more in-sync and efficient together.


I thought that while I was sharing about my personal thoughts and discoveries about this subject that I would look up where contact improve and other partnering forms have intersected in the past. And I really could not find that much information, which I found interesting. I know that a lot of modern partnering incorporates contact improvisation but besides that, I think that because the form is so new, that there has not been a lot of integration.