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.