“The body, in order to open to these sensations, must learn to release excess muscular tension and abandon a certain quality of willfulness to experience the natural flow of movement.
Contact improvisations are spontaneous physical dialogues that range from stillness to highly energetic exchanges. It is a free play with balance, self-correcting the wrong moves and reinforcing the right ones…leaves the participants informed, centered, and enlivened.”
--- Contactimprov.net
A key word in the first sentence of the definition above is “senses.” While all dancing requires attentiveness to the body, contact improvisation seems to demand an even higher comprehension of bodily sensation. Before you can read someone else’s energy levels and physical impulses, I feel as though you have to develop a profound relationship with your own body. Certain warm up exercises we did at the beginning of class that involved visualizing organs, muscles and bones; breathing; rolling; the “small dance;” walking; sitting and feeling the body in space all increased my understanding of bodily existence. After easing into class this way, I always felt more present and alive.
As a classically trained dancer, and as an avid exerciser, I always find the modern concept of release to be exigent. All of this musculature I work so hard to attain does not give up easily, yet during my contact improvisation experience I’ve found tricks to letting ago. Inclusive of these new discoveries are: Not anticipating or pre-planning certain actions or movements, incorporating deep breath cycles, feeling grounded yet viable and choosing to go along for the ride. The majority of these strategies are mental, but the way of accessing these mental shifts seems to require a certain amount of physical cooperation. That is why it has taken all semester for me to access them; they only come through trial and error, discussion, embodiment and discomfort.
Originally, our class seemed to think contact improv required constant, energetic movement exchanges. We rarely incorporated stillness into our practice; an undervalued state of being that can both infuse a confused dance with wisdom and deepen the experience. Once I started to allow myself awkward pauses and moments of stillness within duets, my work started to mature. Recognizing this maturity took identifying my practice as a “a physical dialogue,” like the definition suggests. In a conversation there are silences, pauses, verbal exclamations, soft utterances, articulation, phrasing, etc. In this sense, viewing my contact practice as a “dialogue” has been beneficial to finding realistic ways of continuing, even after long silences, awkward pauses or bursts of unplanned movement. And as with any dialogue, I became profoundly aware that work couldn’t happen successfully without the awareness and participation of two people.
The most enthralling, albeit exhausting, part of class has been shifting partners several times in each class. This is still a jolting exchange for me in that it requires an entirely different approach, set of movements and energy level each time. An additional challenge to this is not being able to blurt out or talk when trying to communicate a need or want. Finding ways to subtly shift the body, redirect a lift or send waves of trust via movement are all physical efforts that originally came as secondary nature to my primary urge to plan/fix things verbally. Developing physical conversation has grown throughout the semester, but initially I felt flustered and anguished about it.
Overall, I do leave class feeling “informed, centered and enlivened.” I feel informed by other people’s bodies, choices of movement, ability to create, willingness to compromise weight and insights into the work. I feel centered in a strange way after successfully being off balance, tilted, unstable, viable and reliant on another person’s frame for over an hour; if I can survive in those physical predicaments, of course I can function in the other mode, not to mention appreciate it more. And last, I am enlivened by the subconscious creations that construct each class, regardless of our outside baggage and daily distractions. Somehow we are always able to step into the studio and unleash physical possibilities that we weren’t aware of beforehand.
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The warmups definitely assisted with class engagement and willingness to experiment. Although I would have been open to receive guided warmups before every session, it was also important to introspectively set myself up for the class. We are so used to beginning class with warmup exercises in modern and ballet that it starts to become expected, anticipated, and relied upon. I share similar notions of mental and physical discipline along with how the relationships between the two change. That is exactly why we must practice these skills and relaxation patternings because they too have their own form of technique and what it means to employ them effectively.
ReplyDeleteThe dichotomy of physical versus verbal dialogue is also an exchange that can be helpful to alleviate frustration. By simply redirecting impulses of speech into gestural and physical statements, your partner can be informed and more avaialable for cooperation. The duets and their subsequent changes of partners is exactly like conversations and can be thought of as similar to mingling at a party. Not every conversation will be as satisfying, but there is something to be learned about yourself and the way you itnerpret others. Some people do not feel the need to be submissive or led, while others can not take charge of seamless conversation. Finding certain things that work and specific ways of tackling problems or boundaries will exude confidence and comfort your partner in a way that can hopefully yield interesting dance.