Reflection

Contact Improvisation has been a rollercoaster journey for me, some weeks I felt I was doing amazing and other weeks I felt that I was never going to grasp the concept of CI. However, saying that I have developed many skills practicing this module and learnt a lot about my own body that I didn’t know before. For example, I know that my body is constantly moving and never stops thanks to reading about and practicing Steve Paxton’s ‘Small Dance’. As a group we have learnt to be sensitive to each other’s bodies when working together, and to listen to each other through movement. Personally, I feel that this will aid us in many other modules that the course has to offer, because we now know more about how we all move individually and together, we know when to place weight onto each other or when to stop a movement in case of injury.

I made some great connections with people I did not think possible because I am not close with them outside of the studio. This comes back to Week 2’s blog where I talk about proprioception, and it is about sensing when to put weight onto your partner or reacting to their stimuli. I feel that I have become better at this as the semester has gone on, especially with people I struggled to move with at the beginning. El was one of these people, but I feel that the more we worked together we were able to find momentum in our movements because we knew each other’s limits.

The aspect that hindered me the most throughout the weeks of learning Contact Improvisation was my fear of the unknown, as previously mentioned in Week 3 when talking about the reading ‘Beginning, Approaching, Practicing, Dancing’ (Paek, S. M, 2015). Some questions that emerged from this reading were;

How long will you be working together?
How intimate of frightening will the task be?
Will you feel comfortable?
What will you have to do?

These questions still cross my mind when practicing CI, but now I do not try and answer them mentally but just emerge myself in what is being asked of us and the questions will be answered naturally. I still have a fear of the unknown and I do not think that will go away but I can now control how much this affects me and how it can benefit me within my practice.

In Week 4 I wrote a few questions about Steve Paxton’s ‘Small Dance’. One of them being “Is there such thing as complete stillness?” My answer now would be no, for a couple of reasons, one being that whilst practicing CI you would lose momentum if you were to have complete stillness between bodies. The second is that the body can never be fully still, internally your organs are still functioning causing your ribcage and various other body parts to move, this is creating reflexes, whether you are aware of them or not. Within the CI practice it is important to be aware of these and to be able to react to them through movement. I do not feel that we are in control of our reflexes, rather our body is reacting to sensations we feel, whether this is through touch, sound or sight.

The ‘Sensing Weight in Movement’ (Ravin, Susanne, 2010) reading where it talks about the senses being a function of how we move, and our inner sensations are to be understood, meaning that our body moves as one and we are constantly receiving information from all our senses, we just don’t always pay attention to all of them. Finally, our senses tell us how we feel about situations we have been presented with. Senses are one of the most important aspects in learning CI, I feel that without the senses how would you know what movements to do or if you were injuring your partner. I feel that they are most obvious in the lead and follow exercise that we do most weeks. This exercise awakens the senses ready for the rest of the class as you are relying solely on your partner to guide you through the space.

Going up was my favourite week, I feel that working with Georgia who gave me all her trust allowed me to fully engage in the lifts we were learning. Even though one of our lifts did not work out how we wanted it to and we both ended up falling on the floor we still trusted each other afterwards. I think this is because as we were falling I never let go of Georgia and made sure that I was not just going to drop her to make sure I did not get injured. She made me feel confident in being able to take all her weight. I think this was the week where I felt that I wasn’t that bad at CI and I just needed to take what I had done in that week’s lesson into the following weeks.

I have loved CI despite the ups and downs and I think it has had a huge impact on my dance training in general. I feel that we need to carry on these sessions in the future as they will prepare us for when we leave university. I feel confident in my skills that I have acquired and can not wait to apply them to other modules through out my dance training.

 

Bibliography

Paek, S M. (2015) Beginning, Approaching, Practicing, Dancing. Contact Quarterly, Vol 40: 1,pp. 36.

Brown, B. (1997) Is Contact a Small Dance? Contact Improvisation Sourcebook I, 6, 72-75.

Ravn, S. (2010) Sensing weight in movement. Journal of Dance & Somatics, 2 (1) 21-34.

Leave a comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *