Contact Improvisation

This week’s class was a little different from all the other weeks as we were preparing for our assessment next week. The whole session was running through Nancy Stark-Smiths the Underscore. I felt prepared for the session as I watched her video talking about the underscore beforehand. The score made me think about my own practice and I questioned if I have full challenged and emerged myself in the concept of Contact Improvisation this semester? In a sense I believe that I have because I have worked with new people and created relationships with people I did not think I could, because I do not have a connection with them outside of the dance studio. However, I feel that I could have explored more with the idea and movements of CI, no matter if something did not work out. This way I would know that I tried something new instead of giving up at the first hurdle.

Within the session I feel that I had some strong moments with different people. One of these would be when I was improvising with Sammy. We completed a series of lifts without any sticky moments, it felt good that one thing just flowed into another and even when we failed we tried again. I found that when something worked well it was because we didn’t loose momentum in-between movements. Finally, we had trust in each other meaning that whatever happened we knew we would not get hurt.

I found that when we used the score ‘repulsion’ people started to create larger groups to improvise within. Although I am not sure why this is it was interesting to see this happen, there is more to watch and work with when there is a bigger group of people. I noticed myself edging towards joining a group when I was working in a pair. I would try and move my improvisation to where a group was in the room and find a natural way into the group.

A connection that did not work this week was with Hannah, I think this is because we did not create a connection before we started moving and just went straight into the lifts and tricks. We usually work well together and can create some interesting moments, but this week just proved difficult.

The final jam this week seemed more relaxed than usual. You could see moments where relationships did not work so well, but instead of running away from these sticky parts people negotiated ways to be open with each other to create a way they could improvise together. It was nice to see things that did not work being turned into new exploratory ‘tools’ to use. A nice connection was between Abbie and Kye, they were so open to improvising with each other. They also have a ‘no fear’ motto when it comes to Contact Improvisation, meaning when they both work together this is just magnified.

Bibliography

Stover, J. (1989). Some considerations when structuring an Improvisation (to be seen by an audience). Contact Quarterly/ Contact Improvisation Sourcebook II, Vol.14. pp185

This week was a little different for me as I was observing the session, not taking part. Although I did not want to just watch the session it was interesting to be able to see other people move through the space and how they create connections with each other. The strongest connections were formed when participants were moving with their friends compared to with the people they are not as close with. I think this was only because of how comfortable they were with friends and they already have trust and care for each other’s bodies. There were some interesting moments within peoples work, one of these being Kye and Laura C. They kept momentum throughout their improvisation and experimented with how they could transfer weight between each other.

One of the tasks showed which people in the class wanted to be the hierarchy when in pairs, I think this says a lot about contact, in the sense that as a group we need to come to terms with an equality between 2 bodies and show that roles are interchangeable within the practice. I know personally this is an issue for me as I prefer to be the under dancer, taking peoples weight and being in control of the situation. This is because I don’t feel comfortable about giving someone all my weight. It is not a lack of trust for my partner, it is a lack of trust for myself in that situation. This reflects on my dance training as I have always been the male role of lifting within performance, so I feel I am not able to be lifted.

We also looked briefly at the Nancy Stark Smith Underscore in preparation for our assessment, I am slightly confused about this at the moment but hopefully watching the set video and researching in more depth with make it clearer, however I am looking forward to integrating this into my practice in the future.

The jam this week was one of my favourite so far! I felt that I really pushed myself with exploring new ways to keep contestant connection and a momentum. I worked best when I had my eyes closed, this is because I tuned into my other sensations such as; skin on skin contact and how that made me feel/ how it influenced my movements, listening to my partners body and tuning it to how they are feeling in that moment. I also forgot about how aesthetic my movements looked at the time and concentrated on the feel of them and how they flowed. I worked with Laura C for the first time in this jam and we came up with some exciting ways to take one lift into another, she was very mobile and not afraid of what might have happened if something went wrong which helped me to feel more confident too.

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.

The first exercise this week ‘hands on back’ proposed some weird sensations… once my partner had took her had off of my back I felt as though I was going to fall over, but I didn’t think that I was giving that much of my weight onto her hand. I could feel the warmth of Jess’s hand after she had removed it from my back which was quite soothing to feel like she was still there supporting me. Being the leader was the more difficult role, there was a lot of responsibility to ensure your partner didn’t crash into anyone else. Jess didn’t respond to the pressure of my hand on the right hand side but she did on the left, this meant I have to put a lot of pressure on the right.

This week I couldn’t grasp surfing and rolling, this was because I wasn’t releasing weight onto my partner. A lot of this was down to her rolling onto my hair multiple times and eventually I was scared to fully relax my body in case it happened again, I know that in the future I need to ensure that I tie my hair up properly so that this doesn’t occur again. Another reason was because I go to the gym, this comment didn’t make me feel too good about myself. I go to the gym to better my body and make me stronger for dance, so when I was told it isn’t working in my favour, it resulted in me having a negative attitude for the rest of the class.

 

I felt like the first of the two contact jams this week was my favourite, having a bit of feedback allowed me to know what I needed to work on to better myself. I felt much more relaxed in the jam and I tried to work on the reading we were given about being still in table top and we played with the idea of continuous movement. We found that when we became still in this position we lost all the momentum we had previously built up. The second jam wasn’t as successful, me and Hannah felt that we needed to enter the circle and we didn’t build a connection before we started, resulting in no trust, no momentum and lack of communication.

The reading I connected the most with was ‘Contact Improvisation: A Question’ by Daniel Lepkoff. A lot of the things I was reading I noticed through my own experiences in Improvisation. It explores the never before things that emerge from Contact Improvisation;

• Relationships
• Physical sensations
• Movement pathways
• Connections

I know that every time I have practiced Contact Improvisation I have found stronger connections with certain people and created new relationships with peers I haven’t worked with before. The reading also links into the ‘Thinking in Movement’ reading where it describes Improvisation as this evenings dance, meaning that no session of Contact Improvisation is ever the same, you are constantly creating new physical sensations and movement pathways and that an improvised performance only exists in the here and now.

 

Bibliography

The research lab was interesting more than anything. Hearing peoples divided opinions about our exercises caused me to believe that thought and feeling are different for each individual in Contact Improvisation, even if the principles are the same.

The question we proposed to the group was;
How are the senses heightened or forgotten when moving through contact improvisation, with vision or without?

Senses and sight in particular are one of the most important principles in Contact Improvisation to produce a form of communication between two people. Influenced by our ‘Sensing Weight in Movement’ (Ravin, Susanne, 2010) reading where it talks about the senses being a function of how we move and out inner sensations are to be understood, meaning that our body moves as one and we are constantly receiving information from all of 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. We wanted to see what would happen if we took these senses away from our peers and collect their opinions on how they felt. We came up with two exercises which were ‘lead and follow’, one with the eyes opened and the other closed, our other exercise was ‘complete the image’ with eyes open slowly closing the eyes when both partners felt comfortable to improvise however they chose.

When we asked questions at the end of our session we had a mixed set of opinions.

Question 1

• Which connection was stronger, with your eyes open or closed? Why?
  Overall people said that creating a connection in the second task was harder because you couldn’t see each other and they don’t think you can get a connection without eye contact.

Question 2

• Did you feel different with eyes closed compared to open?
  Dancing when both partners have their eyes closed is frightening because you don’t want to injure your partner, but in the 1st exercise it was easier because there was less judgement on what movements they created.

Question 3

• Did you create new movements?
  New movements were created in the 1st exercise compared to the 2nd, they think this again was down to feeling less comfortable when both eyes were closed. One person said they think they created new movements because they worked with someone they have never worked with before.

Question 4

• Which senses were heightened or lost?
  Some people said that they lost all senses when their eyes were closed because they were concentrating on where their partner was, but others said that their sight was still in use as they used the difference of light and dark shadows to see where their partners were and their sense of touch was heightened to feel what each partner wanted to do next movement wise.

The 1,2,3 falling exercise made me feel anxious, it took me a while to be the person to be caught. I think this was down to me not feeling safe that someone would catch me in time, after I got over this it was a relief to know that I was caught and I actually found it relaxing giving all my weight into others. Catching other people gave a sense of responsibility, it felt rewarding to work as a team in order to make people feel safe. I found the fighting monkey exercise difficult when working with someone I’m not familiar with, it was hard to keep resistance against each other and to not loose contact. The transitions between the arms action going onto the back made it easier to find the connection again.

Finally the ‘Small Dance’ caused confusion with me. A question that has occurred is;
How can Small Dance be done in Contact Improvisation? Small Dance is described as the sensations of movement that happen when you find ‘stillness’ within the body. The small shifts of weight that you feel when standing still. Which proposes the question of; Is there such thing as complete stillness? The small dance exercise created a sensation of irritation and caused a burning feeling in my body at first, when we were asked to releve I found it difficult, there was no balance in my body. I think this was because our eyes were closed and I didn’t have a fixed point to concentrate on. Going into movements I don’t think that I was moving with impulses meaning that I wasn’t creating authentic movements, it was forced. This left me with a few questions;

Are we in control of our reflexes?
Why do I get irritated and burning sensations when standing still?

 

Bibliography