In Contact Improvisation (CI), Two People Share a Dance by Giving Weight to a Single Point

In contact improvisation (CI), two people share a dance by giving weight to a single "point of contact." They might stand forehead to forehead, of one's shoulder might lean into the other's hip. "It looks like a cross between a ballet pas de deux and a barroom brawl," said one dance critic. Each dance is effectively a trio, with the third partner being the floor. Early experiments were conducted on gym mats, soon discarded in favor of the solid footing a harder surface provides.

It's nonhierarchical; no choreographer is directing. Participants speak of being "danced" by the point of contact. Paxton, a wise, laconic artist of 65 who guesses he's partnered 20,000 people worldwide in the past thirty years (see sidebar), says, "I was trying to understand what makes integrity in movement. I thought I spied in CI a form arising from us rather than imposed upon us. It's a game that takes two people to win, so it doesn't create losers; it ignores gender, size, and other differences. It's about attending to your reflexes in a touch communication--faster than words, faster than conscious thinking." About the way CI uses space, he says, "I came to think of the space as spherical, a tumbling sphere as opposed to a pedestal sphere. This seemed to be a big change from the [proscenium] dance I was used to."

CI has exploded dramatically in the past thirty years. From its genesis at Oberlin and BenningtonCollege, where Paxton was teaching, CI found its way to art galleries in New York and Italy and spread across North America, gradually penetrating other college dance departments and studios and festivals on every continent.

Nancy Stark Smith, the Massachusetts-based teacher and performer who cofounded and co-edits Contact Quarterly (see Resource List), was present at the creation at Oberlin, where she was an undergraduate active in sports and modern dance. "CI could have been a single piece Steve Paxton made in 1972. That it would become a worldwide movement form was not anticipated at the time. I started to share it with people, because you can't do it alone. That was the most important factor in its spread."

Although Smith, an improvisational performer, often extends her work from CI as a strict form, she continues to use it as a teaching tool. "There's really nothing like it. It challenges people to be curious, to initiate, to follow, to be sensitive, to listen, to resist when necessary, to innovate, to risk, and to enjoy. There's an aspect of play in it: you're learning, satisfying, challenging; you're lost, you're solving phenomenological problems. It's so versatile. Some people use it for choreographic research, others as a contemplative practice."

Thirty-two years since its "instigation," people offer contact classes and host "jams"--freewheeling gatherings of dancers--in thirty-six states, six Canadian provinces, twenty-five European countries, and Japan, China, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Brazil, and Argentina. Doing contact creates a nurturing community, which proved especially therapeutic in Argentina during the recent difficult times. Teachers estimate that 200 people a week have been showing up at jams in Buenos Aires, seeking the grounding, intimate experience--bold and daring, yet in a protected environment--that the dancing provides. Dancers in Israel report the same phenomenon.

There are large contact communities in San Francisco, Seattle, Montreal, and Vancouver. Practicing CI takes a lot of time--perhaps an hour to warm up, two hours for dancing, and then time to relax and share a drink or a meal with partners. New Yorkers find this hard to schedule (though a Monday evening dance jam has been flourishing in Manhattan for decades).

The question of whether CI is, on its own, a "performance form" continues to engage artists and audiences. Alito Alessi of Eugene, Oregon, and other West Coast artists, like Nita Little Nelson in Santa Cruz, California, integrate it into their choreography. The Vancouver-based Holy Body Tattoo is a contact-informed troupe, and Vancouverite Peter Bingham has been teaching across Canada since 1977 (and choreographing since 1984), as has Montrealer Andrew Harwood. "Contact on the West Coast was much more visceral," says Bingham. "On the East Coast they took a more intellectual approach."

Downtown New York choreographers Stephen Petronio, David Dorfman, Bill T. Jones, K.J. Holmes, Bebe Miller, and Bill Young have thoroughly absorbed contact principles into their aesthetics, and recently the British renegade group, the George Piper Dancers (See "25 to Watch," DM, January, page 32), combined CI with ballet. Vermont-based Lisa Nelson, improvisational performer, co-editor of Contact Quarterly, and a longtime dance partner of Paxton's, directs Videoda, which produces, archives, and distributes videos of improvisational dance.

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"Grand Union was a luxurious improvisational laboratory," said Paxton by phone from his farm in northern Vermont. "All of us were very formally oriented, even though we were doing formless work. Three or four companies came out of that period, out of the experience of watching forms elude grasp." Examples are the Trisha Brown Dance Company, David Gordon Pick-Up Company, and Douglas Dunn and Dancers.

He's recently performed with sublime improvisers like Trisha Brown, Lisa Nelson, and French choreographer Boris Charmatz, around Europe and the U.S. He developed a project to teach CI to the visually challenged, called Touchdown, at England's DartingtonCollege. He now teaches Material for the Spine, a study focusing on "what the spine is doing in that tumbling sphere with another person--a kind of yogic form, a technique that focuses on the pelvis, the spine, the shoulder blades, the rotation of the head." His solo improvisations to Bach, both complex and serene, are legendary.

This summer he's teaching at the VerbierAcademy in Switzerland. "I love to watch people try to teach improvisation. I'm not sure it can be taught. I think it's up to the student to learn. It's hard for dance students to realize that they can take initiative and figure things out."

Points of Contact

Contact Quarterly

This biannual journal, beautifully edited by Nancy Stark Smith and Lisa Nelson, contains fascinating articles on C1 and somatic practices as well as listings of workshops and CI points of contacts worldwide.

Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture

By Cynthia J. Novack. University of Wisconsin Press. Available from CQ.

This useful historical analysis is wide-ranging in its topics and has lots of great photos.

Taken By Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader

Edited by Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere. WesleyanUniversity Press.

Albright, who teaches at Oberlin, and Gere, who teaches at U.C.L.A., have assembled essays by Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith, Sally Banes, and other seminal thinkers about improvisational dance.

Improv Dance Jam in New York City Weekly gathering of contact and other improvisers, at Children's Aid Society. Contact James Dowling at 718.768.3492.