Contact improvisation in the first week was quite interesting, it was a step up from last year when we just focused on ourselves in improvisation classes; having to come out of habitual patterns and challenging others, with our own movements to break their patterns also. Improvisation mainly focuses on internal work and trying something new each time, but I always felt my moves would came from a habitual place. For contact its different we’re allowed to use habitual patterns to an extent, but to be able to use them to create new movement which I think helps build upon the technique, so I can see where I’m adding new movements to my style whether it would be to my dynamics, speed or levels.
In this week’s reading I got quite an insight on the primary aspects of contact improvisation and the main senses that are used for this style. Moving from the Skin (Heitkamp 2003) was a detailed way of explaining how ‘One of the most important elements of Contact Improvisation is communication by touch, both by touching and being touched’ (Heitkamp, 2003, 256). Remembering this quote had cleared up the idea of one of the tasks we had to do, which was to walk around the room with our eyes shut, hugging anyone that came within our perimeter. At the time while doing this task I didn’t quite understand how walking around in the space, with our eyes shut would build the necessary skills of contact but later on knowing that being able to sense people, and their next movements is the best way to keep the bodies flowing in a natural way.
To build the skills for contact we performed a series of tasks that involved actions such as pulling, pushing, rolling and pressing. This started with us on the floor and feeling our bodies connecting to it, and creating positions for ourselves that were influenced with these actions and to make sure each body part, no matter how awkward we felt, to be covered by the ground. I remember thinking not about my habitual patterns or looking like a dancer but to make sure that I was connecting and feeling the floor in any way I could, it resulted in me having to stretch my limbs in ways I normally wouldn’t. From last year I learnt that I use spiral and twisty movements a lot and for that task I had to use sharper movements.
One of the other tasks that we did was close to one of Heitkamp’s experiment ‘Contact and Retina’ (Heitkamp, 2003, 263). He goes on to explain about a person dancing but usually feeling their own senses and what would it be like to open that up to another person, possibly a duet and to also focus on the surrounding. Our task was a form of skinning, we had practiced this last year but I think for me it felt more as a mission to do the unexpected in improvisation. This time was different, doing it with a partner and having them place their handing on you wherever they felt they could made me want to escape from it, but wherever the hand was placed seemed to influence where my next action would lead from. I think this task improved the way I use my body as I normally wouldn’t lead from the elbow or my head or even my hips. To explore them made me change my timing and dynamics which I thought was quite fun.
Paxton, S. Drafting Interior Techniques. In Stark-Smith, N. A Subjective History of Contact Improvisation. In Albright, A. C., & Gere, D. (2003). Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press. Pp.175-184
Heitkamp, D. (2003). Moving from the Skin: An Exploratorium. Contact Quarterly/Contact Improvisation Sourcebook II, Vol.28:2. Pp.256-264