Contact improvisation
Originating in the United States in 1972, contact improvisation was developed by dancer and choreographer Steve Paxton, drawing on influences from modern dance, aikido, and somatic practices.
[4] Known for its open "jams," contact improvisation is both a social dance and a tool for movement research, offering a unique blend of physicality and mindfulness.
According to one of its first practitioners, Nancy Stark Smith, it "resembles other familiar duet forms, such as the embrace, wrestling, surfing, martial arts, and the Jitterbug, encompassing a wide range of movement from stillness to highly athletic.
Figures like Nancy Stark Smith, Lisa Nelson, and Nita Little played significant roles in broadening its influence, integrating the practice into postmodern dance traditions and contemporary performance studies.
[3] In January 1972, Steve Paxton was in residence at Oberlin College during a tour with Grand Union, a collective where he collaborated with other prominent figures in postmodern dance, including Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown.
He invited some colleagues from the Judson Dance Theater years like Barbara Dilley and Nancy Topf, release technique pioneer Mary Fulkerson, as well as students met during his teaching tours, including Nancy Stark Smith and Curt Siddall (from Oberlin College), Danny Lepkoff and David Woodberry (from the University of Rochester, where Mary Fulkerson was a teacher) and Nita Little (from Bennington College).
[12]Regardless of those aesthetic choices, the central characteristic of contact improvisation remains a focus on bodily awareness and physical reflexes rather than consciously controlled movements.
In 1975, the dancers working with Steve Paxton considered trademarking the term contact improvisation in order to control the teaching and practice of the dance form, consequently for reasons of safety.
[17]While the development of contact improvisation has benefited greatly from Nancy Stark Smith and Lisa Nelson's editorial work to support the writings of dancers in their exploration of the form, it also owes much to the cameras of Steve Christiansen and then Lisa Nelson, who documented many moments of the work (especially in performance) and allow the contactors to observe themselves with meticulousness.Since the mid-1970s, regular jams are present in most major cities in North America (New York City, Boston, San Francisco, and Montreal).
Remembers dancer Mark Pritchard, The 1979 Country Jam was a first of its kind in the Contact world: over fifty people from the western United States and Canada came together for twelve days of non-structured existence, life and dance: neither a workshop, a conference or a seminar, but an improvisational gathering, with the sole aim of creating a space for dancing and living in flux... Our days were without structure, except for meals: at the beginning, we planned to keep 90-minute slots for the courses, but the idea was quickly abandoned thanks to a system based on Supply and demand, in which each could suggest a topic to be dealt with and offer to lead a class.
Their enthusiasm brought them together, to explore together this new form of dance, to organize new courses by bringing back Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson and by inviting other teachers such as Nancy Stark Smith.
The network of social practices or amateurs of contact improvisation has spread to all the continents except Antarctica,[17] with a particularly intense presence in the Americas, Western and Eastern Europe, Finland, Russia, Israel, Japan, Taïwan, Australia, India, China and Malaysia, as evidenced by the regularity of the jams, festivals and weekly courses taught in these countries.
Taking distance from the dance, she watched a lot through the eye of the camera and pursued personal research on the collaboration between the senses, in particular on the organization of kinaesthesia in relation to the way in which vision works (a practice later known as the "Tuning Scores").
[28] Central to the poetics of the form is a desire to create a non-hierarchical way of developing the movement, based on the simple exchange of weight and touch between partners improvising together.
In fact, many of the most renowned nondisabled Contact practitioners (including Steve Paxton), spend a lot of time teaching, facilitating and dancing with disabled communities.
[6]Women have expressed feeling uncomfortable on the dance floor and in the community, especially with men who overstep intimacy, bringing unwanted sexual energy into the connection.
Many other forms of dance had also experimented with weight, touch and improvisation and examples abound in the 1960s of dancers who practice something similar, but not as systematic as contact improvisation, including Trisha Brown, Grand Union, Daniel Nagrin's Workgroup, Anna Halprin 's San Francisco Dancers' Workshop, Julian Beck and Judith Malina's Living Theater[3] or Carolee Schneeman's Meat Joy (1964).
This is the case with choreographers Bill T. Jones, Wim Vandekeybus and Antonija Livingstone, or in the companies Punchdrunk (especially in their famous site-specific 2011 production Sleep No More[42]) and DV8 Physical Theater.
"[45] Similarly, a number of early contactors – such as Keith Hennesy, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Bill T. Jones and his partner Arnie Zane – participated in the struggles for LGBT rights in the wake of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.
Examples of such dancers are João Fiadeiro from the Portuguese New Dance, British improvisers Julyen Hamilton,[47] Kirstie Simson, and Charlie Morrissey, as well as North American artists who emigrated to Europe like Benoît Lachambre, Mark Tompkins[48] and Meg Stuart.
