I don't think that the communities described are isolated in non-interacting islands, but are more overlapping circles that have more or less influence on each other. I also think that Phaedra's knife of categorization could be used to draw finer lines of distinction within these circles, but I put out these 4 categories as a conceptual tool for placing different contact explorations relative to each other...
- Classic Contact Imprvovisation
- Community Contact Improvisation
- Post CI explorations
- Other Contact
Classic Contact Improvisation I would describe as the common reference point of skills that had developed by the mid 80s. This skill set was not necessarily universal, but was very wide spread as what people were working on as a goal or reference point to diverge off of.
This would include things like rolling point of contact, "no hands", continuous off-balance, a basic vocabulary of hip and shoulder lifts, log rolling, use of crescent roll for bringing one's center over another's base while rolling up their body, concentration on skeletal architecture for lifting/being-lifted and power, challenging size/gender roles, comfort with falling/jumping/catching/crashing.
While there were always explorations moving away from these skills, there seemed to be through the early 90s a common understanding of them as the basic skill set. At one point, when asked about the openness of contact vs the form, Steve Paxton said that the basics could be learned conceptually at least by someone who was physically already physically aware in their bodies in the space of a week-long intensive. This wold then be the skill base taught in such a workshop.
Community Contact Improvisation
This is a technically devolved version of Classic Contact Improvisation, oriented primarily towards contact as social dance. Over the years, more and more people were being introduced to contact through jams and not classes or were drawn to contact through the rhetoric of individual exploration rather than the physical culture of the classic contact dance, and so much of the skills in this set started to disappear or become "very advanced skills" within the evolving festival scene. Things that one might encounter in a fundamentals workshop in 1986 were considered topics only for advanced workshops within the "CI Community" by the late 90s. The skills of continuous off-balance had all but disappeared within this sub-community of contact explorers, and the jumping and catching/crashing skills were considered very edge-pushing work as the classes and workshops of this community became more and more about radical accessibility and less about the martial-arts like discipline that was in many of the earlier contact explorations. I call the Contact Community a sub-community of contact explorers, as the early divides between performers and community/social dancers had by the late 90s expanded enormously, creating really different communities... dancers in the performance world who were not so engaged with the social scene of the community and turned off by the relative lack of physical discipline and the social dancers of the contact community who became more and more oriented around the social bonding of the scene and less towards an engagement with the wider arts community.
The physical culture of this scene is quite recognizeable from the outside. Despite internal rhetoric of "the uniqueness of each dance", looking from the outside the basic movement vocabulary is as recognizeable and stylistically particular as that of Tango or Salsa.
Post Contact Explorations
Post Contact ( a term i first heard from Keith Hennessey) I would use to describe those explorations in contact that have been informed by the physical skill building and exploratory world of Classic Contact Improvisation, but do not restrict themselves to its aesthetic, social, or physical assumptions or implied rules. Also, unlike Community Contact, the practitioners of post contact explorations are generally less interested in identification as a community of contact explorers, having the explorations of physical contact as just a tool to use in creative process and are not generally as interested in creating an identity around those explorations or around the rhetoric of either classic or community contact. In this category, I would put much of the physical contact explorations in the contemporary performance/dance scene, the growing world of contact explorations within the world of butoh, as well as the use of contact within the ecstatic dance and electronic music scenes of the West Coast, where people explore contact, often unconsciously informed by the explorations of classic contact, but unaware of the history of those explorations and not really caring about how thier explorations or labeled or trying to fit them in the boxes of community or classic contact.
Other Contact
Contact explorations have gone on since there were people to make contact. CI was not somehow a completely unique phenomena of people exploring touch playfully. So, i would use the catch-all category of "Other Contact" to decsribe those contact explorations that are not significantly influenced by the explorations of CI... here, we might place circus partner acrobatics, Lindy HopSwing, and Tango, the push hands practice of Tai Chi, creative massage practices, play wrestling, capoeira, explorations from the worlds of Tantra, neo-Tantra, and BDSM, or the childhood games of ring-around-the-rosy or leap-frog.
describing my won path in contact, i would place myself primarilly in the field of Post-Contact. In the mid 80s, i had my introduction to classic contact improvisation and then felt myself very identified with the Contact Community until over the years the center of action in this community drifted farther away from the interests and curiousities that i was being drawn to, especially around healing work, more sophisticated release work, psychological and paratheatrical explorations of contact, placing me more in what i have come to understand as the field of Post Contact. However, already in the early 80s, i was thoroughly exposed to contact via "Other" explorations of slam dancing in punk concerts and Hawaiian martial arts practice.
hope these concepts are useful for you.
Karl Frost
I like what you wrote, and the effort to concisely group platforms and intentions from which one enters a contact dance. And I feel the necessity of your 'disclaimer' at the top, reminding the reader that there are many overlapping concentric circles.
ReplyDeleteIf find myself frequently in the overlap between Community Contact and Post-Contact as a teacher and practitioner. I am interested and intrigued how the clarity, excitement, chops, and languaging of the teacher can create a shift or a blur or a slide from one to the other. Having begun strictly as a post contact non-community person, over the years I've been deeply enriched personally, conceptually, and pedagogically by engaging with all sorts of non trained people. It's helped me to understand Bodies more vastly, and to notice lenses of being, identity, and expression that either don't exist or differ greatly from the professional community of dance makers.
I am interested in that overlap between post contact and community contact, the common interest in healing, in the psychology of the form if not the physical rigor, in the willingness to tease out a connection between out of studio work and in studio work. Between 'real' life and 'dance' life. To make intersections, to sharpen awareness, to resist escape.
When I was more thoroughly mired in a professionally and performatively minded community of more rigorous dancers, I missed a lot that feels expansive to me now--not only about the edges of the form, but about the edges of myself, my psyche, and my human experience. There is a rerouting of habit, a spirit of duration, and an engagement with 'normal' and 'abnormal' bodies in what we are calling 'community dancing' that has been far more meaningful to my own healing than what has tended to emerge for me in my dances with trained contacters. Chock it up to an encounter with 'difference' and the sweet tangle of negotiation there. It feels to me like there is infinite resonance there--in negotiating difference-- that can feed back into a different but serious contact practice.
So. Questions that keep coming up for me are: what is the responsibility of 'elders' or 'trained' dancers to new comers? to keep the invitation alive and available for newer folks, different folks, and also for those long committed to a community experience? What is my interest and responsibility as a teacher to model a certain kind of quest, a sophistication of research in the way I operate and package ideas in class that might promote an 'octave leap' from one Group to Another Group? What is it that I want to model or invite from the Community Group to the Post Contact Group and back again?
I am interested in the radical inspiration that comes from teachers really blissed out by nuances and details of the study that infects a community to irresistibly engage their curiosity and physicality more fiercely.