Documenting a dance choreographed and performed by Karl Frost
I would like to tell you about my performance. I thought it best to write, rather than talk with you, as I didn’t want you to mistake my telling you about my performance for my performance.
I choreographed a performance, and also composed the music and designed the lights and set. I also am the dancer/actor in the piece.
When I began thinking about this piece, I wanted to do something minimalist. I began thinking of myself on stage without moving, but then I thought that I could actually subtract my physical presence from the piece. By announcing that I was going to be performing the work, my body would be clear, and so there would be a clarity around the perception of my performing an ongoing choice to not walk on stage. I thought, in order to avoid confusion about whether I was intending some sort of tension around expectation (an added element), I decided to remove this element by alerting you, the audience that I would not enter the stage for the duration of the work.
I originally envisioned this work on the stage at the University Club at UC Davis in a simple square of light. The music, I originally composed for the work was 5 minutes of silence. I had planned to alert you, the audience, to the beginning and ending of the piece by the sounds of bells, a fact which I had planned to communicate to you, the audience, in the original program notes.
The original piece, as choreographed, had a bare well lit stage, for 5 minutes of silence with me waiting in the wings, not entering, as I again, did not want to confuse you, the audience, by sitting in the audience. I had worried that my sitting amongst you might make you, the audience, wonder whether the performance was on stage or, through some sort of experiment with agency and defying authority, in the audience.
Then, I thought, the lights were actually a very strong element, so I thought to remove them. This would then leave you sitting watching an empty blackness denoted as a dance piece for 5 minutes of silence.
Still, there existed in this modified version, the troubling aspect of duration and physical extent, even if you, the audience were blind and unable to see or hear it.
At this point , I decided to remove the aspects of time and space from the work. So, the piece, as performed, has no duration and does not have a specified space.
I have already performed the piece.
Since there is no existence in time or space, there is no way, really for you to apprehend it through your sense organs, which is why I am writing you these notes about the work.
These notes, then, are a way to facilitate your reflection on your experience of this piece. Even though you have not actually experienced the piece in a conventional sense, the piece exists in the same way that any other piece can be said to exist, which is in your brain. Now that you have read these notes, the piece exists in your mind, even if just in the under the label “imaginary”. Is there a fundamental difference, experientially between a memory and an imagination, other than the label and the perceived referent to past physical experience?
My performance is just like any other performance, continuing to have impacts on you and out into society through your reflections on the work, as well, as through your unconscious processing of the work via your body.
The piece has no name.
I hope that you will come to find it a meaningful work.
Any and all feedback is appreciated.
Regards
Karl Frost, director of Body Research
Friday, March 12, 2010
Thursday, December 24, 2009
ownership and CI community
It's funny that a lot of conversation and thought can come out of something so "dry" as a listserve, but in an age where so much of our communication happens online and where community organizing happens through them, listserves represent potentially a lot of social power and their politics and control are worth considering.
I've seen the notion of ownership and control of contact community manifesting with some frequency lately. For me, it triggers ethical questions in how it is claimed, when people in some way assert control over a local community. On the one hand, i believe there is nothing wrong with making a personal business out of serving the contact community. On the other hand, i feel that something is amiss when people use priveledged access to communication channels that have been given to them by community members with a broad interest in CI in order to direct their own personal or financial agenda.
to start, a few stories...
1) a small group of local organizers in a big city with a relatively young contact scene (about 3 years) quietly decide to keep control of the list serve that they developed for local contact to only promote events that have come through them. They also expect to make a significant cut of the profits of any local contact workshop, even if they are not doing anything to help organize it directly, because the community is "theirs".
2) an organizer in another contact community (up until this event, THE organizer) became upset when someone who had been one one of her students decided to organize a workshop without going through her, and she asked people not to go to it, for this reason, because she did not organize it. again, this community is a young community of about 5 years.
3)a group of teachers who had been THE group of teachers and organizers in another big city (larger, older community... about 8 years or so and maybe 6 or 7 teachers). Decided when someone else started to teach that there were already too many teachers and that they would not open their list to be used by any more new teachers... a list serve that had been promoted widely as the "local contact community list serve". In other words, people signed up to this list trusting that it was representative of local ci, and the moderators of the list decided to deny the promotional use of the list to people outside of their group.
What to think of these stories in a world originated at least partially around anarchist ideals?
There is the desire to steward a contact scene, to hold a specific space of exploration. There is the desire to be able to make a living out of the good work that one does in the world in proportion to the work one does and the benefit one gives to others. There is the capitalist entrepreneurial freedom to promote events as one pleases, and let others promote the events they want to promote and let people choose which ones they want to go to. These are all either good or at least socially neutral views.
A few problems arise for me, however.
There is also the general spirit of good will. Can one have one's own desires and projects and maintain a sense of goodwill towards others whose projects might run counter to or even eventually eclipse one's own?
From a practical view point, I imagine that being possessive of a scene, discouraging competition, and presenting a false face of community service actually does, in the short term, benefit those who do it. It might even in the long term serve them in terms of control and status, but if resentment builds up to a high enough degree over time, it can have ill affects on a scene, and it also does not do a service to the actual depth of the practice.
And, this communication should be made relatively explicit given that this community was founded on a lot of people who held to more anarchist beliefs, who donated their time and energy to make things happen, who took their own ego out of the way to help promote a community where there was not an explicit way of doing contact or set of rules about how to do it... Of course, there were from the beginning people who made a business out of it to the benefit of the form, but there are hundreds who do not appear in the history books whose contributions were vital and who chose to "serve" without recognition or recompense.
I've seen the notion of ownership and control of contact community manifesting with some frequency lately. For me, it triggers ethical questions in how it is claimed, when people in some way assert control over a local community. On the one hand, i believe there is nothing wrong with making a personal business out of serving the contact community. On the other hand, i feel that something is amiss when people use priveledged access to communication channels that have been given to them by community members with a broad interest in CI in order to direct their own personal or financial agenda.
to start, a few stories...
1) a small group of local organizers in a big city with a relatively young contact scene (about 3 years) quietly decide to keep control of the list serve that they developed for local contact to only promote events that have come through them. They also expect to make a significant cut of the profits of any local contact workshop, even if they are not doing anything to help organize it directly, because the community is "theirs".
2) an organizer in another contact community (up until this event, THE organizer) became upset when someone who had been one one of her students decided to organize a workshop without going through her, and she asked people not to go to it, for this reason, because she did not organize it. again, this community is a young community of about 5 years.
3)a group of teachers who had been THE group of teachers and organizers in another big city (larger, older community... about 8 years or so and maybe 6 or 7 teachers). Decided when someone else started to teach that there were already too many teachers and that they would not open their list to be used by any more new teachers... a list serve that had been promoted widely as the "local contact community list serve". In other words, people signed up to this list trusting that it was representative of local ci, and the moderators of the list decided to deny the promotional use of the list to people outside of their group.
What to think of these stories in a world originated at least partially around anarchist ideals?
There is the desire to steward a contact scene, to hold a specific space of exploration. There is the desire to be able to make a living out of the good work that one does in the world in proportion to the work one does and the benefit one gives to others. There is the capitalist entrepreneurial freedom to promote events as one pleases, and let others promote the events they want to promote and let people choose which ones they want to go to. These are all either good or at least socially neutral views.
A few problems arise for me, however.
- promoting oneself explicitly and implicitly as serving something larger than one serves. To promote oneself explicitly as serving a larger community than one's own clientele and then to abuse the trust that people place in you to follow that promise is questionable to say the least. For example, to ask people to sign up to a list serve for the local community and then restrict announcements to only one's own events is questionable. I have a similar feeling about emotional currency -- to emotionally present oneself as universally inclusive when really the "love" is restricted to a specific environment of status and money exchange i also find rather distasteful. Because it doesn't deal with such linearly clear things as words, it is harder to nail this down, but i feel its presence.
- denying the business-nature of one's actions. I find it wholly sensible to offer one's work for money. However denying that this exchange is important or even present, i find questionable... presenting oneself as an altruist or accepting praise as an altruist when their is a clear money exchange i find sad and misleading. Further, using the trust that is put in one as an altruist for one's personal financial gain i find reprehensible.
- attitude towards competition: I find it the worst kind of spirit of capitalism to think ill of one's competition just because they are one's competition and because their success might lead to your financial detriment. If one chooses to engage in a capitalist system with capitalist goals, then one should only wish the best on one's competition in the spirit of compassion and good will.
- owning people and knowledge: I find this very strange, the idea that one owns information or owns people. To say that one owns a local community because one is their first teacher is relatively ridiculous. Similarly to think that one owns a group of people because one was the first person to organize them is very questionable.
- sometimes a new teacher or group of teachers in a community can ruin the business of teaching for many without being able to establish a business for themselves. Because so many teachers exist on the edge of financial viability and with fixed expenses like studio rental, taking away a few students from them might cut their earnings in half. Thus, a new enthusiastic teacher who is not actually capable of gathering enough students to make a business for themselves, but who is willing to put a lot of energy into something that looses them money for a while might in that time screw over an existing teacher so that they are not able to survive in the moment, where they would otherwise be able to survive. Thus, adding a new teacher (or flow of new teachers) to the mix in an uncareful way can mean that no one ends up able to teach in the long run, and the overall quality of available teaching goes down.
- I definitely feel, as i mentioned, that people should be able to offer their services for money and that it is a great thing when client and businessperson are both happy with an exchange.
- I strongly believe in people keeping the containers that they wish through their personal activities. That is, if someone wants to create a contact jam, scene, or festival that has a specific approach or set of rules or agreements, i think that is great. I am by no means trying to argue that people should always be completely open altruists, giving their effort and work to whomever wants to take it and allowing anything into any space. I personally prefer a diversity of specifically focused spaces and venues vs a lot of the same, lowest-common-denominator events.
There is also the general spirit of good will. Can one have one's own desires and projects and maintain a sense of goodwill towards others whose projects might run counter to or even eventually eclipse one's own?
From a practical view point, I imagine that being possessive of a scene, discouraging competition, and presenting a false face of community service actually does, in the short term, benefit those who do it. It might even in the long term serve them in terms of control and status, but if resentment builds up to a high enough degree over time, it can have ill affects on a scene, and it also does not do a service to the actual depth of the practice.
And, this communication should be made relatively explicit given that this community was founded on a lot of people who held to more anarchist beliefs, who donated their time and energy to make things happen, who took their own ego out of the way to help promote a community where there was not an explicit way of doing contact or set of rules about how to do it... Of course, there were from the beginning people who made a business out of it to the benefit of the form, but there are hundreds who do not appear in the history books whose contributions were vital and who chose to "serve" without recognition or recompense.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
10 year anniversary of the WTO protests in Seattle
10 years ago today, i was released from jail in Seattle after spending 6 days in police custody over my participation in the WTO protests. Over 600 of us were arrested illegally for exercising our freedom of assembly.
I think it is important to remember how we changed things through simply deciding that we needed to be involved. We were not invited by the people in suits. We were not given a voice. We had to take it.
You will not be given freedom, and if you fail to exercise your freedom, you will loose it.
I also find it important to remember that we have allies, amny of which we don't know yet, and we will never know until we start acting who they are. When we 3000 in the direct action network decided to shut down the WTO meeting, we could not have succeeded except for the 150,000 people who rallied with us. The unions were not going to come join us in our direct action, but the union membership decided that they wanted more than their leaders were suggesting that they settle for. They saw the 3000 of us taking our freedom, and they came for some too.
We shut down the meeting.
the tear gas, pepper spray, rubber and wooden bullets couldn't stop us that day.
But more than that, the 150,000 of us could not have succeeded alone in stopping the WTO, but we found that the southern delegates to the WTO were inspired by the freedom that we took, and they took some too. They stopped going along with the developed north and the corporate interests that control the north and since that day, not a single new piece of legislation has passed through the WTO becasue the South stopped going along. They took their freedom.
You are not always given freedom. sometimes, you need to take it.
We have allies, many of whom we don't know yet. We only meet them when we start to act and let our views and voice be seen and heard.
600 of us spent a week in jail, but we changed the course of history.
We need to keep participating.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Categories of Contact Exploration: Classic, Post, Community, Other
In talking to people about contact explorations, I've been finding it interesting to work with differentiating different communities of explorers that have different physical, social, and aesthetic cultures of contact exploration.
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 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 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
Gender, Intimacy, and the CI Community: a study of cross gender preference amongst contact teachers and some thoughts
A study and some thoughts on cross gender and same gender dancing in the CI Community.
In the past years, I’ve been involved in many conversations about cross gender vs same gender dancing. While some are quick to acknowledge that cross-gender dancing is the norm in the CI Community, a surprising number hold onto the rhetoric of relative gender neutrality or drastically underestimate how much cross gender dancing is emphasized in contact jams. I have been curious about this dissonance between rhetoric vs what I was in fact seeing at jams.
My point is not to judge this preference, but simply to open awareness and dialogue.. On the one hand, there is the strong influence of gender-based construction of intimacy within the heteronormality of the contact community: intimacy exploration that is not fully embraced and acknowledged. On the other hand, there is the contradiction between the rhetoric of gender neutrality (“physics, not chemistry”) and the actual dancing that people are doing … what is the “rolling point of contact” about in a basically heterosexual community that mainly chooses to roll cross gender? I think that by seeing what we are doing, we can embrace more fully what works for us, more effectively challenge shadows, and generally make richer art. While denial may originally have had a function in helping us experiment with intimacy in ways we may not consciously have allowed ourselves, I think that we would be better served at this point by consciously embracing what we do.
ECITE Study
To get specific about how much cross-gender dancing is emphasized in CI, I decided to document this cross gender preference by doing a study of the open dancing at the European Contact Improvisation Teacher’s Exchange in July 2009, England.
ECITE, being a teacher’s exchange, you would assume to have a greater investment in the purely physical side of contact and therefore less of an emphasis on cross gender dancing than the typical jam. In fact, this was observed by many there -- that there was much less gender bias than usual.
I tallied 158 dances at ECITE. There were 3 different kinds of open dance events that i was tracking: Contact Jams, 1 on 1 Dates (a regular morning event where two people would make a date to dance together for an hour), and the Underscore evening (facilitated by Nancy Stark Smith).
After ECITE, I sent out a follow up survey to get a basic sense of what people thought was going on. About 20% of those attending ECITE responded.
I was personally expecting to find a cross gender preference of about 1.5 to 1. In fact, what I observed was a cross gender preference of almost 4 to 1. (Based on what so many were saying about what they usually see in their communities, it means that CI Jams in Europe are more likely 8 to1 cross gender to same gender, possibly more.)
Of course, I observed variations from one person to the next at ECITE, with a few having a small preference for same gander dancing and others having a cross gender preference much higher than the average. The average, though, was 4 to 1.
This basic observation was in contradiction to what people remembered was happening (both in their dances and in the space). The average estimate in conversations and survey responses was about 1.2 to 1, with most people remembering the dancing as evenly balanced. It should be emphasized that this is a very significant and curious distortion of perception/memory.
This memory distortion actually is in line with a funny repeated experience I have had of asking people DURING A JAM if the dancing in the room was evenly balanced same/cross gender, their replying that it was pretty balanced, and then their being surprised as I ask them to actually count the dances and they realize how far off they are. The human capacity for distorting perception to line up with personal rhetoric is fascinating!
Interesting to note is that The Underscore and the 1 on 1 sessions both had significantly higher cross-gender bias… 50% stronger in the Underscore and almost twice as strong a preference for cross gender dancing in the 1 on 1 sessions, as compared to the open jams. My experience is that both had an amplified sense of intimacy, so no surprise. Both contexts were “no-talking” -- one could not hide behind social banter, so one is left more exposed. The time commitment and explicit intentionality of the 1 in 1s only amplified this sense of intimacy.
For a breakdown of the data and how it was gathered, goto http://www.bodyresearch.org/gender/data.shtml
What to make of this?
First, a question arises if this relative preference is due to attraction to dance with the opposite sex or aversion of dancing same gender.
The attraction to the opposite sex is obvious in the heterosexually dominated contact community, and many commented on this, even if they did not acknowledge acting on it. Things like relationship-like intimacy and nurturing, story and fantasy, and smell were mentioned. I don’t think that this is necessarily about trying to sleep with someone, but clearly it is about search for some form intimacy, again as constructed in a heterosexual context.
I believe that a lot of this cross gender preference is also, but less obviously, due to unconscious homophobia. I personally feel and see many (if not most) men having unconscious reactions to physical intimacy with other men … the subtle rushing out of slowness or frontal facing for example that can be hidden behind an illusion of “just following the flow”… an illusion that is revealed through an attempt to interrupt this “flow”, exposing the subtly attached intent behind it. Male/male dances that I experience are often faster and then end suddenly with a “thank you, that was great!” rather than continuing on into the sensual intimacy of a slower dance. I often feel a jumpiness in my male partner to get out when I physically suggest a slowness or stillness … something not there when I watch the same man with a woman… fear of intimacy with another man, partially perhaps speaking to an unconscious linking of slowness and sensuality with sexual feelings. If I am starting slow and just waiting for someone to approach, men come to join me less. The exceptions, of course, are delightful, but they are exceptions.
A couple of women remarked something similar -- their dances with women not lingering as long, more likely to end abruptly -- so this seems to not be just about men. One young woman at ECITE particularly remarked that it was harder to engage other young women in a dance and that these dances were much shorter, feeling that it was because of subtle competition issues. She did not have the same experience with older women there.
Some mentioned mechanical body-use issues making polarity attractive, but these body-use issues were mostly brought up in the context of working with beginners … male beginners being more rough and competitive with other men and women beginners not giving support or weight to other women. This was expressed as NOT an issue at ECITE, though, so doesn’t explain the cross gender preference there.
What to do with this information?
As we bring awareness to what we are doing, we might on the one hand embrace something in what we are doing that we don’t fully embrace… actually embrace the experiment of constructing new kinds of intimacy. As part of that, we can also notice what is being avoided and assess whether we really need to avoid it.
What we seek is intimacy. What we avoid is also intimacy…
Intimacy is of course, not one simple phenomena. There are many different socially recognized intimacy types in the West (friend, lover, parent/child, sibling, permutations of the above and others). These are in turn constructions of subtle and gross action choices, ideas, and underlying biological impulses and metabolic responses below the level of recognized emotions. Contact Improvisation is a place where we create through new action choices and social agreements new contexts for the actions of these underlying impulses, thus creating new kinds of intimacy. It is a laboratory of intimacy, whether we recognize it our not.
Talking to Nita Little a few months ago, she concurred with the idea that the avoidance of awareness of intimacy causes a “dumbing down” of the physical dance, that unconsciousness around intimacy leads to dancing that is less physically detailed.
As an example from the Bay Area, about a year ago, I was observing very different dances when I would go to the San Francisco vs Fairfax contact jams. Things are always changing, but last year, I was finding at the Counterpulse jam that there was a subtle fear of intimacy resulting in dances that had less abandoned weight sharing and less sensual detail – dances more of gross motion, people dancing around each other and then climbing on each other, avoiding of deeper levels of sustained relaxing into contact. Those attending the Fairfax jam had much more overt comfort with intimacy. The results in terms of the “physics” was that I felt like I was able to more easily have dances of greater physical detail in Fairfax … this despite the community having less experience. There was less subtle triggered reaction when the dance would drift through a physically intimate moment. It’s not that seeking out of conventional intimacy created this space of detail… more the lack of fear of it. I didn’t notice any significant difference in the cross/same gender ratios of the two events, which is interesting.
To open up the question of why we c=make the choices we do, it is interesting to look how we choose to dance with different genders… What would it be like to pretend that a male partner is female, or that a female partner is male? What would it be like to dance as if you were personally the opposite gender?
What if you deconstructed these variations and mixed them up?
Dancing slowly can be a very interesting laboratory for this exploration of intimacy… just as we move slowly in an Alexander session or in Tai Chi practice in order to study the use of the body in relation to physical function, we can do the same in contact, noticing both physical and emotional function … what we run from, move towards, double signal around. As we dance slowly, new worlds of ourselves become visible that were invisible to our conscious mind, opening up ways that our stories about ourselves are inaccurate, particularly around that field of phenomena that we call “intimacy”. It is interesting to sit in the tension to want to move away or towards and to see this tension for what it is, to have an opportunity to deconstruct it.
Perhaps there is more room than is commonly realized in contact for continued deconstruction of gender-based intimacy. Rather than saying that we should not seek out the intimacy that is being sought in cross gender dancing, perhaps we could go the other way, accept it and explore how we can also find it same gender.
As we look at the intimacy that is being sought, perhaps we find aspects of seeking for intimacy that are misdirected and greater awareness can help intimacy manifest in a more artful way. We can also notice how we habitually run from physically intimate moments that we don’t actually need to, or at least acknowledge that we avoid them and embrace that fact, again, creating the intimacy that we want, rather than denying the intimacy of the dance in order to participate in it.
Again, we may also find aspects of intimacy that we simultaneously seek and avoid that we can find a more coherent, artful dance with.
What is the art of experimentation with intimacy? Just as a painting can be abstract or it can have an emotional content, the same for a dance.
I remember Chris Aiken talked once in a class of his at SFADI, about intimacy and ci. The gist was that in the early days there was a strong (though by no means universal) emphasis on “physics, not chemistry”, and that this was very useful in the development of the physical art of contact; now, though, we are in a place where we have this container of a body of physical technique, practice, and art which can act as a support for the exploration of emotion and intimacy in the dance.
I personally feel that the active exploration of feeling and emotion is a rich part of the potential poetic language of contact exploration.
I would go further and say that the physical side of the art is itself limited by the suppression of awareness of intimacy and that advancing physical awareness requires an awareness of the physical relationship to underlying instincts and reflexes of intimacy. We can differentiate here between a Freudian suppression of intimacy (where the underlying reflexes are still active and we deny them) vs the Alexander idea of inhibition (where we become aware of underlying (re)actions and learn to actively choose them or choose to not execute them).
Perhaps it is hard to acknowledge how much ci explores intimacy because of holding onto specific social constructions of intimacy… the fear that acknowledging the intimacy of a dance means having to be intimate in a particular way or that we should amp up a particular kind of sexuality or take it in a specific direction. Instead, we can be aware of what we are already doing with intimacy in contact as we choose to explore it. This specific reconstruction points out the possibility of a much broader range of possibilities… possibilities to construct new forms of intimate experience that can enrich our lives personally and artistically.
As Peter Brook once said, “Theater is the place where we process the question of how we want to live our lives.” How do we use the art practice of contact to examine and reconstruct our life choices around intimacy? Or, looking to the deconstruction of the line between theater and life by groups like the Living Theater, how do embrace this experimentation as part of our lives?
Maybe contact is a context for us to rebalance some things that are out of balance in the rest of our lives. Maybe it is a place where we can explore how we might change how we live it.
Karl Frost, director of Body Research Theater.
Contact karlfost@bodyresearch.org
PS. We should not forget, of course, that CI is still pretty unusual in western social dance forms in the fact that it values same sex dance at all and creates venues for same gender intimacy that don’t exist in the dominant culture. Most everyone at ECITE that I talked to valued their same gender dancing… they just weren’t, generally, choosing to do it as often.
In the past years, I’ve been involved in many conversations about cross gender vs same gender dancing. While some are quick to acknowledge that cross-gender dancing is the norm in the CI Community, a surprising number hold onto the rhetoric of relative gender neutrality or drastically underestimate how much cross gender dancing is emphasized in contact jams. I have been curious about this dissonance between rhetoric vs what I was in fact seeing at jams.
My point is not to judge this preference, but simply to open awareness and dialogue.. On the one hand, there is the strong influence of gender-based construction of intimacy within the heteronormality of the contact community: intimacy exploration that is not fully embraced and acknowledged. On the other hand, there is the contradiction between the rhetoric of gender neutrality (“physics, not chemistry”) and the actual dancing that people are doing … what is the “rolling point of contact” about in a basically heterosexual community that mainly chooses to roll cross gender? I think that by seeing what we are doing, we can embrace more fully what works for us, more effectively challenge shadows, and generally make richer art. While denial may originally have had a function in helping us experiment with intimacy in ways we may not consciously have allowed ourselves, I think that we would be better served at this point by consciously embracing what we do.
ECITE Study
To get specific about how much cross-gender dancing is emphasized in CI, I decided to document this cross gender preference by doing a study of the open dancing at the European Contact Improvisation Teacher’s Exchange in July 2009, England.
ECITE, being a teacher’s exchange, you would assume to have a greater investment in the purely physical side of contact and therefore less of an emphasis on cross gender dancing than the typical jam. In fact, this was observed by many there -- that there was much less gender bias than usual.
I tallied 158 dances at ECITE. There were 3 different kinds of open dance events that i was tracking: Contact Jams, 1 on 1 Dates (a regular morning event where two people would make a date to dance together for an hour), and the Underscore evening (facilitated by Nancy Stark Smith).
After ECITE, I sent out a follow up survey to get a basic sense of what people thought was going on. About 20% of those attending ECITE responded.
I was personally expecting to find a cross gender preference of about 1.5 to 1. In fact, what I observed was a cross gender preference of almost 4 to 1. (Based on what so many were saying about what they usually see in their communities, it means that CI Jams in Europe are more likely 8 to1 cross gender to same gender, possibly more.)
Of course, I observed variations from one person to the next at ECITE, with a few having a small preference for same gander dancing and others having a cross gender preference much higher than the average. The average, though, was 4 to 1.
This basic observation was in contradiction to what people remembered was happening (both in their dances and in the space). The average estimate in conversations and survey responses was about 1.2 to 1, with most people remembering the dancing as evenly balanced. It should be emphasized that this is a very significant and curious distortion of perception/memory.
This memory distortion actually is in line with a funny repeated experience I have had of asking people DURING A JAM if the dancing in the room was evenly balanced same/cross gender, their replying that it was pretty balanced, and then their being surprised as I ask them to actually count the dances and they realize how far off they are. The human capacity for distorting perception to line up with personal rhetoric is fascinating!
Interesting to note is that The Underscore and the 1 on 1 sessions both had significantly higher cross-gender bias… 50% stronger in the Underscore and almost twice as strong a preference for cross gender dancing in the 1 on 1 sessions, as compared to the open jams. My experience is that both had an amplified sense of intimacy, so no surprise. Both contexts were “no-talking” -- one could not hide behind social banter, so one is left more exposed. The time commitment and explicit intentionality of the 1 in 1s only amplified this sense of intimacy.
For a breakdown of the data and how it was gathered, goto http://www.bodyresearch.org/gender/data.shtml
What to make of this?
First, a question arises if this relative preference is due to attraction to dance with the opposite sex or aversion of dancing same gender.
The attraction to the opposite sex is obvious in the heterosexually dominated contact community, and many commented on this, even if they did not acknowledge acting on it. Things like relationship-like intimacy and nurturing, story and fantasy, and smell were mentioned. I don’t think that this is necessarily about trying to sleep with someone, but clearly it is about search for some form intimacy, again as constructed in a heterosexual context.
I believe that a lot of this cross gender preference is also, but less obviously, due to unconscious homophobia. I personally feel and see many (if not most) men having unconscious reactions to physical intimacy with other men … the subtle rushing out of slowness or frontal facing for example that can be hidden behind an illusion of “just following the flow”… an illusion that is revealed through an attempt to interrupt this “flow”, exposing the subtly attached intent behind it. Male/male dances that I experience are often faster and then end suddenly with a “thank you, that was great!” rather than continuing on into the sensual intimacy of a slower dance. I often feel a jumpiness in my male partner to get out when I physically suggest a slowness or stillness … something not there when I watch the same man with a woman… fear of intimacy with another man, partially perhaps speaking to an unconscious linking of slowness and sensuality with sexual feelings. If I am starting slow and just waiting for someone to approach, men come to join me less. The exceptions, of course, are delightful, but they are exceptions.
A couple of women remarked something similar -- their dances with women not lingering as long, more likely to end abruptly -- so this seems to not be just about men. One young woman at ECITE particularly remarked that it was harder to engage other young women in a dance and that these dances were much shorter, feeling that it was because of subtle competition issues. She did not have the same experience with older women there.
Some mentioned mechanical body-use issues making polarity attractive, but these body-use issues were mostly brought up in the context of working with beginners … male beginners being more rough and competitive with other men and women beginners not giving support or weight to other women. This was expressed as NOT an issue at ECITE, though, so doesn’t explain the cross gender preference there.
What to do with this information?
As we bring awareness to what we are doing, we might on the one hand embrace something in what we are doing that we don’t fully embrace… actually embrace the experiment of constructing new kinds of intimacy. As part of that, we can also notice what is being avoided and assess whether we really need to avoid it.
What we seek is intimacy. What we avoid is also intimacy…
Intimacy is of course, not one simple phenomena. There are many different socially recognized intimacy types in the West (friend, lover, parent/child, sibling, permutations of the above and others). These are in turn constructions of subtle and gross action choices, ideas, and underlying biological impulses and metabolic responses below the level of recognized emotions. Contact Improvisation is a place where we create through new action choices and social agreements new contexts for the actions of these underlying impulses, thus creating new kinds of intimacy. It is a laboratory of intimacy, whether we recognize it our not.
Talking to Nita Little a few months ago, she concurred with the idea that the avoidance of awareness of intimacy causes a “dumbing down” of the physical dance, that unconsciousness around intimacy leads to dancing that is less physically detailed.
As an example from the Bay Area, about a year ago, I was observing very different dances when I would go to the San Francisco vs Fairfax contact jams. Things are always changing, but last year, I was finding at the Counterpulse jam that there was a subtle fear of intimacy resulting in dances that had less abandoned weight sharing and less sensual detail – dances more of gross motion, people dancing around each other and then climbing on each other, avoiding of deeper levels of sustained relaxing into contact. Those attending the Fairfax jam had much more overt comfort with intimacy. The results in terms of the “physics” was that I felt like I was able to more easily have dances of greater physical detail in Fairfax … this despite the community having less experience. There was less subtle triggered reaction when the dance would drift through a physically intimate moment. It’s not that seeking out of conventional intimacy created this space of detail… more the lack of fear of it. I didn’t notice any significant difference in the cross/same gender ratios of the two events, which is interesting.
To open up the question of why we c=make the choices we do, it is interesting to look how we choose to dance with different genders… What would it be like to pretend that a male partner is female, or that a female partner is male? What would it be like to dance as if you were personally the opposite gender?
What if you deconstructed these variations and mixed them up?
Dancing slowly can be a very interesting laboratory for this exploration of intimacy… just as we move slowly in an Alexander session or in Tai Chi practice in order to study the use of the body in relation to physical function, we can do the same in contact, noticing both physical and emotional function … what we run from, move towards, double signal around. As we dance slowly, new worlds of ourselves become visible that were invisible to our conscious mind, opening up ways that our stories about ourselves are inaccurate, particularly around that field of phenomena that we call “intimacy”. It is interesting to sit in the tension to want to move away or towards and to see this tension for what it is, to have an opportunity to deconstruct it.
Perhaps there is more room than is commonly realized in contact for continued deconstruction of gender-based intimacy. Rather than saying that we should not seek out the intimacy that is being sought in cross gender dancing, perhaps we could go the other way, accept it and explore how we can also find it same gender.
As we look at the intimacy that is being sought, perhaps we find aspects of seeking for intimacy that are misdirected and greater awareness can help intimacy manifest in a more artful way. We can also notice how we habitually run from physically intimate moments that we don’t actually need to, or at least acknowledge that we avoid them and embrace that fact, again, creating the intimacy that we want, rather than denying the intimacy of the dance in order to participate in it.
Again, we may also find aspects of intimacy that we simultaneously seek and avoid that we can find a more coherent, artful dance with.
What is the art of experimentation with intimacy? Just as a painting can be abstract or it can have an emotional content, the same for a dance.
I remember Chris Aiken talked once in a class of his at SFADI, about intimacy and ci. The gist was that in the early days there was a strong (though by no means universal) emphasis on “physics, not chemistry”, and that this was very useful in the development of the physical art of contact; now, though, we are in a place where we have this container of a body of physical technique, practice, and art which can act as a support for the exploration of emotion and intimacy in the dance.
I personally feel that the active exploration of feeling and emotion is a rich part of the potential poetic language of contact exploration.
I would go further and say that the physical side of the art is itself limited by the suppression of awareness of intimacy and that advancing physical awareness requires an awareness of the physical relationship to underlying instincts and reflexes of intimacy. We can differentiate here between a Freudian suppression of intimacy (where the underlying reflexes are still active and we deny them) vs the Alexander idea of inhibition (where we become aware of underlying (re)actions and learn to actively choose them or choose to not execute them).
Perhaps it is hard to acknowledge how much ci explores intimacy because of holding onto specific social constructions of intimacy… the fear that acknowledging the intimacy of a dance means having to be intimate in a particular way or that we should amp up a particular kind of sexuality or take it in a specific direction. Instead, we can be aware of what we are already doing with intimacy in contact as we choose to explore it. This specific reconstruction points out the possibility of a much broader range of possibilities… possibilities to construct new forms of intimate experience that can enrich our lives personally and artistically.
As Peter Brook once said, “Theater is the place where we process the question of how we want to live our lives.” How do we use the art practice of contact to examine and reconstruct our life choices around intimacy? Or, looking to the deconstruction of the line between theater and life by groups like the Living Theater, how do embrace this experimentation as part of our lives?
Maybe contact is a context for us to rebalance some things that are out of balance in the rest of our lives. Maybe it is a place where we can explore how we might change how we live it.
Karl Frost, director of Body Research Theater.
Contact karlfost@bodyresearch.org
PS. We should not forget, of course, that CI is still pretty unusual in western social dance forms in the fact that it values same sex dance at all and creates venues for same gender intimacy that don’t exist in the dominant culture. Most everyone at ECITE that I talked to valued their same gender dancing… they just weren’t, generally, choosing to do it as often.
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