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.