Research Project at the international contactfestival freiburg 2015

Romain Bigé Philosophy and CI

Initially a philosophy scholar (agrégé of philosophy and ENS alumnus), I stumbled upon CI a few years ago as I came in the US (Amherst College, MA) to teach French. Back to , I resumed teaching philosophy, but with a growing intertwining with the movement practice, I decided that I should try to elucidate what it is we do in CI with the philosophical means I work with in my classes (phenomenology, philosophy and anthropology of techniques, philosophy of …). So there was my PhD research launched: Sharing movement. The Poetic of CI. It’s been a continuous joy to be able to explore those two activities at the same time, with the same conviction that they contain endless directions of research and pleasures. I have intensively been exploring contact improvisation since 2012, mostly in the US (at Amherst College, at Earthdance, MA, and in NYC) and in Paris, but also in Berlin, Prague, Warsaw, London and Ibiza. Matthieu Gaudeau, Asaf Bachrach, Joerg Hassmann were and are my main teachers, along with the innumerable jams and labs led or joined in Paris and elsewhere. More recently, I had the chance to spend dancing and talking time with Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson and Nancy Stark Smith while researching the archives of CI in the US. I am currently Associate of Philosophy in the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris where I teach a Philosophy of Art class, inviting dancers, visual artists and writers to share some of their work with the students, and bridging the practices with the work of . I also teach philosophy classes to dancers at the National Conservatory of Dance and give a weekly “minute of philosophy” in contact classes in Paris, where I've just co-organized the first CI festival to be held in the city RiCI Paris, 2015. Areas of specialization – In case you'd have a specific demand! Come to me! – French and German phenomenology: Erwin Straus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jan Patočka, Renaud Barbaras French philosophy: , Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze Philosophy of Art Dance studies Continental philosophy

1/2 My distillation of philosophy inside Freiburg's festival will have three sides:

I. Teachers' meeting / Two-minute instant philosophy After the morning warm-up: 11am Surfing on the morning awakening minds and bodies, I will propose a short philosophy moment (2 to 3 minutes) dedicated to a text or issue relevant to our dance practice. Steve Paxton noted that dancers need not only to warm up their muscles: they have to stretch their imaginations. These minutes, hopefully, will help us through a stretching of our conceptual frameworks, into receiving the experiences of the day. Potential program: Michel Foucault's: “Utopian body”, Merleau-Ponty's “discussion of the body schema, an inquiry into pointing”, and Jean-Paul Sartre's interest in “holes and why we try to fill them up”.

II. Festival / Afternoon philosophy jams To invent with the facilitators / Saturday 4:30pm; or Monday, Tuesday, 2pm This could take many shapes, depending on what we want to share: 1. some sort of low-tone lecture that would co-improvise with the jam (in the same manner as music accompanies the dance) ; 2. a jam of words, with a collective philosophy discussion while dancing ; 3. minutes of philosophy …

III. Festival / Eat & think Friday to Tuesday, during lunch time: 1pm-1:45pm Every lunch, I will propose to the participants to meet, eat and think together. Our starting point will be a small hand-out with two texts, one of philosophy, the other taken from Steve Paxton or other contacters. Our goal will be to mutually question those texts and uncover the philosophical principles embedded in the practice: weight sharing, ground, touch, subjectivity/collectivity, sexuality, kinesthetic empathy, joint improvisation... are themes that CI and philosophy share, and discussing them through the philosophical lens should be fueling our dances. Before/while/after reading the texts, which I will explicate a little bit, we will have a free discussion. The idea is that this discussion could be a way to digest the festival, the morning activities and jams, in a non- “small talk” way. How can philosophy be a support and a resource, throughout a festival, to eat and think what we are going through as dancers...?

> The conclusion of these Eat & think will be a study lab on Tuesday (4:30- 6:30pm) where we will share in the studio more ways of navigating between philosophical texts and dancing. (A structure could be: collective reading and commenting of a text, dancing out of it, writing fueled with the dance, dancing the writing.)

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