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Some Thoughts on Moving, Training, Contact Improvisation and Performing

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Some Thoughts on Moving, Training, Contact Improvisation and Performing Thalia Laric Some thoughts on moving, training, contact improvisation and performing My niece and nephew are CI experts. Together they jump, laugh and roll across the floor. They have no preconceptions of the ‘proper’ way to dance and play. Their movement stays close to the ground and there is no self consciousness interrupting their game. They follow enjoyable sensations and images as we sit on the couch to watch them. We all start dancing in this way. Understanding our world through sensation and movement. But as we grow up this way of learning is packed away and often suppressed. We enter the ‘real’ world, where thought and reason are favored over the experiencing body. This is so deeply ingrained in Western philosophy and tradition. We grow up and forget to dance or go to classes to learn to dance ‘properly’. As a child I was sent to dance class to remedy my posture. I began to enjoy the classes and started taking the discipline seriously, until eventually the technical demands of the form began causing injury and distress. My body is resisting this technique…. I need to move slower. I need more time. I want to feel what is happening, to experience, to figure it out. I am involved in an enquiry and I will only move in a way that feels natural and functional. I want to move with ease. Without tension or pain. I want to feel fluid, continuous and soft. On the path to recovery, I began to understand a body integrity that said ‘yes I want to dance, but not like that’. I found my way to movement practices grounded on somatic principles (contact improvisation, release technique, Authentic Movement) - ways of moving and understanding the body that support what Jill Green refers to as a ‘somatic authority’ (Green271). Green explains that systems which impose ‘bodily norms and models of ideal bodily being’ actually disconnect us from our bodies, suppressing creative activity and somatic authority (ibid). This is consistent with what Robert Turner describes as a ‘conditioning in unawareness’ that undermines our potential for satisfying physical impulses (Turner124). My body is resisting this performance….. It doesn’t see the point of a flashy turn or jump or a meaningful expressiveness. It will not pretend anymore. My body is concerned with what is going on now. It must start from a neutral physical intelligence and respond from there. This is consistent with the concerns of postmodern dance, particularly the work emerging out of the Judson era, where ‘the body was no longer trained to the task of interpreting or illustrating something other than its own material reality’ (Dempster 227). The dancer brings intelligence to bear on the physical structure of her/his body, focusing close attention upon the interaction of skeletal alignment and physiological and perceptual processes. Through this process, the dancer reconstructs a physical articulation based on an understanding of what is common to all bodies and what is unique to her/his own (Dempster 229) For Steve Paxton, the practice of contact improvisation is to discover human movement that is ‘pleasant, highly stimulating and elemental’ (Paxton in Turner 123). Don Johnson explains how somatic innovations such as this ‘challenge the dominant models of exercise, manipulation, and self-awareness that alienate people from their bodies’ (Johnson:xvi) I close my eyes and put my ‘listen’ into my body. What is in contact with what, and how does it feel? I find a point of contact to move from, seeing the sensing in my mind’s eye. Working with body-based imagery, I move into parts that want to feel compression and away from parts that want to feel stretch. With CI I am interested in bodywork. What we can come to know of our own body through working with another. What we can figure out through touching, sensing and listening. What we can comprehend from tone, texture, weight, gravity. I am interested in what happens when we close our eyes. When we decide to trust. When I find where to say yes or no. What happens when people are watching. And what happens when we call this a performance. References Dempster, E. 1988 “Women Writing the Body: Let's Watch a Little How She Dances” in The Routledge Dance Studies Reader. New York: Routledge Green, J. 1996, “Choreographing a Postmodern Turn: The Creative Process and Somatics”, Journal of Human Kinetics, vol. 4, pp. 267-275 Johnson, D. H. (Ed.) 1995, Bone, Breath, Gesture: Practices of Embodiment, Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books Turner, R. 2010, "Steve Paxton's "interior techniques": Contact improvisation and political power", TDR - The Drama Review - A Journal of Performance Studies, vol. 54, no. 3, pp. 123-135. .
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