Contact Improvisation Kye Davis

This week we started off with a trust exercise called ‘hand on back’. I call this a trust exercise because one of us constantly had our eyes closed and were being guided around the space, this trust was gained by the partner with their eyes open having full hand to back contact  at all times. What I noticed with this exercise was that within our partners we were constantly having a bodily dialogue that guided us through the space, by adding gentle pressure to specific parts of our partners lower back we were able to move them in the direction that we wanted them to travel. Sometimes it was hard to negotiate with my partner as to which direction we were moving in, by this I mean when adding pressure to specific points in the back, my partner would misinterpret and move in the wrong direction, in danger of causing collisions.

During our first contact jam we played with the idea of fluidity within our tools for contact improve, we worked with our surf and roll technique and played with ways of moving across a back. I really enjoyed experimenting with movement on peoples backs. For me, it felt very comfortable to throw myself into the exercises given and really try working with these new ideas of contact. unfortunately I am still having trouble with releasing my full weight within an open space environment, there was one point during this jam where I had to be reminded to give all my weight but once I was reminded the jam became a lot smoother, to explain why I think this happened I want to look back on one of the readings from this week written by Maxine Sheets – Johnstone (MSJ) called Thinking In Movement, in this reading she talks about how we are constantly thinking unconsciously when we dance. I am bringing this up because I feel that at the start of my jam I felt like I was thinking too much of the technical side to contact, and because I was trying to hard to be correct, this then influenced my movement in a negative way.

In our second jam this week I really struggled to get into the jam and due to this I then had such a negative mind set that the rest of the jam was ruined for myself, this was mainly brought on by the injury of my knee and going back to the earlier reading, I was consciously aware of my injury so I then felt very restricted to how I moved throughout the space. What I am hoping for by writing this is to gain a unconscious awareness of these restrictions in hopes that they no longer hinder my movement but instead gives me a new way of exploring movement through other surfaces of my body. Also in this jam we began to introduce our bodies into ‘going up’ exercises where we lifted people from standing rather than a secure table top position. the reason behind this was based from a blog post we discussed in class; ‘You don’t have to stop moving in table top – be an underdancer’. this blog post discussed how the table top position has become a fixed state which dancers get trapped in when moving within contact, this post was incredibly useful when coming to our contact jams this week because it was constantly in my mind of trying to find new ways of supporting the overdancer’s instead of being stuck in this table top position.

 

Contact Improvisation Blog. (2017). You dont have to stop moving in table top – be an underdancer. [online] Available at: http://contactimprovblog.com/you-dont-have-to-stop-moving-in-table-top-to-be-an-underdancer [Accessed 24 Sep. 2017].

Daniellepkoff.com. (2008). Contact Improvisation: A question. [online] Available at: http://daniellepkoff.com/writings/CI%20A%20question.php [Accessed 24 Sep. 2017].

Sheets- Johnstone, M. (2017). Thinking In Movement. Contact Quarterly, 42(1), pp.7-11.

Small dance is a theory created by Steve Paxton that shows the constant motion of the body when standing still. It is a phenomological understand of our body through a lived experience. In class we experimented with this idea by doing an exercise where we stood still and felt the sensations of stillness. Once I had found the sensation of swaying that my body was doing while standing still, I then exaggerated this swaying movement and explored the impulses and reflexes that I tried to subdue while in stillness. Once deep into the exercise I noticed that my body had twitches such as twinges in my shoulder and leg, I continued to explore this movement and transferred my thoughts from this idea of swaying to, what I believe is the opposite, idea of bouncing, my reasoning for this was to explore the feeling through the body while doing these two opposite movements. What I found was when doing the swaying movements my body felt a lot lighter and easier to move throughout my kinesphere. Whereas during the bouncing movement it was a lot more difficult to move as my body felt heavier, I also noticed that my movement mainly came from the shoulders and knees when bouncing where during the swaying it mainly came from the torso and pelvis.

Research Lab (What we did and what we found. reflection) – This week our question was How does eye contact effect movement within improvisation? We chose this question because of an exercise we had previously done in contact classes, where two people roll across the floor and have to keep eye contact at all times, the reason this very simple exercise influenced our question was because of how much the exercise can differ with or without eye contact. So we wanted to explore if this was the case when doing improvisations. For this we gave the class two tasks;

• Improvise for 5 minutes while avoiding eye contact.
• Improvise for 5 minutes while keeping eye contact with a participant at all times.

Our original idea was the improvise for 5 minutes but upon watching the group performing we decided to bring it down to 3 minutes. Once both tasks had been completed we sat down as a collective and discussed how people felt about both tasks. From the discussion we found out that keeping eye contact while improvising and trying to incorporate contact also, was very difficult. Participants found that there always seemed to be partners forming and once a couple was created it was very difficult to break them apart. another participant had stated that when one of the task leaders spoke while they were improvising that they found it very challenging not to shift their eyes in our direction. One of our questions to the group was, “Was it easier to use contact when keeping eye contact?” the general consensus was that they struggled to interact using contact while keeping the eye contact, this was due to a lot of the contact tools we had been given at this time were mainly back to back, this carried on to specific members of the class saying that they felt restricted by needing to keep eye contact at all times because they felt that a lot of the general movement they were able to do was facing each other.

Reading – Is contact a small dance? was an Article written by Byron Brown discussing the problematic nature of Contact Improvisation, he compares a lot of his discussion with Mark Pritchard (Contact Improvisationalist) who’s concerns stem from many contactors just accepting what is happening within contact rather than doing something about it.  Brown agrees with this by saying “i feel there is much life in the contact community but there are more questions than there are answers.” (Brown, pg1, 1980-81) I feel like this is something that all dancers should be thinking about when exploring contact because as artists we should always be willing to go past our comfort zones and be looking for the answers rather than always expecting other artists to answer them for us. Another point in this reading which I thought was quite interesting was when Brown talks about ‘functional movement’ instead of ‘natural’ when describing this says “…we learn to use our bodies in necessary and efficient ways in order to relate to our environment and a moving partner.” (Brown, pg2, 1980-81) Brown uses this as a way of removing the negative hang up that Pritchard focuses on when commenting on the principles and assumptions of contact. I personally, do not understand why there would be a hang up on an principle of contact such as ‘natural’ movement, I think that for someone who is fairly new to contact (such as myself) describing the movement as natural is a way of removing the complications of technical boundaries that come with some dance style, and I would agree with Brown’s new phrase of ‘functional movement’ as it contributes to the idea that safety, speed and ease it important. I think this reading can be related to a lot of what we did in class this week. We were performing our research labs and these are a way of answering questions that we feel needed answering, although this reading didnt directly influence our research it did however help towards a positive outlook when researching in this format.

YouTube. (2017). steve paxton. smalldance. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sJKEXUtv44 [Accessed 22 Oct. 2017].

Brown, B. (1980). Is Contact a small dance?. Contact Improvisation Source Book, 6(1), pp.72-75.

 

The title of this blog post may come across as confusing, so let me elaborate.

In class we started with exercises using our head. We were instructed to improvise movement while attempting to keep parts of our heads in contact with the floor. While doing this exercise I noticed that I seemed to be putting a lot of weight into my shoulders and upper back, doing so lifted me off the floor slightly at times. One problem I seemed to have with this exercise was that occasionally I would put my body in uncomfortable positions and the only way to get myself out of these positions was to remove my head from the floor, I attempted to avoid this as much as possible by using retrograde to sufficiently come out of these positions and continue the improvisation. When doing the floor to standing head exercise, myself and Laura Carey felt a lot differently about the exercise in comparison with the rest of the group. the majority of pairs found this exercise challenging and said they lost contact frequently, they also spoke about how difficult it was to find new ways of moving with in constant contact from above the neck. Like I mentioned earlier, Laura and I had an opposite opinion to the rest of the class, as we felt quite comfortable moving together, this was due to us communicating with our bodies and deciding as one how we were going to move. Once we felt more confident, we moved onto more weight baring exercises, such as the pebble exercise, table top and headstand over table top. When performing these activities I noticed a massive difference in height between myself and the girls I tried them with, for them this made the activities a lot more challenging as they had to use more energy getting themselves over or onto my back. For myself it made the activities easier but more restrictive, this was because I was conscious of putting my full weight on the girls as I am, by default, a lot heavier than them.

The most influential reading this week for me which has made an impact on my improvisation was an interview between Simone Forti (Postmodern dance artist and choreographer) and Daniel Lepkoff (improvisation artist). Lepkoff discusses his opinion on a dance festival he had participated in. during the reading Lepkoff suggests that performers should be considered as creators rather than just the tools of the choreographer, from this I understood that he was talking about how, during contact improvisation all participants must be involved in directing their own bodies to fully create a contact improvisation performance/jam. When talking about the eyes and the breath, Lepkoff explains that our bodies are in constant motion, he talks about how our eyes are constantly moving, even when we sleep, and how we can never stop ourselves from breathing because then we are still doing the action of stopping ourselves. this adds to ideas we have previously discussed in earlier weeks like when doing the surf and roll exercise. One quote which has stuck with me from this reading is on the last page of the reading when Lepkoff says “Try and make work that does not tell people what they supposed to see, or what it is supposed to mean, or indicate, what is good or not good.” To met this basically means create work that makes an audience think, instead of creating work that is easy to watch, be memorable. I liked this idea and although it may not directly connect with contact improvisation it does connect with our choreography modules next semester and next year.

Here is a list of questions which were brought to my attention this week – I will try and answer these questions through next contact jam.

• How does movement change with eyes closed?
• What did I need to focus on while performing contact improve?
• How would it feel to make contact with more abstract parts of the body? e.g. elbow or ear etc.
• How does eye contact effect movement quality?

 

Bibliography – MoMA Learning. 2017 Dance Constructions: Simone Forti.  New York: MoMA Learning. Available from: https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/simone-forti-dance-constructions-1961 [Accessed on 16th October 2017]

Daniel Lepkoff performance(2107)  Daniel lepkoff biographies. Halifax: Daniel Lepkoff. Available from http://daniellepkoff.com/biographies/daniel/index.php [accessed 16th October 2017]

Forti, S (2005) The Movement of Attention. The Movement Research Performqance Journal, 29. 1-5. Available from http://daniellepkoff.com/Writings/Daniel%20simone%20Interview.php [accessed 9th October 2017]

This week was based on the idea of touch. in class we played with entire body by using an exercise called surfing and rolling. the main ideas of this exercise were to give our weight to each other and use the momentum of the roll to push us over the other. this idea was very foreign to me and It took me a while for my body to get used to giving my entire weight to another body, this was mainly because im so used to being the person supporting another persons weight rather than the other way around. However, once I had figured out how to use my breath and jigsaw myself within the other person the entire exercise became a lot more fluid. an idea that was suggested to us while acting out this task was Proprioception, from what I have understood this is the idea of ones self and how we feel our senses, like this idea of what body parts are touching and how we are interacting with the floor.

The reading for this week in my opinion was phenomenal, it discussed into detail a lot points which really helped me understand contact improvisation. One of these ideas was that the quality of touch rather than the quantity of touch was very important for our development as dancers. this is talking about how we move with another body rather than how much movement we do with another body, this important because we could be able to move with a partner for a long duration of time but if the movement has no meaning or intention then what was the point in doing such a long improvisation? One thing that I noticed from this reading was that it contradicted a point that we had been taught previously from our improvisation module, we were always taught to avoid thinking too much within a improv jam but in this reading it basically rejected this idea and tells its reader too stay focused and within the jam at all times, this does make a lot of sense though, if you were not focused and thinking within a contact jam then you could cause some serious injuries to other members of your group or to yourself.

Probably the most important point that this reading suggested was that touch generates fresh movement and opens us up to learning. I felt like this was the most important because it pretty much explains why contact improvisation exists. The idea that touch generates movement is obvious but the idea that it creates fresh and exciting movement is vital, if it wasnt for methods like contact then contemporary dance wouldnt necessarily be as profound as it in the 21st century. Its this idea of giving weight and working as bodies that creates such amazing improvisations that look as if they have been rehearsed for months.

Our first contact jam was uncomfortable for my body this week. I found it very hard to interact with the other bodies in the space, I think this may have been because we have not got the tools to be able to fully use a contact jam but still just trying to do the simplest interaction seemed awkward to me. for the next jam I plan to experiment with eye contact and how this can be considered as contact and use this eye contact to make my interactions a lot easier to move into.

First week of contact improv and as usual the readings confused me, I attempted to read them twice however it wasnt until after our first session that I actually understood what each author was discussing.

the Steve Paxton reading was interesting. from what I read he discussed how consciousness and imagery were used when working within contact. what he meant by consciousness I assumed was discussing a focus of the space you are in, by this I mean that you have to perform in the jam you are in, In order to create fresh and interesting movement. The most influential part of this reading for me when was when Paxton called contact “not art.” what I got from this was that basically there should be no reason to try and make something look pretty when trying to create improv work. When I read this, I got excited to start contact properly because as a Dancer I value the “not art.” a lot more because it tends to show more passionate work and to be honest when I watch someone who is throwing their body around and passionately dancing it will always look more appealing than a strong technical performance.

When doing the lead & follow exercise it was very interesting to see how I reacted when working with certain people. I found that when working with someone I felt I had a closer relationship with, the movement we created wasn’t as fresh as when I worked with someone who I may not have been as close too. I worked with Laura and Hannah and when working with Laura I found that we were trying to anticipate each others movements and control the situation. However when working with Hannah it seemed a lot more fresh and interesting.  When doing this exercise I personally found it very difficult to just allow my body to move and not repeat my habitual movements, I felt like I was constantly trying to plan a route to dance.

From the videos we watched in class I noticed some things that surprised me quite a bit. When watching Berlin k27 (contact improv jam) I noticed that the participants were communicating quite loudly and discussing all the movement they were doing. Originally I assumed that improv was fairly silent and communication was a distraction but after watching this video although what they were saying wasn’t audible it was clear they were discussing the jam. also from this video I noticed that one pair weren’t moving much but they were still in contact and they were where my eyes kept being drawn too. this was because they were led across the floor and doing such minimalistic movements, it showed a completely different aspect of contact improvisation that I had not thought about before, my initial thoughts of contact were lifts and the ability to carry another persons weight but after watching this video its changed that opinion.

Im very much looking forward to continuing my training and research into contact improvisation and I expect to pushed to my very limits.