Before starting this module I began questioning what exactly contact Improvisation is. After reading Steve Paxton’s chapter Drafting Interior Techniques (2003, 175-184) it became clear that there is not a definitive answer to the question, as Paxton himself stated “I have come to think of contact improvisation as a physical event best described negatively: not art, not sport, not most of the things that characterize dancing in this century” (175). Hence the definition of contact Improvisation is a personal answer to ones response to the form. In addition to this Paxton later describes the raw and accidental outcomes developed through contact improvisation, and suggests that a principle of contact improvisation is to be aware and responsive to the ever-changing surroundings and the human body, “we were perhaps examining a basic mode of communication between the reflexes of people in physical contact as they move” (178).

My first class contained an assortment of different tasks. Firstly we began lying on floor, in which we pressed different body parts into the ground experimenting with weight and pressure. This gradually increased to more advanced movement to travel through the space at a low level. As the task progressed pauses were integrated to imagine what your next movement would be but to then respond to the imagery by doing something completely different. This exercise enabled original movement to be created as repetitive movement cycles was broken. Within this task I felt very relaxed and engaged with the movement that I was creating, and specifically the pauses enabled me to try something innovative and to not revert to typical safe dance movement.

Next we became at one with the group by sitting in a tight circle placing our hand on your partner’s thigh. At first we were asked to be tense and then to be relaxed, the whole exercise was completed with eyes shut. Throughout the exercise I was unaware of the hand that was on my thigh as I was solely concentrating on my hand being on my partner, so that when the hand was removed from my thigh I couldn’t fully tell if it was there or not. What’s more my hand that had been pressed onto my partner felt a lot heavier compared to my other hand.

The final task consisted of being in pairs. Firstly we tracked each others movement with the hands, gently following the pathways and different lines of movement. The task advanced by continually alternating the role of the tracker and incorporating the use of different body parts and surfaces. We were instructed to increase the tone from 1-10, there was a vast difference between 1 and 10, once 10 was reached the speed of everybody has increased rapidly where as 1 was a more softer and relaxed tone. The term tone is new to me, therefore at this moment I’m unsure whether tone correlates to the speed of movements, the quality or the pressure. When the tone reached 10 the movements with my partner became more restrictive and our responses were sharper as there was limited time to think.

Throughout the class Ideas from Dieter Heitkamp’s Moving from the Skin were at the forefront of my mind. Before I read the extract I had never really thought about my skin whilst moving or dancing, the extract stimulated me to think and about how my skin came into contact with floor and other people when moving and how I was connecting and experiencing the environment through touch. As stated by Heitkamp “one of the most important elements of Contact Improvisation is communication by touch” (2003, 256). Therefore the touch that you feel through your skin is key in contact improvisation.

Works Cited

Paxton, S. (2003) Drafting Interior Techniques. In: Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere (eds.) Taken By Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 175-184.

Heitkamp, D. (2003). Moving from the Skin: An Exploratorium. Contact Quarterly/ Contact Improvisation Sourcebook II, Vol. 28:2. 256- 264