Contact improvisation comes of age
By Elizabeth Zimmer
How is Contact Improvisation like the Internet?
Lots of ways, it turns out. Both the dance form and the electronic network came into being in the early 1970s. Both revolutionized the way we communicate. Both have spread dramatically, becoming worldwide phenomena. “Surfing” is part of the lingo in both. And neither has managed to make much money.
“Does everything have to make money?” Steve Paxton asks when I try out this comparison in a telephone interview. Paxton “instigated” contact improvisation, to use his word, in New York City in 1972, after experiments during a residency at Oberlin College with the Grand Union. (See sidebar.)
In contact improvisation (CI), two people share a dance by giving weight to a single “point of contact.” They might stand forehead to forehead, of one’s shoulder might lean into the other’s hip. “It looks like a cross between a ballet pas de deux and a barroom brawl,” said one dance critic. Each dance is effectively a trio, with the third partner being the floor. Early experiments were conducted on gym mats, soon discarded in favor of the solid footing a harder surface provides.
It’s nonhierarchical; no choreographer is directing. Participants speak of being “danced” by the point of contact. Paxton, a wise, laconic artist of 65 who guesses he’s partnered 20,000 people worldwide in the past thirty years (see sidebar), says, “I was trying to understand what makes integrity in movement. I thought I spied in CI a form arising from us rather than imposed upon us. It’s a game that takes two people to win, so it doesn’t create losers; it ignores gender, size, and other differences. It’s about attending to your reflexes in a touch communication – faster than words, faster than conscious thinking.” About the way CI uses space,
he says, “I came to think of the space as spherical, a tumbling sphere as opposed to a pedestal sphere. This seemed to be a big change from the [proscenium] dance I was used to.”
CI has exploded dramatically in the past thirty years. From its genesis at Oberlin and Bennington College, where Paxton was teaching, CI found its way to art galleries in New York and Italy and spread across North America, gradually penetrating other college dance departments and studios and festivals on every continent.
Nancy Stark Smith, the Massachusetts-based teacher and performer who cofounded and co-edits Contact Quarterly (see Resource List), was present at the creation at Oberlin, where she was an undergraduate active in sports and modern dance. “CI could have been a single piece Steve Paxton made in 1972. That it would become a worldwide movement form was not anticipated at the time. I started to share it with people, because you can’t do it alone. That was the most important factor in its spread.”
Although Smith, an improvisational performer, often extends her work from CI as a strict form, she continues to use it as a teaching tool. “There’s really nothing like it. It challenges people to be curious, to initiate, to follow, to be sensitive, to listen, to resist when necessary, to innovate, to risk, and to enjoy. There’s an aspect of play in it: you’re learning, satisfying, challenging; you’re lost, you’re solving phenomenological problems. It’s so versatile. Some people use it for choreographic research, others as a contemplative practice.”
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