The cruel optimism of contact improvisation: Dancing between neoliberal subjectivation and practices of commoning

Within the social world of Contact Improvisation, the question of class relations remains conspicuous by its absence. Whilst ongoing debates in the global Contact Improvisation (CI) community and recent scholarship have foregrounded the problem of Whiteness, there have been few attempts to provide intersectional analyses of the racialised, classed subjectivation of contact dancers. To make such future enquiry possible, this paper dismantles originary CI myths about ‘natural’ movement, also attended to by Bojana Cvejić, and explores the question of social antagonism through analysing the dance form’s discursive norms and movement vocabulary. As this essay argues, the contact dancer occupies a paradoxical subject position: between a neoliberal embrace of risk-taking and precarity, and a cruelly optimistic prefiguration of the commons.