Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2014

This article delves into the experiences of a recent graduate exploring improvised dance. By analysing experiences of performing, watching and reflecting, this article questions the role of the dancer within improvised performance, and gives insight into the discovery, self-reflection and development involved in the journey of an improvising performer. The article discusses and reflects upon the practice of British dance artists, including Kirstie Simon, Julyen Hamilton and Rosemary Lee, through the eyes of the enquiring and developing dancer: each of these practitioners has influenced and moulded improvisational practice in the United Kingdom since the 1970s. In addition to this discussion of practice, the article also draws upon the published research of artists including Nina Martin and Susan Sgorbati in order to explore the concerns of improvised performance as negotiated by the performer. From a consideration of the thoughts, reflections and observations that occur in the moment of improvised performance, this article examines how dancers engaging with improvised performance are involved in a journey that provokes, challenges and questions concepts of authenticity, honesty and presence. It questions the processes through which dancers are able to negotiate these concerns to fully engage, with both fellow performer and audience, in improvised performance.

The author, a practitioner of contact improvisation and a poet, discusses how she applied improvisational elements from contact improvisation to writing poetry. Her aim was to reinvigorate her writing after a loss in motivation and vision. The article focuses on a technique of sound replicating a partner and using it to propel writing. The author shares sections of her published poems to illustrate her sound sense and shows how it leads to a polylinear, experimental style. She recognizes meaning need not be homogenous nor dictated by the writer. An open, improvised, visceral approach to writing welcomes reader participation. Readers are invited to read with an open mind and the entirety of their body.

This article explores processes within a dance practice as research (PaR) case study and draws upon theoretical and philosophical conceptions of the interval and kinaesthetic empathy to discuss relational and emergent processes that have arisen out of three ones (2012). Artistic processes that deal with the embodied experience are prioritized, and commentaries from dancers in the work and from audience members are centralized in a discussion on touch-based, improvisational practice. The subjective perspective and experience of the mover is considered and the discussion further focuses on the between-ness of movement to provoke questions about inter-subjectivity and notions of self and other. I propose that attending to touch-based, improvisational processes elicits a three-ness between the three dancers that offers ways to consider the multiple nature of exchange. I question how gained understandings of relationality through this PaR case study can lead to new understandings of the affective potentiality in our everyday interactions with other bodies and objects and our relationship with environment.

Underscore Alchemy is a research project designed to investigate how artists from disciplines outside the performing arts might engage with Nancy Stark Smith’s collaborative improvisation model, the Underscore, in order to enhance their creative practices. Creative artists with limited prior experience of somatic practices were invited to participate in a series of research workshops based on Smith’s Underscore. These participants were offered somatic exercises based on everyday movements by facilitators trained in contact and improvisation, within an egalitarian workshop culture. This phenomenological study captured data generated through practice as well as qualitative data, analysis of which suggests that the Underscore can be successfully adapted for artists working in non-dance disciplines. This article looks at the role Smith’s Underscore played in Underscore Alchemy, entailing an investigation of how contact manifested through rhythmic and visual patterns, as well as how these creative artists from a variety of disciplines engaged with improvisation through attention to the experiential body.

This article addresses the potential for an embodied ethics of touch in the context of cross-generational dance work, in particular through the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Focusing on choreographic processes and performances involving parents and children I examine the relationships that are reoriented through the shifting mode of being that is dancing together. This is in part an auto-ethnographic enquiry as I reflect on my own experiences as a new mother dancing with my daughter in Baby Jam1 and relating to her in life. Proximity is used as a way to frame the auto-ethnographic lens and to discuss ethics as a way of relating. This article suggests an ambiguous definition of ‘contact’: conceiving of it as a mode of communication as well as a dance practice The article questions how contact might be defined without the use of touch, by including the potential of touch as well as its actualization. Using Manning’s 2009 notion of relational movement, I refer to the ‘about-to-be’ moment in contact and the ethical relationships that this engenders. This article references three case studies as examples: my own cross-generational duet project with an adult mother and daughter, my experiences as a new mother and the work of Giulio D’Anna and his recent piece choreographed with his father Parkin’son. It discusses the ontological implications of contact across generations as a way of being together, reaching towards an ethics of touch rather than fixing its meaning.

This article explores the potential of the touch + talk score to act as a framework in which to articulate and open up dance practitioners’ questions underlying the practice and performance of contact and improvisation. Guattari’s model of three ecologies is used as a reference point from which to identify how a practice of questioning is significant to improvisational modalities in dance as well as wider practices of relating to social, mental and physical spheres of thought. I suggest that negotiating contact with another through physical and verbal questioning can be a route towards articulating our emerging understanding of current improvisation practices and makes visible the ethical practice of encountering another.

This article is from the first chapter of a Ph.D. thesis and introduces some pivotal experiences and emerging beliefs that inspired the past two decades of professional practice, incorporating contact improvisation (CI), Body-Mind Centering® (BMC®) and Dance Movement Psychotherapy (DMP). The purpose of this article is to indicate the epistemology of my professional self, a touch specialist, presented in three emerging roles: the CI practitioner/teacher, the BMC practitioner/teacher and the DMP practitioner/teacher. Through the practice of CI and BMC I learnt essential touch and movement skills, and sharing them with deafblind people had an unexpected outcome – I discovered the effects of touch deprivation. In working with people who experience social exclusion in the context of socially inclusive arts projects I learnt that I too had been deprived of the universal language of touch. My personal and professional paths became intertwined as I undertook to work with touch-based methods in health contexts and encountered the dilemma of working in a non-touch culture and the negative effects on patients. CI and BMC combine as effective methods within DMP practice as they operate within the territory of humanistic and body-oriented psychotherapy and enrich this with specialist skills including reflexivity, hermeneutics and self-enquiry.

Grounded in Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory, the focus of this study was to examine the role of flow as a framework for optimizing the practice of risk-taking in the teaching and learning of contact improvisation in higher education, and to better enable students to take the creative, physical and psychological risks associated with that practice. A range of qualitative methodologies were employed including observation, analysis, writing, drawing and focus group discussions. Findings of this study included: establishing shared learning environments, attending to language and tone of delivery, and ensuring the development of scaffolded tasks for trust, non-judgement, optimal experience and pleasure to flourish.

Children, youth, other persons, animals even are those with whom our lives are entwined, yet our connections are customarily superficial, fleeting and distant. Where they are sustained in various professional and pedagogical practices, the relations tend to be constrained by routines, rituals and rites. The primary motive of contact improvisation, however, is to connect to others beyond our habitual containments. As a movement form, contact improvisation brings postural, positional, gestural and expressive nuance to our actions, reactions and interactions. It is a somatic practice not only of relating sensitively to others, but also of cultivating a corporeal responsiveness to those who would otherwise fall outside our personal and professional commitments. We realize the possibilities of such connection when the spatial, and especially the temporal, dynamics of contact improvisation are transposed ‘somatophorically’ to discursive realms. A felt durational emphasis can be now heard as the agogic accent of multilingualism. And as an accent of speech, but also of song, music and motion, its significance spreads through all our relations with others. Particular attention is paid to the pedagogical formulation of this accent and to how improvisatory contact might be transposed to settings of evident educational concern. Relations between teachers and students, therapists and clients, social workers and youth, as well as parents and their children, can incorporate this accent of contact duration. At their pedagogical best, these relations can be corporeally improvisatory, multilingually responsive, and essentially and durationally tactful. More formal, institutionalized representations of pedagogy can thus be understood as derivative, and too often subversive, of a vital contact with others in the manifold, multilingual worlds we share.

In this article, I discuss how contact improvisation (CI) can be seen as a form of attentional training – training attention-to-attention while moving – and how this practice can change the sense of self that dancers have. It proposes that identity in CI is an action of giving: one that generates new potentials through relations that support complex actions. Identity in an active practice of relations is associated not with bound physicality, but rather with active sensing. This active practice opens up the possibility of another politics of attention. I draw upon my experience as a teacher to make clear the relation between practices of attentional skill and theoretical claims about what attention can do. Working through the relational concepts of performance theorists and contact improvisers, this article offers new language with which to understand the political significance that CI brings into the twenty-first century as it continues to grow.