DANZ QUARTERLY No 1 September 2005

DANCE OF THE PEOPLE - Contact Improvisation

By Francesca Horsley

There is something for everyone in contact improvisation. You may want to play, take your clothes off, or reveal nothing. You may be very athletic or in a wheel chair, 65 – or 17. You may speak Russian, or live in California, jam in the open air in Nelson, or in the Plaza in Buenos Aires. You may want to finish with an artistic flourish, or ride up and hover suspended on someone’s shoulder. You may have danced before a demonstration or after a personal trauma. Contact is for everyone.

Martin Keogh, contact improvisation teacher, has been dancing for 25 years and his youthful vigour, well beneath his 47 years, is an impressive advertisement for the dance form. On his third trip to New Zealand this year, he took workshops at Te Whaea, Wellington and Unitec, Auckland. Martin spends months of every year taking it to people all around the planet.

Contact improvisation began in New York in the heady days of the 1960s, when the established dance world was turned upside down, reappraised, lampooned. When the legendary Steve Paxton began experimenting in the Judson Church, nobody expected it to become a dance form in its own right.

“It was like an installation performance they did for five hours over five days and people could come and go. Steve and these athletes and dancers from all over the country were living together and at night they would look at the videos. Afterwards these artists went back home and they wanted people to keep dancing so they taught their friends who in turn went out and taught their friends. The form was transferred from person to person and became very big,” Martin says.

Its popularity may lie in the very nature of the people who dance it. “I think there is a whole part of the population who think kinesthetically, who thrive in contact. Also it attracts people who are iconoclasts, who don’t like dogma and don’t fit neatly into moulds. They feel it is not trying to shape them in any particular way; they can be who they are in the dance; their self or body or movement isn’t being choreographed by somebody else. It is very experiential.”

“It’s a whole different focus from ‘can I get my leg up to the bar, can I do my perfect plié?’ Ballet, contemporary dance – there is a way in which these dancers colonise space; penetrate space – this is Ann Cooper Albright’s language. It is very watchable to see dancers go out there and eat up the space. In contact improvisation, it is almost the opposite, space colonises us.”
“I don’t think it is important what contact improvisation looks like. What is

important is what it feels like. The interesting thing about contact improvisation is that it attracts more men than any other dance except for traditional forms that are only for men. I think it has to do with particular associations regarding women and appearance versus men and experience.

Martin says contact’s softer, more internal form, is harder to read from the outside. “In my experience there are some people who know how to tune their audience to their internal experience. It’s like they give conduit to the audience, to their inside sensation, their emotional body, where they are making the choices from. But it’s hard to do and there are very few people who I feel can do it well.”

As the form has grown, it has been adopted by three different sections of the dance community. It is now a tool for dance companies to create movement that could never be knowingly created or imagined. “It comes out of the reflexive movement of working together; some very interesting partnering and group work comes out of it.”

Another aspect is its integration into mixed ability dancing. “If contact is the proposition that you’re a movement puzzle and I’m a movement puzzle – and where do we go when we put those puzzles together - it means that anybody can dance the form. So if somebody is a paraplegic, a quadriplegic or has cerebral palsy; if someone can only move from the chest up, then that’s the puzzle they bring to the form. It is the magnanimousness of contact improvisation that it takes all body types.”

The third is the social, therapeutic and contemplative aspects of the form.“There are communities all over the world who do this dance as an investigation. It is a big part of wellness. The choices we make in dance are often the choices we make in all of our relationships - so it becomes this sometimes clear, sometimes flattering and sometimes startling mirror of who we are in all relationships. It is also a contemplative, meditative dance. People practice it as a way to clear their minds - when you are in the dance, it is surprising how present you can be.”

This third group is the biggest and is growing all the time. It is very popular in Eastern Europe, taking off in Asia, but the largest communities are in South America, particularly in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where there are six jams a week, sometimes lasting four hours, occasionally attended by over 100 people.

One of the biggest surprises, Martin says, has been that in certain places of crisis, contact has become a refuge. In Argentina in 2001, when the Government closed all the banks the country went into a huge crisis, and contact grew exponentially. In Israel after the last Intifada in 2000 it also grew. “It seems to be a place where people can see each other’s humanity in very human times. So it’s amazing that this form is giving to people in hard times.”

Raised in California, with a large chunk of South American imprint after living in Mexico for a number of years, Martin is now based in New England with his wife and small son.

He started dancing informally at a regular Friday night dance jam in San Francisco, and enjoyed rolling around with people. “One particular night, I had this great rough and tumble with a man, and afterwards he gave me feedback about how I could roll around better. I was kind of confused – you mean this is a dance form? He said yes its called contact improvisation. I started out that week with three classes. It was like being home – I knew where all the furniture was. Within a year I was teaching, I was performing”.

“I had a sense of comfort; some deep needs of nourishment were met - out of the physical contact, out of the sweat, out of the use of muscle and bone, out of the playfulness of it – and out looking for some form of performance where I didn’t have to be anybody but myself.”

“Our personalities are there, our days are there, our desires are there, our limitations are there – and so when we dance we dance with that. The dance gets created and both people are being danced rather than willfully making it happen."

“A great amount of the practice of improvisation is this balance between will and allowing – and knowing the difference between the two – because we are always going to be ok. For example I am going to let myself be like
a river in this dance – and then I might become like a rag doll and not go anywhere – or you get so willful you are always moving your partner around and they get upset with you and leave the dance – but where do you find that middle ground? Every day it is a different place because it is who you are, who your partner is on that day – you can be dancing with exactly the same person the next day but the balancing point is a different world the next day.”

Martin says that while it is a very intimate form, there are people who he has danced regularly with over the years and yet knows nothing about their lives. “But I know a great deal about their dance and how their personalities are expressed in the dance.”

He has taught in 15 countries on four continents and 63 cities in the last nine years. And yes there are differences. “For example on the East Coast of the States people dance with more autonomous centres; on the West Coast you are far more likely to see people having an angry or sexual dance or where they are actually crying– bringing more aspects of themselves onto the dance floor. Go over to Europe and people come and go out of the dance much more; there is more space and idiosyncratic movement.”

And how good a dancer do you have to be to do contact? “If a person in a wheelchair can do it I don’t think there is strong pre-requisite of being physically fit. Certainly the fitter you are the greater muscle strength and flexibility you have and the ability to release and be comfortable in your body. The more you bring to the dance form the more it is going to open up to you right from the beginning. But the dance form itself can develop all those things in the body.”

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