After over four months off I was slightly apprehensive for my first improvisation session back, especially as this time the module means you can’t just rely on your own body. This week’s readings I found a particularly interesting insight into the fundamentals of contact improvisation. They made me really think about how last year during improvisation I would often shut out the world and do my own thing to try and escape from the idea that people might be watching me. This year, obviously that’s not an option, as it is necessary to observe and communicate with others in order to be successful. Moving from the skin (Heitkamp, 2003), I personally found thought-provoking. I could really relate to way it spoke about the skin as a connection between the external world and your internal self.
‘it is through it that we connect with the outer world, that we touch and experience our environment.’ (Heitkamp, 2003, 257)
This same reading continued on to say how touch is considered the ‘primary means of communication’ (Heitkamp, 2003, 257) in contact improvisation. This related to many tasks we encountered in our first improvisation class. One exercises involved you following someone improvising (person B) or being followed while improvising (person A). Person B would touch areas of the body person A had exposed while improvising. I found myself, as person B, being very careful when touching regions as I didn’t want to affect their movement, and from my experience as person A I found it did influence my next move. Reflecting back on it, I found the external stimuli quite helpful and this sensory input meant I wasn’t doing all the decision making myself, therefore I wasn’t humouring my habitual behaviours.
We started the session off by lying on the floor in neutral. We were told to isolate and press areas of our body into the floor without involving the other regions around it. I found certain areas were easier to tense and push into the floor without disturbing the rest of the body than others. Was this the same for everyone or is it just the way that my body moves?
Once we had done this working through the body from feet to the head, we were asked to curl up into a foetal positon. We then changed over to the other side moving through the neutral position. The process was then sped up. We were told to move as a reaction, to make it the most efficient movement rather than causing strain on the body by moving suddenly between positions. I found this helpful for preparing me to more as ‘we do not begin to move from zero’ (Paxton, 2003, 176). Using this same concept of being relaxed and elongated in neutral to being curled up and contracted in foetal, we were asked to travel around the space drawing upon this idea as the influence of our movement. The movement produced often originated from this notion of pushing and pulling against the floors surface. I tried to make sure while moving I involved every part of my body to make sure I felt the sensation of pushing and pulling throughout the entirety of myself. By doing this I was also able to feel what felt ‘normal’ and what didn’t. It brought to my attention my habitual movement patterns and when I reached a position which I wasn’t fully comfortable with I tried to indulge further into it to see what new movement possibilities I might be able to explore.
This idea of habitual movement was touched upon in our next task. In pairs we were asked to observe each other improvising and to try and pick up on the others individuals movement habits. This task was good for finding out something about the way you move but also useful for finding out how others tend to move as well. By coincidence my partner and I had quite similar movement tendencies. We found that we didn’t incorporate our upper halves much and we tended to stay very grounded. I feel it’s easier to improvise when on the floor as there is another surface to support yourself off, whereas standing up I’m likely to be very cautious of experimenting with my movement. Maybe this is something contact improvisation will help me with as another body can be used as a support or surface to push, pull, lean and suspend off.
Our last task involved a lot of trust in ourselves and the others around us. The reading Drafting Interior Techniques by Steve Paxton (2003), spoke about this idea of trust in contact improvisation. It brought up the ‘unpredictable nature of improvisation’ (Paxton, 2001, 180) and I believe this is why so many people are nervous or apprehensive about the subject itself as it puts you in a somewhat vulnerable position. We were told to close our eyes and walk slowly around the room, we were asked that when we met a body, we stopped and hugged them. To quote Steve Paxton ‘trust was missing’ (Paxton, 2003, 181). The interaction with another person was more of a pat on the back than a hug, so we were asked to do the same task again, but this time you had to hold the hug for what was considered to be an uncomfortable amount of time and our bodies had to be touching. While carrying out this task I remembered what I had read in the Moving from the Skin (Heitkamp, 2003) reading and how it spoke about being able to ‘close our eyes or cover our ears but we cannot “turn off” our skin’ (Heitkamp, 2003, 261) and this was definitely noted in this exercise. I could relate to what the reading was saying and how if one sense is removed, the others are heightened and this was definitely the case. A combination of sound and touch were my new eyes. I would often stop if I heard something to avoid collisions and if I felt something (which wasn’t a person) I would redirect myself away from it. I personally struggled with this as instantly I felt very wary of everything going on around me. However, in improvisation, especially contact improvisation, you have to have trust in the setting you’re in, the people around you and of course yourself.
Heitkamp, D. (2003) Moving from the Skin: An Exploratorium. Contact Quarterly/Contact Improvisation Sourcebook II, 28:2, 256-264.
Paxton, S. (2003) Drafting Interior Techniques. In: Nancy Stark-Smith (ed.) A Subjective History of Contact Improvisation. In: Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere (eds.) Taken by Surprise: A dance improvisation reader. Middletown, CT, USA: Wesleyan University Press, 175-184.