Contact improvisation
Contact Improvisation is a postmodern dance practice that explores movement through shared weight, touch, and physical awareness. Originating in the United States in 1972, contact improvisation was developed by dancer and choreographer Steve Paxton, drawing on influences from modern dance, aikido, and somatic practices. Contact Improvisation emphasizes the interplay of gravity, momentum, and improvisation, fostering an experimental approach to movement that invites both professional dancers and newcomers into its global community.
The practice involves continuous physical touch between dancers, where gravity, momentum, inertia, and friction shape their interactions.
The dance is further described by Paxton:
"The exigencies of the form dictate a mode of movement which is relaxed, constantly aware and prepared, and onflowing".
Known for its open "jams," contact improvisation is both a social dance and a tool for movement research, offering a unique blend of physicality and mindfulness. Formally, contact improvisation is a movement improvisation that is explored with another being. According to one of its first practitioners, Nancy Stark Smith, it "resembles other familiar duet forms, such as the embrace, wrestling, surfing, martial arts, and the Jitterbug, encompassing a wide range of movement from stillness to highly athletic."
Contact improvisation has evolved into various formats, including performance art, experimental dance, and education. Figures like Nancy Stark Smith, Lisa Nelson, and Nita Little played significant roles in broadening its influence, integrating the practice into postmodern dance traditions and contemporary performance studies.
History of contact improvisation
From ''Magnesium'' to ''Contact Improvisations''
Contact improvisation was developed in the United States in the 1970s by a group of dancers and athletes gathered under the guidance of choreographer and dancer Steve Paxton.In January 1972, Steve Paxton was in residence at Oberlin College during a tour with Grand Union, a collective where he collaborated with other prominent figures in postmodern dance, including Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown. For several weeks, he offered Oberlin students two sets of practices:
- every morning at dawn, a "soft class" involving an exploration that he soon called the "small dance," a form of meditation that is practiced standing, where attention is paid to postural adjustments and micro-weight transfers;
- and later in the day, rehearsals for a performance that he transmitted to a group of young men and whose score is to explore the extremes of movement and disorientation, from standing still to falling, rolling, colliding, and jumping in the air. For these rehearsals, Steve Paxton relied on his training in modern dance, in aikido and in gymnastics.
In the Spring of 1972, Steve Paxton received a grant from Change, Inc which allowed him to invite dancers to work on the form he was evolving. He invited some colleagues from the Judson Dance Theater years like Barbara Dilley and Nancy Topf, release technique pioneer Mary Fulkerson, as well as students met during his teaching tours, including Nancy Stark Smith and Curt Siddall, Danny Lepkoff and David Woodberry and Nita Little.
At the end of this residency, the group presented a performance that Paxton named Contact Improvisations. The performance took the form of a continuous afternoon practice over five days at the John Weber Gallery in Manhattan. Spectators were free to come and go as the dancers practiced, alongside a concurrent film screening of George Manupelli's Dr. Chicago.
Expansion Across Regions
In North America
Styles
Following the first performance of Contact Improvisations in New York in 1972, the participants scattered to different parts of the United States but soon began to teach the practice. The syncopated, risky, raw and awkward style of the first performances gave place rather quickly to a variety of aesthetics within the form.One of those aesthetics was the development of smooth, continuous, controlled flow of quality in the late 1970s and early 1980s, running parallel with the opposite trend of interest in conflict and unexpected responses, including previously avoided eye contact and direct hand contact. Says Nancy Stark Smith,
Within the study of Contact Improvisation, the experience of flow was soon recognized and highlighted in our dancing. It became one of my favorite practices and I proceeded to "do flow" for many years-challenging it, testing it: could we flow through this pass? Could we squeak through that one, and keep going?
Regardless of those aesthetic choices, the central characteristic of contact improvisation remains a focus on bodily awareness and physical reflexes rather than consciously controlled movements. One of the founders of the form, Daniel Lepkoff, comments that the “precedence of body experience first, and mindful cognition second, is an essential distinction between Contact Improvisation and other approaches to dance.” Another source affirms that the practice of contact improvisation involves “mindfulness, sensing and collecting information” as its core.
Languaging and observing
In 1975, the dancers working with Steve Paxton considered trademarking the term contact improvisation in order to control the teaching and practice of the dance form, consequently for reasons of safety. This idea was rejected in favor of establishing a forum for communication: this became the Contact Newsletter founded by Nancy Stark Smith, which evolved into the bi-annual journal which continues to be published online by the non-profit Contact Collaborations after a final print edition came out in January 2020. The journal, now co-edited by Nancy Stark Smith and Lisa Nelson, brings together different reflections of contact improvisation teachers and practitioners and cements an international community by equipping it with a communication organ, as well as hosting several other orders of reflections, including writings by contemporary dancers and somatic practitioners. According to the magazine's statement,Contact Quarterly is the longest living, independent, artist-made, not-for-profit, reader-supported magazine devoted to the dancer's voice. Founded in 1975, Contact Quarterly began as a forum for discussion of the emerging dance form Contact Improvisation. Serving as a meeting ground for a worldwide network of contact improvisers, CQquickly grew to include writings and interviews on postmodern and contemporary experimental dance, somatic movement practices, improvisational dance, mixed-abilities dance, teaching methods, creative process, and performance.While the development of contact improvisation has benefited greatly from Nancy Stark Smith and Lisa Nelson's editorial work to support the writings of dancers in their exploration of the form, it also owes much to the cameras of Steve Christiansen and then Lisa Nelson, who documented many moments of the work and allow the contactors to observe themselves with meticulousness.
Development of art-sport
Since the mid-1970s, regular jams are present in most major cities in North America. Other multi-day residential spaces have been in existence since the late 1970s. Remembers dancer Mark Pritchard,The 1979 Country Jam was a first of its kind in the Contact world: over fifty people from the western United States and Canada came together for twelve days of non-structured existence, life and dance: neither a workshop, a conference or a seminar, but an improvisational gathering, with the sole aim of creating a space for dancing and living in flux... Our days were without structure, except for meals: at the beginning, we planned to keep 90-minute slots for the courses, but the idea was quickly abandoned thanks to a system based on Supply and demand, in which each could suggest a topic to be dealt with and offer to lead a class. These residential events represent a parallel economy that invited the creation of dedicated spaces of practice, the model of which was provided very early by Earthdance, a residential center built in 1986 by a Boston community of dancers.
In Europe
In Europe, contact improvisation was presented for the first time in 1973 in an art gallery in Rome, L'Attico run by Fabio Sargentini. In the 1970s and 1980s, Steve Paxton and Lisa Nelson were regularly invited to the Dartington College of Arts in Great Britain and the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam, which served as transmission belts for contact improvisation in Europe.Nancy Stark Smith was key to the organization of the first European Contact Improvisation Teachers Exchange. Subsequent exchanges have been organized since 1985 and hosted each year by a different European country.
Belgian dancer and choreographer Patricia Kuypers noted in 1999 that, depending on the country and the individual, it has spread more or less rapidly in the world of dance or amateurs. In Belgium, where Steve Paxton had come since the 1980s, invited by the Klapstuk and the Kaaitheater, few professional dancers regularly practiced it, and apart from certain outbreaks of fever in successful jams, it can not be said that contact improvisation left any lasting trace among professional dancers, except in a choreographed form.