This week was our final contact improvisation lesson and within this class we brought together everything we had learnt throughout the past weeks. For the first time, we experienced performing contact improvisation in front of an audience, 12 university photography students. Having these 12 students watching and taking photographs of me improved my confidence and encouraged me to do my best, it wasn’t necessarily pressure that I felt, it was more comfort and reassurance. This week, in more detail, we experienced and experimented with Nancy Stark Smith’s Underscore, something that was a lot more successful this week than last week due to having a rough idea as to what it consisted it. Stark Smith’s Underscore “is a score that guides dancers through a series of “changing states,” from solo deepening/ releasing and sensitizing to gravity and support: through group circulation and interaction, Contact Improvisation (CI) engagements, opening out to full group improvisation with compositional awareness, and back to rest and reflection” (Stark Smith, 2008, 90).
The score provided us with not only a secure framework within our jam but it also created room for exploration. Nancy Stark Smith didn’t just create the score to aid movement within contact improvisation but to help dancers engage with their own bodies, minds and bring awareness to safe practice. Using the Underscore as our structure provided us with that element of surprise (even more so than normal), I never knew what my partner would throw at me because everyone interprets the Underscore differently. Stark Smith felt trapped within her own space, by her own material, she needed to open the space again in order to generate new, original movement, “I found myself prolonging open, structureless sections of class, during which I would suggest things to focus on – through language and my own movement” (Stark Smith, 2008, 90). The score was created to challenge dancers within contact improvisation, it provides experience and practice; builds on our knowledge, “learn about the mind of the body through experiencing it” (Stark Smith, 2008, 90).
CI word bank:
- Scores
- Trust
- Touch
- Communication, dialogue
- Connection
- Breath
- Aikido
- Eye contact
- Release
- Trust
- Imagery
- Surfing
- Skinesphere
- Under and over dancer
- Interchangeable roles
- Kinespheres
- Momentum
- Small dance – Steve Paxton
- Going up to go down
- Letting go
- Habitual movements
- Being present
- Equal forces of weight
- Internalizing
- Rolling points
- Releasing the head
Throughout this module I have been through a lot of different states, both physical and emotional. At the start of my practice I felt quite negatively towards contact improvisation, I lacked confidence in my movement, entering the space during jam session, flow and weight baring, all things I strived to improve in. Although it took me a while to get to this stage, I feel as if I eventually got there. Within the last contact jam, I felt less fear than I ever did before, I wanted to go into the space and make contact with a range of bodies. I tried my hardest to keep connected with the other body I was improvising with at all times in order to make my movement flow.I felt less pressure, I didn’t care what people thought or if people were watching me, in the end, that didn’t have an effect on the movement I was performing. I started to experiment with taking and giving weight, I had no fear, I trusted myself and my partner, I wanted to see where my body could take me. All these things came through time, through frustrated moments and times of thinking ‘I’d never be able to do contact improvisation’, but I can and I did. Contact improvisation is something that has helped me with my all-round dance practice, the elements on communication, creativity, risk taking and awareness are all things I can now take into consideration throughout my dance training.
Stark Smith, N. (2008) Caught Falling, The Confluence of Contact Improvisation, Nancy Stark Smith, and Other Moving Ideas.