SUMMER/FALL 2009 VOL. 34 NO. 2

Special Focus:

Inspiration     Expiration

2          CQ Messsages
3          Editor Note Nancy Stark Smith
4          Contact Trust
8          Letters
9          Shelf Life publications received

11        MAPPING TRANSFORMATION:
            Talking about Expiration and Inspiration
            An interview with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen

            by Andrea Olsen and Nancy Stark Smith, for CQ

15       DANCING THROUGH THE TRANSITIONAL FLUID
           two explorations
           by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen

17        THE LIGHT OF THE DANCING
            drawing and text by Simone Forti

18        ANIMAL ANIMAL
            thoughts on embodied action
            by Ruth Zaporah

20        DANCE, ECOLOGY, AND THE DEEP WORLD:
            An interview with Arawana Hayashi and Jennifer Monson
            at the 2008 SEEDS festival at Earthdance
            by Margit Galanter

26       AFTER GERTRUDE STEIN:
           THOUGHTS ON IMPROVISATION AND
           WHAT MY TEACHERS TAUGHT ME

           by Daniel Lepkoff

27       A SNIPPET CONCERNING INSPIRATION
           by Julyen Hamilton

28       BETWEEN BROOKLYN AND BEARNSTOW:
           Translating through Dancing
           An interview with Bebe Miller
           by Andrea Olsen

34       THE I/EYE OF CONTACT
           a photo story
           by K.J. Holmes

36       ENDNOTE: FIVE DEGREES OF INSPIRATION
           tracking an exercise
           by Melinda Buckwalter, CQ co-editor

37       ESSENTIALS.basic Contact Improv. principles & practices
           Yes and Know Work, by Alito Alessi

38       STILL MOVING Contact Improvisation shoptalk & dialogue
               Deepening through Contact Improvisation:
               The Boulder Contact Lab Guidelines

               by the Boulder Lab Core
 
               Three Moments of Gratitude
               in Nine Minutes at CI36

               by Ruth Ferrari
 
               Moving North:
               Orienting Dance at Latitude 61

               by Gabrielle Barnett and Tinu Hettich

46       CI Newsletter Contact Improvisation news & notices

68       Dance Map classified ads of programs, services, etc.

69       BYEBYEBIANNUALILA

70       INSCRIPTION
           a conversation between body, crayon, and paper
           drawings and text by Sally Nash

FRONT COVER:

From The I/Eye of Contact, a photo series by K.J. Holmes. Dancers [left to right] Charlie Morrissey, K.J. Holmes, and Scott Smith at Chisenhale Dance Space, London, England, 2007. See photo story on page 24.
photo © K.J. Holmes

 

see contributor notes



 


CONTRIBUTOR NOTES

ALITO ALESSI directs Joint Forces Dance Company (JFDC). Two of JFDC's major programs are DanceAbility and the spring Jam at Breitenbush Hotsprings in Oregon—now in its twenty-eighth year. Alito began dancing contact improvisation in the mid-1970s and began mixed-abilities work in 1988. He teaches, choreographs, and performs both mixed-abilities work and CI internationally. www.jointforcesdance.com.

GABRIELLE BARNETT is currently assistant professor of humanities at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, as well as a dancer, writer, and grassroots organizer/activist. She can often be found exploring the mountains, river valleys, and coastline near her home in Girdwood, Alaska.

THE BOULDER CONTACT LAB, in Boulder, Colorado, is a place for ongoing personal exploration and deepening through the form of Contact Improvisation. The Contact Lab is organized and facilitated by seven Core members—Jeffrey Dann, John Caron, Morgan Stanfield, Lindsay Sworski, Lucien Renjilian-Burgy, Susan Coates, and Victor Warring—who collaborate and donate their time for the love of the dance.

BONNIE BAINBRIDGE COHEN, founder and developer of Body-Mind Centering®, has been an innovator and leader in working with movement, touch, and the body-mind relationship for over forty years. She has an extensive background in movement, including various dance styles, dance therapy, occupational therapy, bodywork, martial arts, voice, and yoga, and her work has been influential in those fields. She is the author of Sensing, Feeling, and Action: The Experiential Anatomy of Body-Mind Centering.

RUTH FERRARI, dancer and architect: After being introduced to CI by Martin Keogh in Montevideo, Uruguay, I started practicing regularly and began hosting the Montevideo jam in taller casarrodante. I work both in design and movement, now exploring surprising myself as a way to expand life.

SIMONE FORTI just turned seventy-four. She's doing more and more writing. This June she will teach Writing from Movement in the Naropa Summer Writing Program.

MARGIT GALANTER has been living on the East Coast for the past few years, sharing her time between New York and Western Mass. During this time, she has been co-directing Earthdance and continuing to work on collaborative movement investigations. She intends to archive her findings at www.margitg.wordpress.com.

JULYEN HAMILTON is a dancer and poet and teacher. He has been making and performing dance work throughout the world for over thirty years. Born and raised in England, he trained in London in the 1970s, a time of radical experimentation, and has been an exponent of innovative performance since that time. His work, both dances and their accompanying texts, is mostly improvised. Since the 1980s he has performed in close collaboration with live musicians, dancers, and lighting designers from all over Europe. His teaching reflects his research into efficient ways technique can evolve and improvisational creativity might be imparted. He lives in northern Spain. www.julyenhamilton.com.

ARAWANA HAYASHI is a dancer, choreographer, and teacher trained in both Japanese and Western art forms. She is also an Acharya (a senior teacher of meditation) in the Shambhala Buddhist lineage. Her work as an artist and meditation practitioner has always been intertwined with innovations in community building and education. Since the 1970s, her focus has been on using nonverbal collaborative improvisation methods to increase personal presence and group performance. Arawana is currently on the faculty of the Naropa University Authentic Leadership Program in Boulder, Colorado, and the Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She co-founded the Presencing Institute with C. Otto Scharmer.

Based in Berne, Switzerland, TINU HETTICH has worked with contact improvisation, videography, and martial arts since 1990. Together with Peter Aerni, he runs Atelier FreiForm, a space for image and movement in Berne. Part of the organizing team of the international CI jam in Berne, he teaches contact improvisation in Switzerland and abroad, and collaborates on movement research projects around the world.

K.J. HOLMES and other dancefanatics (Scott Smith, Charlie Morrissey, Henry Montes, Kate Brown, and Christoph Lechner) comprise the group Body of Truth, who meet in the UK to engage in long bouts of movement, music, and theatrical wizardry that at times resembles contact improvisation. K.J. lives in Brooklyn, teaching at New York University/Experimental Theater Wing and at Movement Research. She currently channels her physical impulses into scripts and characters through Meisner studies at the William Esper studio. She occasionally continues to travel to perform, teach, and dance with friends.

DANIEL LEPKOFF is a dancemaker who approaches movement as a finely tuned physical dialogue with the environment. He is known for his commitment as a teacher, performer, and writer and has developed a technique based on his approach. Through the '70s and '80s he played a central role in both the development of Release Technique with Mary Fulkerson and Contact Improvisation with Steve Paxton. A founder of Movement Research in NYC, he has taught and performed his work worldwide. His collaborators include Lisa Nelson, Channel-Z, Paul Langland, Steve Paxton, Oleg Soulimenko, Attila Dora, and Sakura Shimada.

BEBE MILLER is a choreographer and professor living in Columbus, Ohio, where she teaches for part of the year at Ohio State University. She formed the Bebe Miller Company over twenty years ago to work with friends and artists who could inspire each other.

JENNIFER MONSON uses choreographic practice as a means to discover connections among environmental, philosophical, and aesthetic approaches to understanding our surroundings. As artistic director of iLAND, which supports performance, research, and residencies, she creates large-scale dance projects inspired by phenomena of the natural and the built environment. She is currently working on the Mahomet Aquifer Project in Illinois, where she is on the dance faculty at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. www.ilandarts.org

SALLY NASH: In 1989, after forty years of making, performing, and teaching dance, I established Workspace for Choreographers, a mountain retreat in Virginia that supports movement-generated arts of all kinds. My inquiry through touch as a Feldenkrais teacher intrigues me in its subtlety, distinctions, and possibilities, unique to each student and set of circumstances, one of which has been my own visual art.

ANDREA OLSEN is author of Body and Earth (2002) and Bodystories (1996 with Caryn McHose). She is a professor of dance and the Truscott Professor of Environmental Studies at Middlebury College in Vermont. She also teaches and performs internationally, including at Pen Pynfarch, in Wales. Her home places—shared with husband Steve—include Vermont, Massachusetts, and Maine.

RUTH ZAPORAH is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She travels to and fro, feeding on the improvisational moment. www.actiontheater.com.

SARA ALESSI ZOLBROD authors the blog jammingonculture.blogspot.com. She is a writer, choreographer, performer, and massage therapist. She contributed to the anthology Dance, Human Rights and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion. Since 2000, she has worked for DanceAbility International.

ADDITIONAL ISSUE CONTRIBUTORS:
Amanda Abrams, Mamen Agüera, Jun Akiyama, Hallie Aldrich, Catherine Allport, Bill Arnold, John Bainbridge, el barrendero, John Barrett, Carolina Becker, Jules Beckman, Richard Bird, Ben Brouwer, Melinda Buckwalter, Juan Antonio Cardenas, Jim Coleman, Angela Dony, Johan Elbers, Ruth Ferrari, Robert Flynt, Mónika Gallardo, Ziji Beth Goren, Kristen Greco, Daniel Halkin, Arauco Hernandez, Kieren King, Guto Macedo, Ulla Mäkinen, Sharon Mansur, Kelley Mariani, Jo McCulty, Marjean McKenna, Sharon Montes, Marilynne Morshead, Eckhard Müller, Kenta Nagai, Lisa Nelson, Jeff Noble, Eric Palmer, Susan Rethorst, Ramon Roig, Andrey Samartzev, Javiera Sanhueza, Leslie Scates, Beatriz Schiller, Daniela Schwartz, Roberta Shaw, Ilana Silverstein, Nancy Stark Smith, Tim Summers, Lindsay Sworski, Jacques van Eijden, Mike Vargas, Yun Yu Wang, Ali Woolwich, Sandra Yee

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