1. Improvising Contact, Queering Intimacy
Dancing with bodies while dancing with questions of improvisation, intimacy, social habits (hegemony), and liberation. Is it true that no one is free unless we’re all free? In this workshop, Queer is a perspective, not an identity; an action verb, not a static noun; a process, not a utopia. Queering intimacy is an invitation to reconsider how two humans (or more) can increase the freedom potential of improvised dancing. We will study (while dancing!) the radical invitation of early Contact Improvisation: to enter a spontaneous, co-created, non-hierarchical, and non-gendered encounter with another body. We will attempt to queer the imagined, unstated, assumed, and institutionalized rules of our dancing. We will research dancing in a post-Contact laboratory, where intimacy (the feeling of closeness and mutual solidarity) is prioritized over other kinds of spectacle and performance.
In these three 90-minute classes, we will improvise with the influences of experimental theatre, feminism, sexual liberation, LGBT/queer activism, contemporary dance, body art, critical race studies, child’s play, punk, relational aesthetics, and cross-cultural shamanism. And mostly we will dance, improvising with touch, weight, non-touch, presence, distance, and the world around us.
(Touch&Play Festival, Schwelle 7, Berlin, April/May, 2010)
2. Improvising Contact, Presence, and Performance
A workshop, a laboratory, a field of research and play, a communal space to negotiate, a dream, and a practice. Performing improvisation, improvising performance—what does Contact Improvisation have to offer? Questioning performance, questioning presence. Seeking the limits and essences of Contact and Performance. How can we use the point of contact as a point of departure or point of negotiation for an improvised performance?
Daily practice will involve various approaches to dancing, improvisation, collaboration, image, theory, and ritual. We will move more than talk, creating experiences that prompt fresh insights and questions. Questioning dance will include questioning the artist as activist, shaman, animal, and citizen. Participants will work alone, in duets, and in groups. The laboratory is intended to be problematic, provocative, and incomplete.
(Chorescence, Grenoble, France, April 2010)
3. Potential Shamanic Action
An experiment to investigate the relationship between improvised dance, performance, and shamanism. Exercises and experiences in presence, transformation, breath, altered states of being, trance, awareness, ritual, and performance.
I have been studying ritual, both ancient and contemporary, for over 20 years. I recognize the many continuations and disruptions between religious practice and the Western concert stage. Shamanism, in a general usage, refers to the ritual/spiritual practices of working with unseen forces, of energy, of transforming space and time, of shifting meaning and perspective, of communicating with the dead or not-human. Performance often engages the same intentions. Each day we will, in action and conversation, question the concept of Presence. What is it? How do we experience it? Can it be choreographed? What can we learn about presence through improvisation? What is magic? What is the role of presence in making magic, provoking transformation, or sensing the Other worlds?
(Impulstanz, Vienna, August 2010; offered annually, in variation, since 2007)
4. Post/Contact: practices of body-to-body engagement
A dance laboratory for experiments in touch, sensing, struggle, collaboration, support, resistance, and relationship. We will work with failure more than flow, with struggle more than ease. The goal of the class is to extend the proposals and possibilities of Contact Improvisation. How do we engage, critique, and evolve the practices of Contact Improvisation? What are its limitations in relation to performance, contemporary art, choreographic innovation, and intervention? Focused on duet partnerships, we will also consider the influence of the duet (as practice, as representation) on solo and group dancing.
Contact Improvisation, more than any other development in European and American dance, challenged the hierarchy of the vertical body, attempted to democratize body parts, challenged the role of gender in dance partnering, and disrupted deeply embodied choreographic and institutional habits. Post/Contact questions and celebrates the resistance to Contact Improvisation in today’s dance and performance. Dance experimentation of the 1960–’70s was heavily influenced by pop culture and youth rebellion, including hippy culture and activist projects (anti-war, feminism, black power…). How do contemporary dance practices erase, engage, or embody these influences? How do we negotiate CI’s hippy tendencies and identities? What happens when dance research becomes a lifestyle?
(Tanzfabrik, Berlin, November 2010;
Impulstanz, Vienna, August 2010)
5. Performance! Improvisation! Contact!
Presence.
Now, here, being.
Spontaneous composition.
Improvisation as potential shamanic action.
Entertainment, art, ritual, practice, pedagogy, performance.
Contact Improvisation is our home base for metaphoric and embodied travel through the fields of performance, intimacy, risk, ritual, community, and action.
To perform improvisation is to perform both the process and the promise of creativity. We make something and give it away, simultaneously. The workshop will explore the tendency towards entertainment as well as the critiques of virtuosity and spectacle. Who are you trying to please?
And we will experiment; we will play like scientists, like alchemists, who mix ingredients just to see what will happen. Religious intentions of awareness, transformation, and revelation encounter political goals of diversity, consensus, and freedom.
(International Contact Festival Freiburg, Germany, August 2009)
6. Contact Improvisation
Contact Improvisation is an approach, a context, a practice. Anyone who is willing can do it. The dance can be slow, low to the ground, intimate, athletic, or fierce and flying—shifting within a matter of seconds or hours. Contact Improvisation thrives on deep listening, whole body respect and awareness, flexibility, playfulness, strength, mutual trust, and joie de vivre. A basic suggestion is to follow an ever-changing point of contact (or place of touch) between your body and your partner’s body. We will follow this suggestion and expand the dance to include a wide experience of improvising in partnership: duo, trio, group, body and architecture, body and world.
Contact Improvisation is one of the principle techniques/practices to emerge from cultural revolutions of the 1960’s & ’70s. I have been dancing with Contact Improvisation since 1979. The dance, like my body and the world around me, has gone through several phases and changes, styles and evolutions. I teach Contact as an experiment in moving, as an impulse for spontaneous partnership and choreography, as an inspirational space where new ideas and actions flourish.
(TSEH—The Moscow Dance Agency, July 2008)
7. The Improvising Citizen
A workshop in dance, improvisation, and performance exploring the polarities of inner/outer, private/public, life/art as our primary sources of instigation and inspiration.
Grounding ourselves in the disciplined study and joyful practice of improvised dance and performance, we’ll explore the symbiosis of our creative work and public life. Deepening and expanding our dance practices—contact improvisation, physical theater, improvised dance—will be the home base for round-trip travel into questions of politics, culture, spirituality, family, and society. Sound, vocal language, and text, sourced from the wild body, will be included in our experiments. Performance will serve as a ritualized time and place for simultaneous research and discourse.
How does the external influence the internal, and vice versa? How do familial, social, and global experiences influence our dancing body? How do our practices of improvised dance, movement, meditation, and performance influence our perceptions and actions outside the studio?
We dive into the pool of our dancing body, dropping into sensation and imagination, resurfacing with gestures and momentum, touch and flight. What is the role of the dance in your life? What is the role of the dancer in social life? Is the world dancing? Is the city an improvised performance?
I intend this workshop to be a living laboratory, motivated by the experiences and desires of each and all who are present.
(TSEH—The Moscow Dance Agency, July 2008)
