Week 3 has been the most enjoyable for me, I feel relaxed, confident, and energized to learn more about CI. Steve Paxton Interior Techniques: Contact Improvisation and the Political Power was an easy read and I feel I could relate to this ‘We are afraid of proximity, and therefore respond to “crowding” by avoiding contact’ (Turner, 2010, 124). What I took from this was that when we are uncomfortable we revert to our comfort zone by doing habitual moves, because we do not know how to respond to the situation. I know I do this, and I need to get this out of my system because everyone is in the same situation.
Simone Forti is a dancer, choreographer, artist and writer and first started her dancing career with Anna Halprin. In the early 1980’s Forti focused on ‘News Animations, spontaneously weaving together movement and spoken words, with a focus on world news’ (DRJ special issue, 2015, 145). When looking at the body Forti looked at the body as an object that is ‘defined by its weight, mass, and scale in relationship to the other things surrounding her’ (Spivey, 2009, 15).
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Steve Paxton’s piece ‘Magnesium’ (1972) and Blake Nelis and Brando piece (2010), are completely different from one another and shows how much CI has changed. Paxton’s piece showed people rolling, colliding, and falling on each other and not having any sense of safety, and hoping for the best. Whereas Nelis and Brando’s piece, has more of a relationship with one another and sharing responsibility of giving and receiving weight. CI now is more about exploring movement in numerous ways, instead of simple touching.
At the start of each exercise there was a struggle of how to move and not to think about it too much. In some cases, this did happen however, the more experimentation done, the easier the exercises became. Releasing our heads and letting them lead to create movement was difficult. I struggled to relax my head at the beginning, however by the end I was relaxed. With both laying down and moving exercises I had two different experiences with my eyes open and with them closed. With my eyes open I was distracted and felt like people were watching even if they were not. With my eyes closed I felt relaxed and not under pressure of being judged. I trusted my partner throughout, it just did not feel natural to give my head weight to someone’s hands.
When moving on the floor I imagined my head was a magnet, and I feel like this helped me release my head into the floor. At first, I felt restricted and only moved my legs, arms and moved side to side. When I knew I could do nothing else I started to think about; different levels and how much of my body can I get on the floor, and what part of my head can touch the floor that would not normally. After, I noticed that I was creating new movement and was not thinking of what and how my body is moving. From my own experience and hearing people’s feedback I could tell everyone was thinking too much. I was thinking about not losing connection with the other persons head, that I forgot about the rest of my body. Once myself and my partner had gotten to our feet, we did not know how to move and just stood there. Moving on the floor was easier but our movement was still limited, slow and awkward. I was thinking more with what can we do with our heads, than the head is just the connection of two bodies.
To me, touch before weight transfer is the foundation of trust. This statement needed to be in mind for the pebble and table top rolling and the headstand over the table top exercises. If the movement was not controlled and the weight was just given, I know that myself and my partner would get injured. I also think that the point of contact prepares you for the weight transfer. Normally I end up working with the same people, although I ended up working with Laura, which was a nice change. I was nervous at first but that soon disappeared. Due to concentrating on connecting and listening to the other person’s body and relaxing everything, I forgot about that I had never worked with Laura before because we worked so well together. By the end of the task I was comfortable and now feel more confident to work with someone new each week.
Brando, A. (2010) Contact Improvisation: Blake Nellis & Brando @ Earthdance.
. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQRF2sLK1vY [Accessed 15 October 2017].
DRJ. (2015) Simone Forti interview. Choreographic Practices. [accessed 15 October 2017].
Spivey, V. (2009) The Minimal Presence of Simone Forti. Woman’s Art Journal. [accessed 15 October 2017].
Tumasia. (2010) Fall after newton 1 .
. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k768K_OTePM&=&t=300s [accessed 15 October 2017].
Turner, R. (2010) Steve Paxton Interior Techniques: Contact Improvisation and the Political Power. TDR: The Drama Review, 54 (3) 123-135.