What Contact Improvisation Does

At various points in CI's history practitioners have tried to define the practice in order to clarify what we're doing. No definition has stuck. I believe that’s because what’s essential is what you can learn through participating, and that is not conveyed by definitions. Furthermore, what you see when people are doing CI often doesn’t convey this way of organizing yourself. It involves particular ways to tune in and engage. Guidance can help you organize your participation to foster discovery, but what you discover is as personal as what you learn in order to walk or ride a bike or swim.

Why is this important?

You could call anything that involves people moving together "contact improv", and in a way that's true. Contact improv can be involved in many sorts of movement cooperation. However, just moving in contact with someone doesn't necessarily convey what's essential. In order to have a real opportunity to get a feel for it, how you try CI matters.

For instance, many are inspired by seeing the dynamic support that adept contact improvisers provide to each other. It's common for those inspired to try it to use muscular lifting to do what they think they saw, but muscular lifting generally isn't what works well. (Think instead of "offering rides" rather than "lifting".) While guidance about how to do particular things, like "offering rides", is useful, that's like giving a person a fish rather than teaching them to fish. Those of us who want to foster opportunities for others to enjoy CI need to identify what's useful more fundamentally than the difference between, for instance, offering rides and lifting.

I suppose that attempts to come up with a definition of CI have been motivated this urge to clarify what's essential. My premise is that those attempts have not been fruitful because what needs to be conveyed is not what contact improv is, but rather what it does. I believe that the most guidance we can offer is how to participate in a way that invites what the practice teaches. I'm writing this essay is to frame this premise and to suggest where the foundation of such guidance might be found.

The Framework

• Partners mutually follow shared points of contact, investing their balance in the shared points. In this way they mutually invest themselves in shared equilibrium to move in close correspondence.

• They each continually make choices about how they align with what is happening, going with what works for them and not going with what doesn’t.

• As each partner does this they are modulating their choices in response to choices of their partner and their shared situation. They establish mutual feedback in response to each other and the developing situation.

This framework doesn’t prescribe movement patterns, pace, rhythms, postures, or anything like that. You continually arrive at particular dynamics as you discover what works in this way of organizing your participation - investing shared balance in mutually following shared points of contact – and what fits for each in the moment. Once you get a feel for it you can bring this way of cooperating to quite different situations, including moving with someone without being in physical contact or moving on your own. The framework is conducive to getting a feel for it. This is what I mean by "what contact improv does".

Opportunities to Learn to Not Clash

In many partner practices the partners are guided by movement patterns or techniques by which the partners movements mesh. In partner dance it's patterns like steps, rhythms, postures, and roles. In martial arts and sports it's techniques for achieving goals, cooperating with allies, and contending with opponents. By contrast, in contact improv you have mutual following of shared contact points instead of prescribed patterns and techniques. Practicing that gives partners opportunities to learn to make choices about how they follow the contact points that don’t clash with the choices that their partners are making, simply for the pragmatics of moving together. CI people come to identify patterns and techniques, and they are useful, but only in so far as they don't get in the way of continuing to follow the contact points. (They can be mistaken for "the form" and actually get in the way.)

(Learning to participate well in CI can be as much about learning to not do what's extraneous as about discovering what fits. The usefulness of "doing less" has been an important lesson for me – one which carries over to many other domains and which I seem to never be done learning...)

Mutual following means any response is quickly felt by all, in turn leading to further responses and so on – "co-responding". The line between responses can blur and even disappear. The art and opportunity is learning to inhabit this immediate correspondence to maneuver together – to cooperate while maintaining clarity about your own concerns (differentiation of self).

Time and attention – practice – allows for increasingly arriving at choices that don't clash.

• You have each brought your attention to the shared situation. With experience you get a feeling for how your choices and those of your partners work (and don't work) in similar situations, and can increasingly get a sense of choices that work well, are harmonious.

• The immediacy and thoroughness of attunement can lead to moments where it feels like the collaboration in which you're participating is making choices that suit you.

• It's not magic. You have the opportunity to make harmonious choices because your mutual participation brings your simultaneous attention to the shared situation.

• It is co-creation. Your responses can become so interwoven that neither and both of you are steering.

The cooperation can change at each moment in small and big ways as either partner's state and choices change.

Not Using Patterns Has Challenges and Opportunities

Like contact improv, partner dance forms in general lead to interacting harmoniously. Unlike CI, most others are organized using patterns like steps, postures, rhythms, leader/follower roles, and so on. These patterns provide movement frameworks within which partners can cooperate closely enough so that things "click" – so they can get a feel for making harmonious choices in the moment. This mutuality gives them freedom to play within the bounds of the form – opportunities for distinctive style and improvisation within and to some degree with the form’s patterns.

Instead of using patterns, contact improv is organized around mutually following points of contact. You gain freedom in your choices by not having to stick to patterns, but you face the challenge of discovering what works without patterns to guide you. Nobody can tell you what works because each choice is situation-specific, depending on the intricate circumstances of the moment. So there’s no formula to guide you but there are ways to participate that are conducive to discovering what works.

• Just following the points of contact can seem insufficient. "Don't I need to make something happen?" But it actually is useful to just notice and follow what’s happening with the contact points. The more that you do extra stuff, the more complicated the situation becomes, compounded because you're both following. Instead of looking for more stuff to do, there's movement to follow even when you're supposedly still. (Steve Paxton elegantly describes this way of discovery in The initiation of contact improvisation for me.) Those small movements are subtle effects of you and your partner's physical organization and choices – they're significant. Mutual following amplifies small movements so there's plenty that's significant to engage with if you both just do the basic thing – follow the points of contact. This takes attention and patience. It's an opportunity to more fully organize yourself with someone else.
• You can also wonder, "I thought this is a creative practice. If I'm just following, when do I get to be creative?" This is a creative practice, but one specifically organized to be creative with someone else. Your creativity manifests in how you follow, informed by you and your partner and the pragmatics of following.
• The pragmatics of mutual following are not trivial. It's not simple to follow the contact points, maneuvering with another person while respecting both of your immediate concerns in order to keep your movement practical and safe. Investing your balance in the contact points helps you tune in and recruits your full involvement.  All of this can be challenging, and rewarding.
• You continuously have the opportunity to choose how you follow. Often there's no single right way, and often you can bring a different quality to any choice that fits. That will inform the character and development of the collaboration, as will your partner’s choices. There's opportunity to play on the shared ground that you find, provided you can learn to establish that shared ground. That's the art and skill.

As you get how to tune in and correspond in the basic practice you can stretch the correspondence across a distance and more generally bring all sorts of inspirations and whims into a dance – provided you have a feel for what can fit the moment. The essential framework described above is contact improvisation's basis for getting that feel.

You Can't Force It

How and the extent to which you don't clash develops depends on each partner and their combination. Making harmonious choices is not something you control. However, you can learn to cultivate and be ready for it.

• Cooperation doesn’t depend on just you!
• It depends on you, but not only you.
• You can't make coordination happen, but you can cultivate the opportunity and readiness to be in it.

• It takes attention to arrive at this shared presence.
• The conditions and ability are developed through mutual organization and exploration, not just the decision to be able to do it.

• Supposing you can get there just by deciding to do what you see others are doing is like supposing you can ride a bike just from seeing someone ride a bike (or surf, or swim, ...)

• Contact improv has great potential for complexity! One way to look at it is as a kind of surfing in which you're surfing another person who is simultaneously surfing you. What you learn from practice keeps it from getting chaotic.

• Continuously making your own choices about how you participate is an intrinsic part of the process at every level.
• It is a kind of continuous consent process.
• In this way, "consent" doesn't just mean whether or not you choose to participate. You continuously choose how you participate, as the dance is changing and you are changing. Slower, faster, closer, further, every aspect is subject to changing negotiation.

• It is specifically when both partners refrain from controlling each other that they can discover how to make choices that serve them and their cooperation with their partner.
• A controlled partner loses the opportunity to be a full and equal partner.
• When anyone is controlling the other, both partners sacrifice the opportunity to explore fully mutual cooperation.

• This way of corresponding so closely without imposing control or being controlled is unusual. It can take time to drop accustomed habits.

• This practice is an opportunity to learn to cooperate without imposing control over each other.

• Being clear about these principles can also provide a basis for recognizing rare individuals who are not practicing in good faith, because in this context controlling behavior is incongruous and counterproductive.

• It serves us all to prohibit bad-faith participation when we recognize it.

The Framework is Part, Not A Definition Nor the Whole Practice

As I said above, this is not a definition of CI. Instead, "sharing balance through mutually followed points of contact" establishes conditions for partners to explore and discover what does and doesn’t work in this way to cooperate.

Just as no definition of riding a bike will convey "how" to someone unfamiliar with bike riding, likewise, being told how to do CI will not lead to what you can learn from tuning in and actually exploring. Then you can discover what works. Similarly, trying to do what you see when people practice CI will not work well without tuning in and developing a feel for what works.

Everyone choosing how they follow and no one leading is an unusual way to interact! Resisting the temptation to lead can be challenging, even for those who are experienced, but refraining from leading establishes the opportunity for extraordinary mutuality. The practice of investing your balance can also be elusive and challenging. It's like diving from a diving board – it involves a commitment to something that seems irreversible. Once you find your way in, though, you may discover how supportive and connecting it can be.

Once you have a feel for corresponding in CI you can find a lot of latitude in how you engage. You can practice across a distance, or on your own, or with someone who does not have a feel for it. You can even deliberately make choices that clash with those of your partner – at some point the readiness and sense of mutuality you learn can make surprises inspiring. (There can be a fine line between inspiration and discord, though, so this would probably be considered advanced territory. (-: ) The basic framework provides opportunities to get that feel – "what Contact Improv does".

Introductory Exercises

These three partner exercises provide a progression introducing mutual following, sharing balance, and then combining them for full engagement in contact improv:

1. The Finger Dance: A virtually idealized introduction to mutually following points of contact.

2. Slight Counterbalance: A gradual introduction to sharing balance.

3. Rising and Descending Together: A combination of mutual following with shared balance to explore moving through "spherical" space together.

(Here's a simple way to arrange the partner selection process so it's easy for participants to try these exercises with various partners.)