Learning Contact Improvisation
Neighboring pages...
Contained pages...
Explaining how to do CI is like explaining how to walk or swim or surf or ride a bike – these kinds of things are learned by doing. However, you can get hints about how to participate – to tune in and engage – in a way that invites what the practice teaches.
Contact improv is organized differently than most partner dance, as a kind of game: mutually following shared points of contact? Like walking or riding a bike, you learn to do it by exploring it. However, experience can reveal hints about how to explore in a way that make it easier to discover what works.
In the connected pages I share ways to engage that I find useful. Here are the fundamental ones:
- Approach contact improv as a verb: What Contact Improvisation Does.
- The finger dance focuses on the essence of mutual following.
- Slight counterbalance and rising and descending together bring that mutuality to the whole body.
- Sharing "upness" builds on those layers for continuously connected movement with others in all directions – moving together through spherical space.