Contact Improv and Health, Aging

    When asked about interest in engaging with someone documenting "communities that age well", I wrote this to introduce my perspective. Short version: I practice CI because it feels good, but suspect that it's also good for me.

    I practice contact improv because it feels good, but I also have a deep sense that it's good for me.

    I like to say that the practice is "an antidote to the static of everyday life". It's a (maybe) cute way of saying an opportunity for full-body activity that ranges widely across all dimensions – vigor, pace, range of motion, and, hardest to pinpoint concretely, mental challenge.

    In recent time the rich challenges of improvisation are coming to be seen as particularly mentally vitalizing. Studies have tended to focus particularly on musical improvisation, so I don't know how that applies to movement improv. However, my experience with the vast range of dynamics and qualities I encounter in dancing with various people, and the intensity of the engaging challenges in rolling with and inhabiting the differences, all suggest to me that CI has the potential for similarly multi-dimensional stimulation as musical and theater improvisation. Plus CI involves compelling stakes of full-body involvement, often demanding acute attention and alacrity.

    In my occasional experiences conducting ensemble and contact improvisation lessons with elderly people, practicing creative movement (when framed well) is immediately both vitalizing and liberating. Being so engaging enables more practice, resulting in a virtuous cycle.

    Likewise my experiences finding ways to recover well from my own injuries - the practice offers uncommon opportunities to find a good balance and range of activity to help recovery. It depends on discerning in recovery how much pushing is too little, enough, or too much, as all exercise does, but it offers many opportunities to calibrate that.

    Ultimately, it's the combination of extraordinary range and depth of opportunities to explore and experiment with movement and cooperation that offers an unusual potential for supporting wellness in general, with the uniquely open-ended way the practice is organized avoiding the kinds of constraints that many other physical practices inherently involve.