What Contact Improvisation Does

An improvised practice like contact improvisation (CI) offers the opportunity to learn and explore mutual cooperation. Learning it is quite different than learning more conventionally structured practices like partner dance and martial arts because, unlike those practices, it isn't organized around predefined patterns. Not being organized around patterns, telling people what contact improv is doesn't convey how to do it, just as describing riding a bicycle doesn't tell someone how to do that. Instead of patterns we can offer guidance about how to participate in a way that is receptive to what the practice teaches. In the bike-riding analogy, that would be guidance that provides opportunities to intuitively learn to keep finding your balance. This paradigm holds for any kind of activity where you're navigating continuously varying circumstances, like bike riding, surfing, even walking; and contact improv. In these kinds of activities, you learn through receptive practice what the activity teaches.

Many of us find that principles which work well in CI apply to learning any kind of mutual cooperation, and are worth describing.

The Challenge

Unlike many kinds of partner dance, contact improv (CI) is not organized around predefined patterns like step sequences, constant rhythms, set postures, distinct roles, and so on. Further, what people typically notice when they see people practice CI often doesn’t convey what the participants are discovering. What you discover is as personal as what you learn in order to walk or ride a bike or swim.

Complicating matters, you could call anything that involves people moving in close cooperation "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 helps get a feel for it. How you explore CI matters.

CI practitioners have often been tempted to try to clarify what we do by defining the practice. No definition has stuck. I suggest that what’s essential is what you can learn through participating, and that is not conveyed by definitions. We can illuminate how to participate in receptive ways, and that also is not conveyed by definitions.

For instance, many are inspired by seeing the dynamic support that contact improvisers familiar with the practice 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 and finding 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.

What, then, can those eager to help others learn CI do? We can provide guidance on how to participate.

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 your balance in mutually following shared points of contact – and what fits for you with your partner in the moment. Once you get a feel for it you can bring this way of cooperating to quite different situations, including not just moving with others but also 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. CI practitioners come to identify patterns and techniques, and they can be useful but only in so far as they don't get in the way of continuing to follow what's actually happening in the moment.

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, so you can do what you're doing increasingly closely with your partners.

Being With

"Learning to not clash" is another way of saying "learning to cooperate". The framework challenges you with engagement that is immediate and thorough. You are moving together, and need to find what works from moment to moment.

• You have each brought your attention to a 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 that develops can lead to it seeming like the combination of you and your partners, rather than any individual, 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 the distinction between leading and following is not useful. You are navigating together.

• It changes as your state and that of your partners constinuously changes.

Discovering how to cooperate in this way brings a sense of shared presence.

If "presence" is being vitally engaged in any moment, "shared presence" is mutual awareness. It is experience that closely corresponds with that of your partner.

Shared presence while singing can lead to harmony, counterpoint, unison, all sorts of interactions in which your voices are part of a coherent composition. That kind of coherence can happen in many kinds of shared activities. The modality of the activity – sound, texture, motion, ideas – might vary, but the experience of being part of something with others can feel similar.

In contact improv, this experience of shared presence serves and supports shared agency.

While "presence" is being vitally engaged in any moment, "agency" is the ability to choose your actions in each moment. Shared agency is cooperating closely enough with others that together you approach the immediacy and depth that can happen when cooperating with oneself. As the negotiation between becomes so immediate and attuned you can experience mutual agency, informed by the concerns and choices of each of you.

Note that shared agency doesn't involve disregarding one's own concerns. To the contrary, the vitality – the safety, depth of engagement, wisdom – of the collaboration depends on everyone involved continuing to respect and represent their own concerns in their choices and actions. It depends on each bringing their full selves to the collaboration. That is the challenge and opportunity of this kind of practice.

Like any practice that fosters sharing presence and agency, it is a counterpoint to alienation from each other and from ourselves.

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 for the opportunity to be creative with someone else. Your part in the mutual creativity is informed by you and your partner's choices about how you follow.
  
• 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.
• Often there's no single right way to follow, and often you can bring a different quality to any choice that fits. (Sometimes not following is the choice that fits for you.) 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.

• It depends on you, but not only you.
• So you can't make coordination happen, but you can cultivate the opportunity and readiness to be in it.

• 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, and likewise for swimming or surfing or any learned practice. You can learn from seeing someone do it, but you need to get the feel for it, which often is quite different than just imitating the actions you see.

• 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.

• 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 choices and ongoing negotiation.
• Negotiation and cooperation can converge without sacrificing your sense of self and personal agency. It depends on it to fully realize what's possible.

• It is an opportunity to learn to cooperate as a peer, rather than by controlling or being controlled.
• A controlled partner loses the opportunity to be a full and equal partner. Both partners sacrifice the opportunity to explore and learn fully mutual cooperation.
• Mutual cooperation informs and is informed by cooperation with oneself. You learn to cooperate with yourself by learning to mutually cooperate with others, and vice versa.

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

As I said above, this is not a definition of CI. It is an avenue for exploration and discovery. 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 a particular 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 nearly 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.)