“An Intimate Dance”

For me, Contact Improvisation as a dance form isn’t concerned with how it looks to move — en pointe, arabesque, step step turn! — but how it feels to move. It is not about the surfaces of the body in movement, but the spirit that moves the body, as though under the skin and behind the ribs you could watch the heart beating toward and away, opening and closing, rising and falling to the earth, while the limbs and the torso follow that sprite where its delight might take it.

It is spirit in motion, where the spirit’s mirror… mirror that helps you recognize your inner-outline, know its form and tendencies, its likes and dislikes… where the spirit’s mirror is your dance partner, whether that partner is the earth and your relationship to it; or another dancer in duet, another moving spirit whose vocabulary of touch and history bring words to a shared narrative, telling a ten-minute story, sweet beginning to sweet end (it reads You, and writes Other, and is simply You Together); or many moving spirits in the same place, with whom you are interacting, touching or not, pulled by mutual gravity or not, yet occupying the same space and connected beneath the surface, like ocean currents.

CI favors the sense of touch over the sense of sight, and one witnessing a performance would be reliving (or living into) the possibilities of connection that are always there, waiting to be expressed, and once expressed, experienced. Just as in meditation seeing can get in the way of being, so too with this intimate dance.

The courage of the CI dancer begins with an intimacy of surfaces, and deepens as those surfaces become transparent, and the self is bared, clearer and cleaner, becoming more vulnerable yet stronger, more embodied in this tiny shell we temporarily call home, beautifully accompanied.

Learn more:
ContactImprov.com
ContactImprov.net
Contact Improv Facebook Page
Contact Improv: An Intimate Dance (movie)