Category: Personal

A little more about Contact Improvisation

There’s a myth in the Contact Improv community that you should dance the same way with everybody. That if you’re a good loving contacter, you dance the same way with everybody, and you love dancing with everybody the same. I’ve been doing Contact Improvisation for 15 years, and have studied with some wonderful teachers – including Nancy Stark Smith, Anne Cooper Albright, Andrew Harwood… – and it’s absolutely clear to me that we all dance differently with one another.

The Contact community is open, and caring. Closing doors to connection is not encouraged. But I have seen the most generous dancers exert clear control over the depth of connection in a dance. They don’t close the door, but they know not to fling it wide open with every dance either. That’s something that many amateurs can not perceive at first.

We are all capable of being truly sensitive to ourselves and others at the same time. But you can’t control other people. If you find yourself dancing with someone who is not really being sensitive to you – what can you do? What should you do?

If I feel like I’m having a dance with someone who is not present with me, I get more distant. And I have developed a variety of physical skills to create slight distances. (I’ll be teaching some exercises to develop those skills this weekend.) If I try to take some distance and they don’t let me – they are unresponsive to me – I know to push a little further away, and create as much distance as I need until I find myself in a dance I am comfortable with.

The class I’m teaching this Saturday at Artomatic will introduce some exercises focusing on control of our boundaries, and the edges of contact. I hope you’ll join me. Saturday, 2-3:30pm on the 6th floor dance stage at Artomatic. I’ve designed this class to be friendly for beginners, but hopefully of interest to those with experience, too.

Contact dance is intimate. It is built around following a point of contact on someone else’s body, with a point on your body. But the release and flow of improvisation do not negate the need to be able to make choices. This class will allow us to practice some options for dance connections.

The video here is a nice example of Contact dance. I see in it how partners follow the point of contact as a guide to following each other’s energy.

Art and Science

book-cover

The last few days Ive been working on a series of blog posts for OvationTv.Com. Theyve got me framing some really interesting video clips related to Bill Iveys new book, Arts, Inc. The book raises some excellent questions about how we understand art.

At the same time, Ive been celebrating publication of my book. (For some excerpts find the Somatic Ecology page on Facebook.) I got a copy in the mail from the publisher today, and found a footnote in my presentation of the Galileo material that I always really liked. The quotation in the footnote is from Galileos father, who was a professional musician. For me his thoughts highlight that Science and Art share an ethos of clarity.

The sentence in the book is, “Galileo, who would spend his entire lifetime fighting for objectivity, was born to a family which supported questioning and intellectual rigor over faith in tradition.” The footnote is:

“Galileos father in particular clearly influenced his intellectual bent. Consider the following from his fathers Dialogue of Ancient and Modern Music which was published at the time that Galileo was in University. It appears to me that they, who in proof of any assertion rely simply on the weight of authority, without adducing any argument in support of it, act very absurdly. I on the contrary, wish to be allowed freely to question and freely to answer you without any sort of adulation as well becomes those who are in search of truth. [in Fermi, Laura and Bernardini, Gilberto Galileo and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1961) 8]”

You sorta gotta understand the stranglehold that Artistotelian philosophy had on the science of the period to really appreciate the quote, but trust that his attitude was not common.

More another time, perhaps, on connections between art and science.

Control is a community managed resource

There are times of quiet grace, peace, and joy in all of our lives. For me: times sitting on a dock, or enjoying a meal. But there are also, for all of us, times of pain, suffering, and desperation. Not to make a joke of it, but I think of the saying, “Life: No one gets out alive.”

About two weeks ago I posted as my Facebook status, “Control is over-rated: Discuss.” I got some very interesting comments. I think the positivity of control is largely an issue of balance. I wrote something similar about Pride a few weeks ago, which you can see here. Im a big fan of E.B. White, who once wrote a version of a psalm in saying,

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

When I hear and see pain in the world Im always brought to the moment with that feeling White describes. What should I be doing about this? I experienced that tension vibrantly the other day. I met a new friend and colleague for a very enjoyable lunch. We sat outside. As I was stuffing my mouth with my first big bite – and I do mean, like, stuffing my mouth – a homeless person walked by and asked for change. Im mumbling a denial of money for food as Im stuffing my face with a really delicious salad.

I wrote in an earlier post about how money buys you isolation. It buys you distance from many of the pains that people without money go through. That does not negate the pains that we all have. But we all do not share the same amount of control. For some reason it seems that those with more control should (and I mean this morally) try to give some of that control to the people with less of it. Gloriously, lots of people with greater control have been with that project for some time.

There are sad, internal times in all our lives. A friends mother is suffering from cancer. I can see what that feels like. And there is no way to control it. It is like flying in a helicopter upside down. We control each other so little, and influence each other so very much. This is a lot of thoughts for one post. I’ll end with this possibility: The less control you have, the simpler things are. Control is a complication managed by our collective humanity.

I don’t want to pollute this idealistic post with the crass realism of the real world. But that is in fact where we all live. It’s because of the project I’m working on that I’ve been thinking about control. Dylan Thomas created these characters who are good, and bad, and who all influence one another. In the preface to my book (out in two weeks!) I quote Albert Einstein who said that we should seek the simplest solutions and not simpler. I believe that understanding control as a community managed resource can help us negotiate sharing of our capacity to influence each other toward the good.