Contact Improvisation - Practice and Theory

Practice and Theory

Contact Improvisation (also referred to as "Contact" or "CI") is a 39-year old dance form, practiced as both a concert and social dance form. In the performance context, Contact Improvisation is used either as a dance practice end-to-itself or as a dance research method for identifying new set choreography. Weekly meetings of practitioners that take place world-wide are called "jams," in which participants participate and watch as they choose over the course of 2-4 hours. Dancers practice both known CI technique and conduct new dance research with different partners or groupings over the course of a Jam session. The name "Jam" is used in keeping with its use by contemporary musicians, who come together to spontaneously explore musical forms and ideas, with some group agreement about structure and duration of the exploration. While there is now an established CI Fundamentals technique, CI dance vocabulary is not closed, so all who practice the form contribute to the constant expansion and greater understanding of the dance form's vocabulary, which is exchanged and taught among practictioners world-wide via regional jams, classes, week-long festivals, both print and online publications and, since its inception, via video in a process of dancing/watching/refining. While CI dancers usually stay touching or in physical contact for much of a dance, a CI dance can occur in which partners never touch yet there is a clear "listening" and energetic connection/intention that creates the "contact" of their shared dance. CI practitioners may also draw on other Somatics and New Dance approaches such as:

• 5Rhythms
• Action Theater
• Alexander Technique
• Acrobatics
• Acroyoga
• Adagio
• Body-Mind Centering
• Cognitive science
• Emergence
• Feldenkrais method
• Eutony
• Gymnastics
• Ideokinesis
• Kinetic Awareness
• Laban Movement Analysis
• martial arts, especially Aikido, T'ai chi ch'uan and capoeira
• Newton's laws of motion
• Parkour
• Skinner Releasing Technique
• Tango
• Yoga

When used as a choreographic technique, movement sequences that emerge during Jam research or rehearsals may be adapted and set to form a part of set choreography, or a score (a set of rules or limiting factors and transitions) may be employed to give dancers a structure to navigate through a performance. CI Scores can have few or many rules, (less rules are referred to as more "open" scores, more rules or closer to set choreography are more "closed" scores).