After Contact Improvisation

13.3.2010, 11.30-1.30 After Contact Improvisation Class With Irmela Stone, Moving East


We are doing things today about contact-pressure; moving and pressing into the floor, then using this as the impulse-impetus to push outwards and continue flowing across and into the space surrounding- this kind of slow motion catapult rebound becomes a pulsing of the body open and closed like a star-fish that yawns and snaps shut and then yawns some more reconfiguring by using the edge of one extreme to re-set and continue the pulse.

This is both ones' own configuring against surfaces and the interchange where human to human surfaces meet. For as one moves and leans into the patterns that this implies and lingers in those pauses there are meetings so that surfaces and spans of body present themselves into conjunctions or axis points, like the hinge of a door that swings and flaps loosely but is secured at one point. That point is where counter directions meet. They continue moving through and past one another and because this counter-balance is strong bothways, there is a turn or a swivel and the mass of bodies flow around that axis before spinning outwards. Space in a sense is made by these bursts of pattern that come from a sudden constraint. There is a softening into that as if pockets of air were being filled with liquid and then the structural leverage that is made out of this complete and sudden filling created a volition outwards, a tilt or back-flow

We devise the space of our movement out of the pressure-release of this going into and working off against the surfaces that we are always involved in whether in walking, rolling or melting against the floor or in testing out and sometimes lingering in connection with another person where there are smaller and smaller portions of our bodies that piecemeal are matched and separated until the very graininess of that process has an intelligence of its own and works to complete, augment or suspend any impulse. We constantly reconfigure.

We articulate shapes out of these journeys that are a complex mix of giving way and holding firm. We play through the security of this central knot that is intended rather than actualized. We work on and off from this compelling centre; on and off the rhythm in order to perturb and to fall off again from that support that is no longer static but always in certain displacement.

These small pressure-releases are a patterning - some kind of inner ridge like the grooves on the palm of a hand that is complex and feels out more and more complexity as it goes along. It stands for everything we do, going from here to there, motioning and communicating in countless ways but it can't be known or even exist outside of the small on-going adjustments made between one and another. It is the interval that holds the message. Whether in the tight airless fit of two bodies moving back to back or in the space and distances across a room, a street, a city, a life-time where people meet and separate with a capacity both to remember and to forget one another.

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* In "Death Row" where people are chained by their hands and feet when receiving a visit, one hand is always unshackled because it is recognized even here that the free movement of the hand and its' felt sensation even against the smooth dividing glass of a barrier where one hand matches the other, is vital in human to human communication.

Pressure-contact can be the key to initiating gesture, movement, visualization, dialogue. I have noticed this with certain autistic people. They can be in one state where there is a sense of being anaesthetized and not in a position to respond physically to on-going occurrences. Then that same person through a period of rest and through gradually making small, localized physical alignments through listening, observation, doing and repetition can begin to reach into a different state of energetic operation. At the garden sculpture project the very act of lifting and placing bricks was a way for some people of having this intense listening contact where the hand enfolded the rough texture of the brick and "read" it bringing that person into a questioning contact that created a feedback loop. Where body tone was initially flaccid or rigid this procedural contact was at times one way to unwrap a sense of being in the world. More spontaneous interaction gradually reinstated as if there had been a re-circulation or redistribution of the parts of the body.

Can pressure-release create the compression-expansion that conjures up a diagram out of the energetic extremes of falling and lifting and that can hone an ability to focus as a kind of touching? How can touch sensitivity become a tool for movement, thought and feeling in its broadest sense? Is that what spatial awareness is? I believe that other forms of gestural and verbal communication are only possible on the back of this sensing, imagining, moving accommodation. The backdrop to any shared presence is these silent and initially personal pressure experiments.

These small investigations are important for everything that then becomes possible and that may look or be categorized as a very different kind of behavior. Between autistic experimentation of surface and weight and creative expression/contact as performance there is a link. Trace that link by following through the small things of interest that we do as they are happening and as we are experiencing them to see what that generates and to stay with what we have in common. I think Contact Dancers know these things.