Touch-the body moving- spatial possibilities: Contact Dance

 19.3.2010 9.pm

The moving body. The on-off touch becomes a rolling point of contact in Contact Dance Improvisation. The jointing occurs differently placed each time. Contact dance can be done with another human body or it can be done as a rolling point of contact with any surface or limitation- where a portion of skin makes contact with the floor, a table top, a wall, an object, where it turns around that newly formed sticking point or pivot to re-angle into a differently placed area of connection. The "contact" could be the delimitation in space where one sweep of movement ends having reached the limit of that particular reaching or, like the boy on the tricycle, becomes the feeling affect of a particular imagined obstruction around which a certain momentum can be converted into a spin, a holding or a reversal. The same goes for the attention span of an autistic person; the musical architecture is crafted out of those stoppages - those areas where maximum velocity is suddenly cut into a downward turn- a contrasting state. The contours of a space begin to form around these blink points or tics. Repetition staggering a certain cohesion in one state to break and offer up a multiplicity of re-routings. Like in pruning a plant, the on-off -touch which is the cut creates the stimulus for growth in a new direction- the articulation forms out of such brutal or subtle negations. (Akinobu Kishi has shown this in Seiki where he works on the Off part of contact more than the On part to give space and time for response rather than fixing problems by doing things to the body).

Steve Paxton in a YouTube interview from the mid- nineties talks about the conical spiral shaping of space that occurs with a rolling point of contact because each new outgrowth becomes or has a possibility to become multi-directional. There is a capacity for movement along any given angle that then cuts out and is bent like a stick in water along a new-found angle. A multi-dimensional geometry that Contact Dance enacts though one affect after another. That is different from the widening angle of lateral and vertical planes that meets at the figure as the central seeing subject and then pinches shut as the distance perspective lengthens according to conventional western pictorial theory where objects are placed. That theory is bound upon an upright body mass that moves in a vertical plane across a given expanse according to pre-formatted measurable distances.

When the body is a tumbling mass that is powered according to the reverse affects of numerous points of contact, space is enacted in that movement as spontaneous meetings that are continuously crafted. Contact Dance was greatly inspired by Aikido whose manner of dealing with attack is to use these forces of attraction as opportunities for contact to roll, bounce and pivot off in order to craft a pattern of movement tendencies. Those tendencies end up describing a spiral that eventually takes an attacker down into a tumbling, rolling mass where the centre is spun out and dissipated back into the space from which it was gathered.

Shiatsu whether it works in tandem with a moving body or a still body, addresses this rolling cylinder of spherical space that describes a moving body rather than the mass of its stationary parts just as a moving body brings such a spherical worlding into a presencing. This shape is recuperative because any point of contact will begin to pattern out a complex whole as one point of response leading to another. In that sense a resonance begins to build back up from the slightest of touches when that touch is sensitively placed within a wider set of relatedness. Even in stillness that pattern inferred or manifest becomes a diagram of a moving articulating body. The points on the body that are touched become the jointings through which that stimulus of giving and making space begins to take shape.

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This is interesting stuff but more needs to be done on what makes an emotional body. How does enaction relate to relating? Particularly looking at the tempo, timing, mythical shapes, languaging of people with Special Needs.

Sensory limits, neurological limits like physical limits craft certain kinds of imagery and sound typologies and how that configures certain empathies. A certain way of being human. A way of emotioning. Are there certain tempos, resonances, and shapings that become immersed, and so occluded in the spacing of more standardized tempos and the physical, sensory, neurological limits through which those emotional and cognitive states are implied and enacted? Are there patterns within patterns only some of which are grasped in any consensus as useable, historical, shared material? What is at the borders of that conscious pre-selection that may be more common to us all though not always openly acknowledged? How do we deal with that material at the edge in day to day life? When and how does it become useful, useable? Under what conditions is entropy converted back into energy?