Contact Improvisation: Partnering Yourself, Partnering Others
Course Description
Summary
Contact improvisation is an American movement form that uses sustained physical touch to create a dance with a partner. According to founding practitioner Nancy Stark Smith, contact improvisation "resembles other familiar duet forms, such as the embrace, wrestling, surfing, martial arts, and the Jitterbug, encompassing a wide range of movement from stillness to highly athletic.”
In this class, we will navigate the possibilities of proximity and touch while allowing gravity, momentum, inertia, and friction to shape our interactions. We will learn internal strategies to orient ourselves to space and to each other. We will explore duet skills such as rolling, falling, spiraling, lifting, balancing, and counterbalancing. The class will emphasize breath, alignment, and presence to sensitize ourselves to the freedoms and constraints when working in community.
In the words of scholar and dancer Danielle Goldman, “Improvised dance literally involves giving shape to oneself and deciding how to move in relation to an unsteady landscape. To go about this endeavor with a sense of confidence and possibility is a powerful way to inhabit one’s body and interact with the world.” We will orient towards possibility by composing together in the moment.
The class will regularly involve continuous physical touch between dancers.
Learning Outcomes
- build dynamic familiarity of one's weight, mass, skeletal structure, and position
- explore non-verbal communication through the various textures and tones of touch
- generate strength to support another body
- gain spatial awareness to move through disorientation
- develop language (both verbal and non) to communicate bodily needs
Prerequisites
This class is open to students with prior dance and improvisation experience.
Please contact the faculty member : londsreuter1@bennington.edu