In ‘Body, remember…’ Cavafy (107) poeticizes the idea that memory originates in the body. To recover the body’s primordial memory Contact Improvisation focuses inwardly enabling a return to the familiar made unfamiliar: the body as a bio-mechanical enactor of movement with its inherent pathos.
To the Wagnerian distinction between light and sound CI adds the touch world in which us in duet, in alliance with the floor, became the composers of our ‘musique concrète’: an intimate chamber play of ‘found’ movement made proprioceptively, i.e. perceiving our positioning-moving through an experiential dialogue where feeling was investigative through the skin-bone-flesh sensitivity animated by breath. Permeating the whole body by stripping stylized illusionist accretions, touch became the connective tissue, a deep generative structure calibrating movement using anatomy/weight; psoas muscle released and tailbone unlocked, for example, a lever is created with the pelvis triangle pushed up, maintaining an erect torso/head configuration, a contact platform formed for the partner on top, then compressing/supporting her with one hand, her free hip rotating up across my body until standing. The entire range of touch in this sequence directs the bodily reflexes through an instantaneously randomized interplay of give-and-take of gravity, release and momentum, strength and vulnerability. Touch impulsing a body area enables my partner to respond by opening this area up towards the impulse pathway. Touch opened up multiple sensory avenues framing the flickering image/motion and subverting it as fast as it was projected as in the back-to-back, head-to-head, hip-to-shoulder pathways, with cubist-like shapes spontaneously formed by our bodies creating a shifting figure-drawing in dance. The juxtaposition/simultaneity/interdependency of impulses/responses exchanged in time/space felt open-ended, free-associative. Peregrination and circularity driving our movement rather than linearity, our dance was ‘rhapsodized’ through a spherical sense of space with no preset syntax/semantics. The physical truth of touch made our movement supportive and supported, visceral, free from the concern for attractive partnering yet emotionalized, even sensual, at times. Loss of touch, unless instigated as a wilful suspension of intimacy, led to awkwardness but it was touch again that allowed us to recreate and sustain impetus. Riding on it I got lost in its forces, embracing that disorientation arising from letting things happen. The more I plunged in this dialogical listening to my partner’s body despite or even because of my tiredness, the more I came close to ‘seeing through the body’, ‘listening through the skin’ (Novack 189), i.e. to coenaesthesia “the diffuse internal awareness of bodily existence, caused by the interaction of numerous unlocalized sensations.”
A compositional multi-focal flow thus emerged often as a palindrome punctuated by stillness and sudden vigorous or gentle weight shifts, falls/rises with biomechanical immediacy as in the ‘aeroplane’ sequence whose fluidity necessitated not only the 90̊ heel-straight leg but also a mutuality in momentum/inertia, requiring us both to be unfixed, susceptible, impromptu, in readiness to initiate/receive/develop the kinetic offer. It is this uncharted dialectic ongoingness of touch and weight organized within Laban’s icosahedron which results in flow that pries open logicality to make room potentially for exquisite vertiginous disorder. With both partners I experienced moments where our dance felt Protean/metamorphic through the neuromuscular systems of two yielding softening bodies enacting this polysemous activity-receptivity dialogue, gauging the possibilities for continuing to move following the point of contact. Overcoming the fear of falling or hurting, in the end I felt arriving at a plateau of weightlessness, exuberance, a sense of magic even transmitted through the hereness of our pounding feet or the rhythmic pulse of our touching body parts. Using my shoulder as a lever and the other arm as supporting frame to roll on the floor or to a reverse somersault, everything changing unpredictably took us on trips that just as suddenly assumed a funny state as in t’ai chi’s ying-yang polarities where one concept changes fluidly into its opposite. It felt as if via this mutually modulated flux of playfulness and kinetic imagery my ‘reptile brain’ was awakening, a mesmerizing sensation that generated for me a high pitch of intensity, a stepping out of time/space into that shadow-state between consciousness and sub-consciousness.
Re-conceptualizing the body as a sign per se CI’s responsive body aesthetic, countercultural to the expressive body, empowered my physicality in both centred and off-balance modalities. I should like to develop it particularly exploring centrifugal force in more adrenalised states off the ground as well as solo improvisation. The ‘voice’ of my performing body has certainly benefited from greater depth, softness, resonance, responsiveness, lightness, spinal agility. CI’s ‘effortless effort as the genuine source of power’ (Banes 119) is a revelatory metaphor for art and life not in-the-proscenium but in-the-round. Its poetics is liminal, boundary-crossing, a no man’s land inhabited by both Self and Other, confounding the presence and the distance, the inner and the outer. Through CI I have gained and will further explore in my practice ‘yahaku’: meaning ‘emptiness’ in Sanskrit, it is the undrawn space in the sumi-e Japanese monochromatic painting, the unacted act in Noh, the unworded word in poetry. A nothing that becomes the fountainhead of possibility, a free-wheeling, raw, messy nihil full of potential that tears into the preciousness of one’s material to birth a dignity and a beauty in the smallest nuance of touch, move, sound, glance, smell.
References
Banes, Sally. Terpsichore in Sneakers, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1987.
Cavafy, Constantine. The Collected Poems, Oxford: OUP 2007.
Novack, Cynthia. Sharing the Dance, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press,
1990.
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