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Contact improvisation is one of the main reasons i devoted my life to dancing. i took a series of contact classes during my college days and was immediately hooked. The range of physical possibilities combined with the improvisational impulse in this form of kinesthetic partnering spoke to my desire for feisty, anything goes, movement. in addition, the life lessons concerning the relationship between one’s self and another as they are negotiated through the subtle exchanges of weight and momentum, leading and following, kept me engaged in a form that evolved as my interests also changed. Contact improvisation trains for disorientation in its many guises (including spatial and emotional), and i appreciate the form’s insistence that we cultivate a willingness to experience awkward moments and suspend expectations about what constitutes a successful duet. The somatic work that informs contact improvisation has been crucial to keeping me dancing throughout my middle years and i often talk about my approach to dance history as a kind of contact duet. Paradoxically, it was precisely my closeness to this dance form that initially kept me from engaging with it critically or theoretically. That changed when i moved to oberlin and began to teach contact improvisation in the same beautiful wooden studio that sponsored one of contact’s seminal explorations—Steve Paxton’s 1972 dance for twelve men entitled Magnesium. This section begins with “A Particular history,” the first conference presentation i gave on teaching contact improvisation at oberlin College .The palpable sense of contact improvisation’s history is imbued in the beautiful wood floor of Warner Main Space—the big old gymnasium where Steve Paxton taught movement skills during January 1972 and where nancy Stark Smith danced first as a student. By the time i wrote this essay, i had been teaching contact improvisation at oberlin for almost a decade, and i had developed a quasi-religious reverence for that space and its floor that i imparted to my students. This feeling is wonderfully articulated in the concluding paragraph of that short talk, which quotes a former student’s description of that floor as a sort IV Contact Improvisation 210 of ancient grail reserved for the ritual of dance. i do not know whether it is the importance of oberlin in contact improvisation’s early history, whether the floor is indeed magical, or whether there is a special affinity between oberlin students and contact improvisation, but i feel really lucky to have found a job in a place that can generate so much energy for this form, year after year. Precisely because contact improvisation is not a static practice, i never get tired of teaching it, and i am deeply appreciative that each fall season a new crop of students learn to share my enthusiasm for its physical and psychic lessons, inspiring, in turn, my continued engagement with the form. how ironic, then, that when i spent a year living in Strasbourg, France, and had anticipated dancing a lot of contact improvisation, i found myself instead doing a weekly capoeira class and roda, mixing it up with a variety of teenage boys (who could all do backflips). needless to say, that experience was a weekly lesson in humiliation for my forty-year-old self, but i stuck it out because there was a palpable sense of community and respect for all our differences that i had found missing from the local contact improvisation jam. our teacher was African French—a former professional volleyball player who moved his long limbs with an extraordinary fluidity and grace. inspired by my time practicing capoeira in France and later back in the United States, “open Bodies,” is a comparison of contact improvisation and capoeira, two forms of physical engagement with an increasingly global influence. This essay was originally written for Protée—a French-language publication —and in it i try to articulate the ways in which these two forms encourage a meeting of the “other” in oneself within a circle of witnesses. i was intrigued with how contact improvisation and capoeira, although they come from very different historical and cultural roots, are hybrid improvisational forms that encourage an experience of vulnerability, disorientation, as well as a certain feisty resistance to being challenged. And both forms can sponsor gorgeous moments of kinesthetic collaboration, providing a physical model for engaging across cultural difference. Several months ago while i was in Porto Alegre, Brazil, i had the opportunity to witness a class and roda at the studio of Contramestre...

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