Fine Arts: Contact Improvisation

Monday, April 28, 2014

CHUTE

http://vk.com/video1087868_139846724

"Chute" was the first contact improvisation concert; narration describes some of the original concerns of the form, mostly speaking of falling. "Contact at 10th & 2nd" documents the 11th anniversary contact improvisation performance including Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith and dancers from England Canada and all parts of the United States.

http://www.worldcat.org/title/chute-contact-improvisation-and-contact-at-10th-2nd/oclc/41429923

Thursday, April 24, 2014

HISTORY* -- Contact Jam

Contact Improvisation is an evolving system of movement initiated in June 1972 by American choreographer Steve Paxton.
based on the communication between two moving bodies that are in physical contact and their combined relationship to the physical laws that govern their motion—gravity, momentum, inertia.
17 students and colleagues to participate in the two-week project.
Steve Paxton, a dancer with a background in tumbling and martial arts, was a member of several modern dance companies in New York in the 1960s, including that of the revolutionary choreographer Merce Cunningham and his longtime collaborator, composer John Cage, a major innovator in musical and artistic thinking.
Paxton was a prime mover in the groundbreaking performances of the Judson Dance Theater in the mid-1960s in NYC, challenging assumptions about dance and opening up new possibilities for the art form, including what kinds of movement could be considered dance and how dances are made.
initial performances can be seen in two documentaries narrated by Paxton, Chute (1979) and Fall After Newton (1987), produced by Videoda.

DONE BY: CI is enjoyed by movers of all kinds—professionally trained dancers, recreational movers, athletes, disabled dancers, old, young. Dancers apply their work with CI to choreography, to dance training, to working with children, seniors, disabled populations, therapy, visual art, music, education, environmental work, and social activism. Many do it just for pleasure and personal development.

Influence: Contact Improvisation's influence can be seen throughout modern and postmodern dance choreography, performance, and dance training worldwide, especially in relationship to partnering and use of weight.

*** June 2014 = 40th birthday of Contact Improv

What is a Contact jam?

Contact Improvisation jams are leaderless practice environments in which dancers practice the dance form with whoever gathers—friends or strangers, old, young, experienced, novice. Some jams take place in a studio for a few hours once a week. Longer retreat jams might last several days, sometimes held in hot springs resorts or other retreat locations where dancers can practice at any hour of the day in the studio/lodge or take a rejuvenating soak or steam in the mineral waters.

http://www.contactquarterly.com/contact-improvisation/about/cq_ciAbout.php

Quotes.

Contact Improvisation is an open-ended exploration of the kinaesthetic possibilities of bodies moving through contact. Sometimes wild and athletic, sometimes quiet and meditative, it is a form open to all bodies and enquiring minds.

—from Ray Chung workshop announcement, London, 2009

Contact improvisations are spontaneous physical dialogues that range from stillness to highly energetic exchanges. Alertness is developed in order to work in an energetic state of physical disorientation, trusting in one's basic survival instincts. It is a free play with balance, self-correcting the wrong moves and reinforcing the right ones, bringing forth a physical/emotional truth about a shared moment of movement that leaves the participants informed, centered, and enlivened.

—early definition by Steve Paxton and others, 1970s, from CQ Vol. 5:1, Fall 1979

Contact Improvisation (CI) is a framework for an improvised duet dance. Since it is essentially a dance of investigation of weight, touch, and communication, it adheres to no single definition or pedagogical certification program. All practitioners ultimately participate in the defining, disseminating, and development of the form through their own practice and discovery.

http://www.contactquarterly.com/contact-improvisation/about/cq_ciAbout.php