Aisle 24: Performance Art Supplies
Essay on Contact Improvisation "exersice" from Friday's class. To find out more on contact improv check out
this.
It is amazing what you learn about yourself after rolling around on the floor with fifty-five people that you have only known for three weeks. For that matter it is amazing what you learn about life from doing that. The contact improvisation “exercise” that we all took part in during the last lecture class brought forth several discussions afterwards, one of which was the realization made by several people that it is amazing the lengths we go to in trying to avoid contact with other people. We work so hard to create a personal, physical bubble around us, cutting ourselves off from the world. Whether it be through always keeping a seat between you and a stranger on the subway, or through conversing online via an instant messenger program rather than calling or, even more intimate, visiting the person you want to talk to. We are turning into a society that fears physical intimacy.
Contact improvisation pops our bubbles, but it does not force us to. No one instructed any of us to interact with each other in the way we did. Our personal movements might have started out as conscious choices on our own part but soon our movements were influenced by the movements of the bodies next to us. At first, for me at least, I was very conscious of sliding in and out of clusters of people, providing support for the stray leg or torso that came my way and getting supported in turn. Soon enough I noticed that my consciousness of my movements lessened and my body took over on its own. It seemed like a group mind started to form across the floor. In one way or another all fifty-five of us were connected and interacting in ways we would never imagine interacting when meeting on the street.
Where as unplanned physical contact with some one not familiar to you has the potential to create a feeling of unease, through contact improvisation (and the knowledge that we were all in a safe environment) created a state of euphoria in the room. At the conclusion of the exercise, while looking around the room I did not notice a single face that did not have a smile on it. The majority of the class may not have ever had any substantial exposure to contact improvisation before this day, and while it is likely that our little explosion of physicality might not hold up to an experienced troop of contact improvisers what we did attain is at its very essence of contact improvisation. The main rub of the art being “the experience of touching and sharing weight with a partner of either sex and any size as a way of constructing a new experience of the self interacting with another person” and doing so in a manner that remains spontaneous throughout (Novack 11). I think it goes without saying that we all shared this “new experience of self interacting with” other individuals. It was inviting, comforting and provided us with the physical contact that we all yearn for; yet constantly build up walls protecting ourselves from each day.
Work Cited
Novack, Cynthia. Sharing the Dance. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.
