dance with the body you have

Hellene Gronda

Dance with the body you have is probably the most useful idea I know for practicing Contact Improvisation. Making contact with my own body is the essence and the basis for contact with my partner(s), the only way I can hope to dance with the reality of another person and their body. But what does it mean? Dance with the body you have. I can hardly dance with anyone else’s body. Isn’t it a tautology? And if not, it sounds like some kind of determinism limiting my dancing to mere biology or physics.


Quite the opposite, I think, and I want to offer some thoughts about why dancing with the body you have is both a profound struggle and a spiritual-political activism. Along the way I’m going to introduce some ideas from two twentieth century philosophers, Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault. Together they help to highlight aspects of politics and spirituality revealed in the practice of Contact Improvisation.


photo by Sam Overington

At first sight, the instruction appears to enforce that Cartesian bad guy, the mind-body split. There is a subject: a ‘you,’ posited separate from another entity, ‘the body’. The relation seems to be about possession: you, the subject, have or own an object, the body. Sometimes it’s useful to shift from having to being (the body you are) to displace imperialist politics and bring attention to the ethics of appropriation. But for what interests me here that difference is not so important. The advice to “dance with the body you have” has a perplexing impossibility and it speaks to the very nature of existence: I am inescapably embodied yet I can struggle with that fact. The feeling of separation between conscious mind and body is really a paradox. It is this paradox that makes an instruction like “dance with the body you have” both necessary and challenging.

Contact Improvisation was created by Steve Paxton in New York in the early 1970s. Contact was part of a move away from the emotionally expressive and individualistic modern dance to an interest in communality, physicality and improvisation for its own sake. The experiments of choreographers Merce Cunnigham, Anna Halprin and Erick Hawkins in the postwar period are exemplary of this change. The new dance was inspired by everyday movement and an interest in random elements; it was at once more abstract and more phenomenological. Dancers explored gravity and scientific principles of motion while valuing and developing their own sensuous kinesthetic experience.

Contact Improvisation involves the spontaneous exchange of weight through a rolling point of contact. The dance translates vertical momentum, a fall, into a horizontal trajectory. It can be awkward, dangerous, or breathtakingly tender. Contact is the process of finding out what you can do, and is most satisfying when you find yourself surprised by what happens. Communication between dancers is the most important element of the dance; and it is often compared to conversation. It has been called an “art-sport” and the new “folk-dance”; it has more in common with social dancing than concert choreography. Contact brings together the desire to “let the dance happen” and the belief that everybody can dance. There is no ideal body for Contact Improvisation but ideally, every dancer explores the possibilities of their particular body.

Contact can lead to unpredictable interactions, physical disorientation and speeds that are beyond conscious control. I have to feel how the weight of my body is falling toward the floor so I can be safe, and so I can take advantage of the pathways which open out of each embodied moment. To dance with the body I have, I must firstly notice my own physical state and the experience and awareness of my own weight is a crucial part of this awareness.

Contact dancing teaches you to feel your weight and gives you skills for organizing it. You learn to pour, spread, and focus your weight; to send it off balance and share it with your partner. You practice following its flow in falling and find ways to translate its momentum into pleasurable trajectories. For Contact, no part of the body is more important than any other. The dance relies on kinesthesia, proprioception and reflexive responses rather than visual information or cognitive choices.

By contrast, feminist research into body image shows that weight is usually not experienced in the body, but visually or abstractly. This kind of body awareness might rely on a mirror and part-by-part monitoring of the body shape. I stand side on to the mirror and examine the protrusion of my belly, for example. I compare the body I see with the norm I aspire towards. I turn away from the body I have and promise to give up ice-cream. From the perspective of feminism it can seem that women in particular have a lot of body awareness, probably too much already. But I think there is a world of difference between reading a scale daily or examining my stomach in the mirror, and monitoring the movement of my centre of gravity via internal body sensation. The way I access “the body I have” has everything to do with politics, and I’ll write more about this later.

For now I want to stay with the difficulties in dancing with the body I have. I find that while I am dancing with you, the virtual and the actual are engaged in a fierce competition. I rest my body on yours, but I keep it tensed out of fear that it is too heavy, ironically increasing the weight on your back. I might be wishing that I were more skillful, stronger or lighter. I have to keep reminding myself to dance with my own present body, to dance this dance with my body as it is now. Yet my materiality is inescapable. Obviously. I am my body, moving inexorably through time and space. But I get trapped in the desire for the bodies I wish I had, and miss the actual opportunities in the dance I am having.

Martin Heidegger, a great twentieth century philosopher, has some ideas that I think help describe this paradox. While Heidegger did not directly discuss embodiment (he considered the body to be “the most difficult problem”) he gives us a powerful way of discussing why it might be an issue for us to dance with the body we have.

Heidegger uses the term Dasein (there-being) instead of ‘human’ to try and define what is the essence of human being, of human existence. Dasein is an entity for whom its own existence is an issue. I am not just alive and existing, but I know this, and sometimes it worries me. Moreover Dasein always exists in the world, somewhere, some specific there. I want to introduce you to three terms - facticity, throwness, and state-of-mind - which help describe the process of trying to dance with the body you have.

Facticity designates the irreducible specificity and always alreadyness of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. The body I have is always unavoidably and specifically mine. The concept of facticity also implies that Dasein is meaningfully bound to the conditions of its existence and the entities it encounters. The specifics of my “there” mean something to me. Whether I have red hair or yellow skin or grow up in a brick veneer house are not just random, objective facts: they are important to me and to others, but I don’t get to choose them. I think the ‘there’ of my existence is always and most proximally, my body. My bodily particularities are part of facticity, they constitute the ‘mineness’ of my existence: it is the inheritance which I do not choose, and can therefore choose to choose.

Heidegger uses the evocative term, ‘throwness,’ to connote this inescapable submission to existence itself. We are beings thrown into existence. Dasein is always and already “delivered over to the Being which, in existing, it has to be.” For Heidegger we are forced to confront this ‘throwness’ most powerfully in state-of-mind. State-of-mind, or mood, discloses existence prior and beyond either cognition or will. We “find ourselves” in a mood just as, I would add, we find ourselves in a body. Knowledge and intention come later. Heidegger says: “the mood brings Dasein before the “that-it-is” of its “there”, which as such, stares it in the face with the inexorability of an enigma”(Being and Time). At this point Dasein has the opportunity to grasp hold of its throwness, to choose its enigmatic, unexplainable specificity and inhabit the possibilities of its there. In just this way the practice of Contact Improvisation forces me over and over to confront my mood, to pay attention to my bodily state, to notice the body I actually have and to dance with it. But Heidegger argues that for the most part, Dasein turns away from facing the enigma of its throwness. And I think we’re even expert at turning away from the moods, themselves … how often have you said – “I’m just not sure how I feel”? Grasping hold of the ‘there’ – the facticity of Dasein’s throwness – is not an easy task.

Is this merely a lack of courage, or is there more going on? Dancing with the body you have is more difficult than a simple embrace of body awareness. Everyone is happy to feel their body when it feels good. But in case of headache, take aspirin. And if pain persists? We all know what to do. It would be easy to scold ourselves, as Nietzsche, another famous philosopher does, for having become someone who “sometimes holds his nose in his own presence”.

But what if the body I have is paralysed, or if my capacity to be touched is marred by sexual abuse? What if the body I have is judged to be less than human due to its colour? Can I still accept the body I have? Should I bear it? To dance with the body you have is to take hold of your throwness; and it is to confront the political reality that we are not all born equal. How to deal with that specificity is a political question.Acceptance of the body you have is political when contrasted with regulatory management of the normal and the ideal. For while as a society we profess a love of difference, the built environment is designed for the able-bodied, car seats fit the average man, and clothing is mass-produced in standard sizes. There is very little space for the abnormal body to live. Most importantly, I make very little space for my own abnormality. Most of the time we’re focused on controlling our bodies, harnessing their forces towards an intention (like writing) or filtering our impulses to fit in with normal sociality (like sitting quietly reading). These habits of discipline make it difficult to access corpo-reality beyond the intrusive calls of pain, hunger, defecation etc. It’s much easier to “fit in” and ease is political, not just personal.

The politics of dancing with the body you have can be seen through the understanding of power introduced by Michel Foucault. The body you have is not a “natural” body, not something pre-cultural and fixed, but it does oppose the normal or ideal body of social discipline. Foucualt argues that a new form of power is more significant today than direct repressive action. It is a dispersed and productive control that he calls “biopower”: “the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life.” This modern form of power relies heavily upon normalization, which in turn functions through the subject’s internalized disciplinary surveillance. We keep an eye on ourselves. We become social subjects by disciplining our bodies, monitoring what goes in and what comes out, keeping them docile. We manage their irregularities and strive to stay close to the norm. In contrast Contact Improvisation implements a competing regime which aims to accept and affirm the given rather than disciplining it towards something else. Trying to dance with the body you have is a struggle with your own internalised drive toward the normal and the ideal.

The attempt to dance with the body-you-have is an ethics of difference in practice. It is a way to develop skills in tolerance, a way to strengthen our difference muscles. My body is one place where the pain of difference can and must be borne. I want to value the irreducible specificity of my body as the source and inspiration for a compassionate political agency.

Dancing with the body you have is a practice of affirming the facts of your existence – physical, psychological, cultural, and political specificities – and finding what you can do with them. Right there lie the resources to resist a normalising power. And bearing your actual weight is not just a personal issue. The global distribution of body mass is a literal indicator of world inequities. To bear my actual weight is in part to accept that Westerners are more likely to die of obesity than starvation.

What about the objection that the body is plastic, malleable – not inescapable at all? Don’t surgical interventions and technological enhancements mean that we can transcend the body we have? Yet these technologies cannot evade the irreducible moment of confronting the specificity of the body’s mineness. The body’s plasticity does not free me from the particular possibilities of my existence. If I replace this hinge joint of my elbow with a ball joint, I still confront a specific set of movements, merely a different range. And when bodies are constantly positioned with respect to the norm, and particularities are tolerated as distributions around the mean, then finding out what you can do with your given body is a form of activism. This model of politics based on confronting your physical body - vulnerable, flawed and uniquely yours - might also be the opening of compassion.


For more information on Contact Improvisation’s history and context see Cynthia Novack, Sharing the Dance: CI and American Culture, 1990.


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