On Sunday 17th of December a forum on contact improvisation and performance was held at Performance Space, Sydney. This followed a weekend workshop conducted by Nancy Stark Smith, contact improvisation pioneer and editor of “Contact Quarterly”. On the previous Thursday there had been an evening performance with a piece by Nancy and musician Mike Vargas, followed by a piece with Nancy, Mike and State of Flux, which had been developed in Melbourne over a three week period.
The forum began with Nancy Stark Smith, Helen Clarke Lapin and Jonathan Sinatra engaging in some contact dance. This gradually led to a conversation between Nancy and Andrew Morrish.
This is a transcript of some of that conversation. As the conversation proceeds it opens out to include others in the conversation. Some of this has been omitted due to poor recording quality, wherever possible I have included the names of the others participants, but on occasions have had to resort to referring to them as “Q”
My apologies to them.
Nancy’s visit to Australia was arranged by State of Flux, with support from the Dance Fund of the Australia Council.

AM
Can you remember the first time you met Steve Paxton?

NSS
He was performing with the Grand Union. That was where I first worked with him, but I don’t remember the actual first meeting.
(Sounds of “Greensleeves” in the background as an ice cream van passes by outside.)

AM
And what had been your involvement with performing before you had seen Grand Union?

NSS
Well, I had been doing modern dance at College. Twyla Tharp had come the year before and that was when I had become really interested in dancing. I wasn’t so interested in more traditional dancing. I never understood why people wanted to dance in front of mirrors. I just wanted to move more. (More “Greeensleeves”) But Twyla came and did some very interesting stuff. There was someone in her company who was standing around and scratching her nose. Twyla said “O.K. everybody do that” “Do what?” we asked. “Do that” she said. So somehow she got us to see more closely every little scratch and every little weight shift.
This was a revelation to me.
So we did class with her and performed this very complicated piece she had made. That hooked me because I felt the rigour, the intelligence and the poetry of dancing could all happen at the same time. Then a year later I met Steve Paxton and the Grand Union.

AM
At that time what kinds of things were the Grand Union doing?

NSS
They were doing some pretty wild “open improvisations” you could say. They would go into proscenium theatres, they might put on wigs from the costume room, they would bring out props, they had a variety of different music, they would have access to the light board and the sound board. They would get out there and start doing stuff, sometimes unrelated, sometimes related, full of dancing and movement and sometimes not : little events or scenes would form, develop, end, change. Several at the same time. It would go on for a couple of hours. I found it very intriguing because they were making it on the spot. Dance theatre... improvised dance theatre.
When I met them at Oberlin College, they were each doing a different project for that month of their residency. Steve’s project culminated in the piece that then became the seminal work for contact improvisation, the piece with the men... called “Magnesium.”

AM
Was your initial interest in contact motivated by a desire to perform, or was it something to do with the physicality of it as an activity?

NSS
Well I didn’t really see it before I did it. But I was inspired after seeing the piece Steve had made with the men. They started standing still and then began spilling, falling,rolling, getting up and staggering around for about 15 minutes on a big wrestling mat. Then they started throwing themselves in the air and coming down and rolling. This beautiful sight of men sliding, colliding, to-ing and fro-ing around each other, and jumping up. So I said to Steve that if he worked like that with women that I would like to know about it.
He continued to develop the work at Benington College in Vermont where he was teaching that spring. Later that year in June he pulled a group of students and colleagues together in NYC to practice the next step of his investigations, now maintaining contact between two movers and developing the improvisation in a sustained conversation, rather than the whole group going at it at once.

AM
Where are you now in relation to the issue of contact improvisation as a physical practice and as a performance form?

NSS
It’s a funny question because from the very beginning it was a performance. It was performed in an art gallery for 5 hours a day for a week. It was in an art context, an experimental dance context and it was in a context where people could choose. They could walk through and say “oh very nice,” they could stay for five minutes or they could come back everyday and stay for hours and they could change where they were sitting. So that was a very different way of sharing a performance than in a proscenium theatre.
I always assumed as a performance it was an offering of the work. In this particular work it was unusual at the time for a lot of different reasons such as touch, falling, women lifting men. It was different in a lot of ways. So I felt like I was sharing a phenomena. When Simone Forti first saw it she said “it looks like an Art-Sport.”
For years we called it an art -sport because it seemed to get people around the question that was hanging them up: “Is this dance?” That worked for a while.
I think that from the beginning people added, as choreographers and artists, things that might contextualise it, costumes or music or special types of relationship to it. Also there were groups for many years that were performing the “pure form.”
So initially people came wanting to see the phenomena and then after a while they wanted to see “these people” rather than “those people” doing it. That already began to make a change.
The issue of performance viability came up in Melbourne and we talked it. In contact improvisation the dancing is spherical. So your pathway in space might bring you into inversion, or with your back to the audience and that’s an unusual surface to radiate from. Usually audiences look at faces to see if someone is communicating something. To be able communicate through your skin in different directions is a different thing. It’s also a fairly complicated activity and, for some people, they need all their concentration just to keep it alive and safe. So they are quite absorbed, to the point where including the audience in their awareness is quite a challenge.

AM
You’ve recently been working with State of Flux in Melbourne on a performance, how did you structure it? It looked to me that there were some prearranged sections that each had a particular quality.

NSS
They reflected some of the practices that we have been working on together. As well there was the idea of what you could invest in contact improvisation in terms of articulation, of working with various states of physical tone and of bringing out different qualities of focus within contact rather that adding things on to it.
Flux had not really performed contact in extended partnerships. As a group they would move around the space and form, change and mutate into something else though contact.
We worked on letting the form itself be where the “story” was coming from. So we had extended duets which in the performance here mostly were about 5 minutes but in practice could be 10, 15, 20 minutes. It was interesting to clear the room and have one duet be visible. That was a big step.
There are a lot of choices you can make about how to present the material. The partnerships and situations you get into in contact have been seen and used in very formally set work by people who don’t do contact improvisation.

AM
In terms of the decisions you made with State of Flux, was the idea to share with the audience what happens in the duet, or to demonstrate that Flux can do contact?

NSS
Yes, what is the difference between what we are doing here (i.e. the dancing that Nancy, Helen and Jonathan had been doing at the beginning of the forum) and performing? That’s why I said before we started “Andrew are we demonstrating contact or are we performing now?” Of course you didn’t answer.

AM
Only because I didn’t know the answer.

NSS
So I decided we were demonstrating, and the question is: “what does that mean in terms of my attention?” How is “demonstrating” different from “performing” different from “jamming”?
In the early years of performing contact we were just doing it and the audience was watching us. It’s very different in a jam when you have a hundred people dancing around. Essentially it’s the same activity, but an audience can add another dimension to the condition.

AM
One of the fundamental forms of contact improvisation practice is the jam, and implicit in that form is watching, to be present to the gaze of others. It seems to me that the question of whether it’s performing or not is almost an existential difficulty for contact improvisers. the basic form says “we have the experience of being watched doing this” and “I have the experience of watching others doing it” But when it comes to doing it as art-making then an existential crisis seems to befall upon practitioners.

Rosalind Crisp
There are other kinds of watching too. There is the kind of watching we have been doing in the workshop this weekend. Its quite a specific way of holding the space and our attention.

NSS
... and what the expectation is too. If you’re students in a class and watching people dancing, or if you’re paying $5 or $20 or $40 then the expectation changes. The venue creates an expectation. But artists can also work with these expectations. There is for me an interesting new distinction that I’m finding in the issue of articulation. I feel that when I’m performing contact improvisation I’m giving my attention to it and my partner, but I’m also making an effort to render it as articulately as I can.
I may have other motivations when I’m teaching. I might want to demonstrate or emphasise a particular thing or to shake someone loose from something or to just have a good time. There are a lot of different motivations, but if I’m investing in this form as a performance form, as a piece of choreography then it becomes a structure that an artist makes.
Now after 25-28 years of people practising the form it’s like a telephone game, it has become just this thing that we do. I like to remind people that it was an individual who composed it, and that has grown and been reinterpreted and reframed. It does has value performatively. I do see people getting confused about what the contract is with an audience and feel that they need to dress it up and project and start to do other things that in my opinion, don’t really go well with this form. But, people can do all kinds of things with it, and the physical practice can serve them well in the pursuit of their particular performance activity.

AM
Initially contact improvisation was subversive. It was in opposition to many things, to what art and dance was. So if people “tart it up” and present it in a more conventional form are they actually missing the point?

NSS
... the point?

AM
The subversive point, as in “undermining the convention.”

NSS
I can’t speak for Steve, but I think there was a lot more to his investigation than subversion. The whole Judson Church Dance Theatre was about looking at things in a new way. Not necessarily throwing anything out or subverting it, but making another choice and looking at other possibilities. In the process perhaps supplanting other ways.
The times have changed, so it will be viewed differently in different parts of the world and in different contexts. If it’s being shown as a phenomena, that will be determined by how and where you do it.
If you’re going to perform it in a proscenium, I think it’s got a lot of possibilities.
With State of Flux what we did was frame it in space and time. To see it in that way. Also to give them a chance to practice that, because they consider themselves to be a performing company that uses contact improvisation primarily. That was their intention in bringing me to Australia, and all these things line up. That doesn’t mean that I think that the particular formulation we did is the most performable way to do contact. I felt it was the most appropriate and do-able in the time we had. It did draw out tremendous nuance and clarity in their performing of that material and that communicates something.

Mike Vargas
The form of contact is a conversation, and one way to think about it is that if you are going to listen in on a conversation then it might be more or less interesting or inspiring depending on who is talking and what the topic is. If the form is art or mentioned as art, then it has to be evaluated on the same basis as other art forms. So when you listen to musicians improvising together you notice how well do they play their instrument, how well do they get along as musicians and how powerful are the aesthetics. There are a lot of things in question. In the end perhaps its not so problematic to decide if its performance or not, but simply is it inspiring to watch these particular bodies interacting.

Rosalind Crisp
But is it a different issue when people make a performance. Its about ways of performing and whether contact is dressed up as one of those ways of performing.

NSS
I think contact has been spoken of as being voyeuristic, at least it can be. When watching, people can feel excluded from the activity. As part of my own practice of contact improvisation and working with performance I have used the idea of radiance as opposed to projection. If you can fill what you are doing enough to include the environment somehow, without necessarily changing the activity, but expand the kinesphere of it energetically, then maybe you can reach someone, and there can be some exchange. So its not private and its not showy. It’s like the difference between ignorance and innocence. So you don’t ignore (the audience) but you remain fresh and true to what you are doing and aware that you are in the position (of being watched) which is a very powerful thing.AM
One of the other central aspects of contact improvisation has been its creation of a world wide community, and as part of that the development of interest in mixed ability participation. How does this sit with the idea of the virtuosic display of skill in performance?

NSS
There are some great paradoxes in performing and teaching that have gone along with the territory of contact.
In teaching we did not copyright it, and chose not to create a certification programme which would have meant that people would have had to pay to learn how to teach. We felt people should teach because they wanted to share the information and to get different partners to dance with. We felt that you learned by teaching how to teach etc.
Performing also came with the territory, not just because of jamming. In the retreat jam situation people practised performing contact and other improvisational work. Performing was part of the learning.
But maybe there is an extra step that has to be taken if someone considers themselves to be an artist making work. Then if you are using contact there is a sense of intent and work.
I remember in our second year we toured California with a show called “You come, we’ll show you what we do.” That was the spirit of the work, it was Steve’s construction, but that idea only goes so far. Then one needs to consider “why are we performing?” “how am I performing?” “what is this about?” and to ask more questions or decide not to. I think there is a level of unconsciousness in the performance of improvised work which can give it a bad reputation.

Q
Could you talk about how you devised this performance?

NSS
Well the two halves were very differently arrived at. The first half was material Mike and I have been working on in the studio. We have come up with different formulations to practice together, a particular piece he does co-existing with a form that I do and adapting that or trying different things and arriving at a definition or a constraint for a particular section.
I’ve already talked a little about how we worked with State of Flux.
There was a group I was working with for a few years called “Group 6” which was attempting to develop a level of consciousness about composition and contact and how to have them both going at once. It was challenging.
We had to practice a lot and see what we made and what we were seeing. When someone is doing an open improvisation what are they actually looking for? What are they following? What are the signals, what are they after? There are a lot of hidden agendas and backgrounds, of what you have learned to do when you’re out there.
We spent a few years isolating practices. For instance, in contact improvisation, it was very difficult for the group to sustain contact with five or six people together, it would always break down into duet. So if we wanted the possibility of all being able to work together in contact ensemble - compositionally and physically - then we would practice that. Then we would leave that practice and go into some open sets and see what happened. Then in that run we might notice that we didn’t have much depth or range dynamically and so we would create another practice that would strengthen that.
So we started to layer levels of awareness. “Group 6” performed sets of so called ‘open’ improvisation but it was layered with all our concerns.
There have been other pieces made with groups that had certain teaching forms in them. For instance we were saying at the end of class today that the “Slo-mo weight transfer” was very beautiful to see with so many doing it. Maybe that is something that could be done by framing it in a certain way. So that might be another way.

Q
What other practices or forms have been practised with contact?

NSS
I think that Steve assumed, that people coming to contact often have movement training already, so their body is organised and they can meet one other and be quite spontaneous with whatever their body organisation is.
Now this is one of the reasons that people run into funny things when they are teaching. There are not a whole lot of teaching materials built into contact as a form. It’s like “OK you’re organised go for it, here are a few safety things etc.” As people start to develop their teaching, they bring in tai chi, ballet, yoga, Alexander whatever they think will bring people into a ready state. I think that Steve was also interested in having people versed in a number of different physical organisations. Now I know there are athletes that do contact and athletes who are modern and post modern dancers, and other “crosstrainers”.
It’s fun at some of these festivals I teach at, I’ll teach contact at 8.30 in the morning then I’ll go to the ballet barre with half the people from my class. Then they’ll go to a modern rep class and take a yoga class at the end of the day. I think “whoa what is happening here?”
So every individual brings all their strands... every tree they have ever climbed, into their dancing. They are bringing all the co-ordinations they have to their partner, so in contact I think its pretty broad, what’s in their practise.

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