Karen Barbour
After much contemplation and reflection through moving, I’m interested to try to express in words some of my experiences of thinking in movement, particularly in relation to contact improvisation. I’ve been stimulated to embody some interesting theoretical perspectives offered by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (1999) on improvisation. What has resulted from my embodiment of these perspectives are some satisfying processes for facilitating CI, and a re-commitment to valuing what we can know through moving.
I have long been frustrated
by a perspective I often encounter outside and within the dance community. This
perspective is that dance improvisation is ‘just movement’, and that
dancers need to suspend their thinking in order to ’just move’. In
a recent improvisation workshop I was distressed to be told not to think. I
appreciate of course, the distinction between planning a movement before doing
it, and ‘just moving’. On some occasions, I think that the instruction
‘don’t think, just move’ is an attempt to encourage unplanned
movement and to really embody movement. I like Wendy Smith’s recent articulation
of this as trying to find the beauty that underpins basic pedestrian human movement
(cited in Roberts, 2000).
However, because I have found that the instruction ‘don’t think’
disempowered me in my dancing (Barbour, 2000), and denied the relevance of moving
as a way of knowing, I set out to explore how else dance improvisation might
be described.
For me, improvisation is a way of thinking in movement, rather than a way of training dancers to ‘just move’. I find the perspective that improvisation is not an intelligent and thoughtful process frustrating. As dance education and research in Aotearoa (and internationally) has gained recognition and value amongst dancers, and in the wider community, any perspective or practice in dance that continues to disempower dancers as intelligent beings seems counter-productive and highly questionable.
I continue to be stimulated
and encouraged by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s (1999) phenomenological work
on movement. Dance improvisation, according to Sheets-Johnstone (1999), is essentially
“non-separation of thinking and doing, and… the very ground of
this non-separation is the capacity, indeed the very experience of the dancer,
to be thinking in movement. To say that the dancer is thinking in movement does
not mean that the dancer is thinking by means of movement or that his/her thoughts
are being transcribed into movement. To think is first of all to be caught up
in a dynamic flow; thinking is itself, by its very nature, kinetic”
(p. 485-486).
Contact improvisation is surely thinking in movement. The thought of contact dancers is moving; the movement of contact dancers is thoughtful. When I see contact dancers I see intelligent, knowledgeable people sharing, exploring, negotiating and understanding their worlds. As a result of reading Sheets-Johnstone’s (1999) work, I asked myself how I might embody a perspective on improvisation as ‘thinking in movement’, in the creation and facilitation of CI classes.
“What is distinctive about thinking in movement is not that the flow of thought is kinetic, but that the thought itself is. It is motional through and through; at once spatial, temporal, dynamic” (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999, p. 486).
I find myself offering CI classes where we do not do watch, rehearse and practice ‘skills’ in the ordinary manner. I think a ‘skills’ approach to CI decreases the opportunities for dancers to experience thinking in movement. My sense is that the demonstration of skills in CI and then the attempt to practice the skills over and over, begins by creating thought processes that are then to be transcribed into movement. This approach encourages dancers to plan ahead and to try out their rehearsed skills in their duet improvisations. This approach constructs movement as a practice to be thought about and then performed, rather than movement as thinking, or thinking in movement. It seems odd to me that a skills approach has become a common practice in CI classes and workshops. Whilst the aim of such skills sessions is to learn safe techniques for doing skills, and the hope is that the dancer will eventually be able to stop this thinking and forward planning, this approach to CI seems to leave many dancers bereft of the joy of improvisation in contact. As a dance student said to me once, she used to find CI boring because she ran out of moves to try. Of course there are other concerns too, such as the way that skill demonstrations by a CI facilitator set up the impression of the facilitator as an ‘expert’ who the dancer should copy. This approach also means that dancers can experience ‘failure’ in their performance of a skill and subsequently lose confidence, enjoyment and interest.
I continue to ask myself,
how else might I encourage dancers to explore some of the fundamental challenges
of CI, without teaching skills?
What I struggle to articulate in words, I find myself in moving. Watching dancers
move, I see that what is meaningful for them is what they discover for themselves,
rather than what they copy from someone else. I am convinced that I need to
provide an empowering and supportive atmosphere for CI, where exploration, negotiation,
shared understandings and expression are possible. This requires courage to
let go of teaching skills and to let go of ownership of the CI class. If we
have the opportunity to think in movement, we will discover what we need to
know as we move, and truly experience the joy of CI.
Photographs of students
at The Tertiary Dance Festival of Aotearoa 2001, by Ian Rotherham, The University
of Waikato Photography Department.
References:
Barbour, Karen N. (2000). Reflections: An education of my own, or Learning to
be resistant. Waikato Journal of Education, 6, 99-101.
Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. (1999). The primacy of movement. Amsterdam & Philadelphia:
John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Roberts, Paul. (2000). Wendy Smith. An interview. Proximity, 3 (1), 9-14.
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