Edited by Ann-maree Ellis

Hellene Gronda interviewed Nancy Stark Smith back in 2000, when Nancy was in Melbourne to teach a 2-week Contact intensive, “Deepening the Form”. An opportunity I regret missing. However, Hellene has allowed me the pleasure of editing this interview for <Proximity>, and I’m dancing better already! I’m only sorry to have had to withhold so many gems from the interview, but there wouldn’t have been room for anything else in this issue.

Photo by Tinu Hettich of Nancy Stark Smith dancing with Franco Zita during her workshop - ZOOM: contact improvisation in detail and perspective - at Casina Settarte in Cisternino, Italy

Hellene Gronda: One big area which interests me is risk. Mainly the physical risk because you’re falling and it is improvised. I feel this element of risk is a really important part of the practice.

Nancy Stark Smith: The fact that the dancing is improvised and that falling is part of it, I feel actually makes it safer. Because you can work with your off-balance states and activities rather than trying to pull everything on balance as with most other dance forms where you’re wrong if you’re off balance and you try to strain to stay on balance; Contact asks for a different kind of balance. But when you’re learning how to fall, you can go with the fall, and follow it through and come up and everything’s fine. So you are actually learning how to follow through various kinds of forces, including gravity, safely. And if you’re a little bit off and you land on a joint oddly, you can turn it and roll, and follow it through rather than trying to hold on to positions that are actually very unstable. So in a way it’s safer for your joints.
The other part of it for me has to do with alertness - the fact that you’re not sure exactly how it is going to work out, and that it is dangerous to the degree that if you don’t pay attention, you could be injured. If you do pay attention you can follow it and deal with it. It might not be the most beautiful solution in the world, but it will be safe, generally, because as you train, your instincts get better at knowing how to follow these things rather than resist them.
We breed in a lot of defensive behaviour for our bodies because we’re not falling regularly or working with these forces.
Some of those habitual defenses that are more fear than anything else – like sticking your arms out straight and locking your elbows to stop yourself on the floor, rather than to reach for the floor and slide or roll, to try and stop it from coming rather than to come towards it and follow it through – those do change as people train. They get used to feeling their body with gravity and support coming from different directions, from the back and side and so on. So the instinct to soften and reach for something and slide, or to touch it lightly and then go further or something like that, is kind of re-trained into the body through Contact practice.
But I do think that the risk factor of being offbalance or falling wakes people up and keeps them awake a lot of the time. That is part of the benefit of the practice it seems, to keep people awake and focused on the present. And then they feel more fully engaged with their body, with their mind, with each other. And that’s a very pleasant feeling, it seems.

Yes, I think that’s how the risk factor interests me. And then arises the paradox of why aren’t we awake? Why do we have to arrive into sensation? Certainly there are psychological, cultural answers in any specific case, but I wonder if there is something more universal about awakeness?

Well, I don’t know about universal. I can only speak from my own experience of being in a body and working with people. But it seems that our culture and our lives prepare us to be awake to certain things. So we get kind of trained in certain ways, consciously or unconsciously about what we’re looking for, what we want, or are afraid of, what we’re used to.
And… the degree to which we are aware of our physical sensations probably has to do with survival, also. What do we need to know? If something is hurting you your body will tell you and you’ll move away from it. On the other hand people wear all kinds of uncomfortable clothing because they look good… But it doesn’t bother them because they are compensated for by this other aspect. The shoes that they’ll squeeze themselves into – it’s sort of fun rather than painful because it is toward an end that they want.
So I think that we’re incredibly flexible machines in what we pay attention to and why, and how we learn or adapt to different kinds of focuses.
If you need to feel very fine gradations of gravity in order to read your partner’s movements more closely, in order to balance with them, or get support from them, or follow through something successfully so that you can take the fall together, or so you can support the weight successfully without hurting yourself, or transition then the more sensitized you will become to these small gradations of change in the body.
And then in the meanwhile you realise that you actually, emotionally and psychologically feel better. You feel clearer, because you’ve focused on this task and a lot of your other worries or things that you’ve been doing during the day suddenly have disappeared and you think, “oh what happened? I guess I really like doing this activity.” And maybe you like doing the activity because you get compression and touch and you’re dancing and flying and doing all these things that feel good. But you might also like it just because it clears your mind of these other things that are cluttering it during the day and you feel free of...

Is it a meditation practice?

Well, I think because it asks you to focus initially on, let’s say the touch with your partner, the point of contact, in order to be able to keep balancing with it and have it roll or pass across the surface of your body so that you two are staying in touch, you have to concentrate on it. Otherwise it’s slipping and falling off and you’re off and you’re on, and the smooth continuity of that touch – which is one model for it, it’s not the only one, but it is one of the basic practices of how to stay in physical contact as your body is turning and changing, and changing levels – that requires concentration… to the touch. Because if you’re feeling it here, and you’re adjusting your body so you can touch and balance… and then suddenly you start thinking about what you’re going to have for dinner, before you know it, you’ve lost balance with your partner. You’re falling out of balance and you’re not touching any more. That loss of touch is a physical stimulation that tells you “oh, I lost it.” And then you retune your focus mentally and physically and then you regain it, the present contact.
And so it is a meditation practice in the sense that it is asking you to focus your mind on your body, on sensation rather than following some other idea or feeling. So it keeps bringing you back to your physical sensation, synchronising your body and your mind and time somehow, because it is in the present moment that they’re both meeting… achieving that kind of synch.
It is also synchronising both of our attention, on each other. On sensation in the present moment. So, there are a lot of things that are helping us to connect.

As I’ve been learning Contact, the sense that if I lose concentration I’ll fall and hurt myself was a real key for me in my learning. It was a support for the activity because since the rest of my daily life is about a different kind of attention, I seemed to need quite a serious message: “if you don’t be in your body now you could end up with an injury that you’ll then have to carry and deal with”. It was like a support or a permission to focus on my body. So I liked something you said about limitations, about respecting bodily limitations and pulling back before you reach the limit, and using body awareness as a guide for that.

Right, and to try and back it up a little bit so that you can redirect the flow of movement away from danger, rather than having to wait until the movement hits the limit and then realising, “oh I can’t go any further in that direction.” You are keyed in enough to your body sensation that you can feel the direction a movement is going, and you can feel your joint or your muscle coming to its limit. You can feel it arriving at its limit. So rather than only feeling it when you’ve hit the limit you can start to feel it as it arrives at its limit. It’s almost like a sound, or a tonality in the body. You can feel how it is almost reaching its limit, and you can measure that and redirect the flow of movement out of that direction, even just slightly. You don’t have to reverse it, you can just go a little bit to the right or the left and relieve whatever impending limit you were headed for so you can continue to dance.

How do you think you learn that? Obviously all the Contact training, but it seems like that’s quite a high level of bodily integration…

It is but we do it… It’s survival I think. We do it all the time. Part of it is visual, like you see the door jam, and you duck. You’re trained to see obstacles and to avoid them, unless you’re not paying attention. But I think also people who have practiced a lot of Contact… A friend wrote that Contact is sort of like walking on very uneven terrain. That your ankles and feet get a chance if you’re walking on very bumpy terrain, they expect to have to adjust. Whereas if you’re walking in a dance studio or something, you almost lose the ability to adjust because you’re assuming that everything is going to stay even. And in Contact you’re confronted with a situation every moment, of change, so it stimulates you to be adaptable. And that also is a very freeing feeling. Rather than your range getting smaller and smaller because you need to stay more stable because you’re not flexible any more mentally or physically, instead it goes the other direction: you become more flexible, more responsive and freer, you could say you’ve got more range.

Yeah, I heard of some research that links Western backpain to the fact that we walk on concrete surfaces all the time. The body is actually designed to have more range. On that point about range of movement and freedom… the two weeks have redefined what I mean by Contact Improvisation in terms of the freedom to improvise. But I’m not even totally sure what that means. After all it is an attention practice of following, so where does improvising come in? Where does it shift? Sometimes it seems Contact is only about following the forces, and the flow of weight but there’s this other element about freedom.

Well, there are many choices to make as you follow, as you are dialoguing with the forces. You can resist them: that’s one way of dialoguing with them. Your partner gives you a little extra weight and you can choose to match it and balance, or carry it somewhere, or… you can respond in a lot of different ways. Just like if you speak English with someone, you start a conversation, and you listen and you respond in the way that you want to. So even though you have a certain vocabulary, and mouth structure and ears and all of that and how loud you speak, or where you are, what context, how private it is… there are so many conditions that affect the choices that you make.
And likewise in dancing. We’re trying to be sensitive to the physical forces that govern our movement, and with that sensitivity we can have more choices about how we respond. So we’re not always at the point of absolute survival where there’s only one choice – and that isn’t true either – there are a lot of creative solutions to even a dire survival situation. But there are choices to be made.
And that’s where I think the teaching of technique and skills can be misunderstood. If you learn how to roll or fall safely, or slide or any of these things: they are to give you more options as you proceed. But you can misunderstand that and think, “oh the point of this is for me to get better at this one thing; to always do it in the perfect way when I am confronted with this situation.” So then you go towards a kind of virtuosity – and virtuosity in itself is not a problem. But it shouldn’t be at the expense of your choice-making. And it isn’t, ultimately. The more virtuosic you get, the more choices you should be able to have in responding to a given situation. So that’s where the dialogue comes in, that’s where the improvisation comes in. It’s not that I’m improvising because I have no choice, because I don’t have any skills, and I’m just sort of falling into this situation and whatever happens because of the forces, I’m at the mercy of it… But I start to have a relationship with it. So I can hear your weight coming, so to speak. And I can… take it in… I can feel my response. I can feel my limits, what I can do, and how I can respond. “No, I can’t do that. Well within the range of what I can do, I can go left or right, or I can go slow or fast.” You start improvising and there are many different responses to have.
That’s why I think it is dangerous to offer too many skills too specifically, as opposed to offering them as principles. And not necessarily saying “put your hand on this part and then do this and then do that…” Instead, you say “Yes, you can do that. And this is a bit of physical vocabulary you can try.” And maybe it will bring you into an experience of a movement you wouldn’t have risked otherwise, because you were so disorientated in that territory you wouldn’t have tried it. But let me orient you and say, put your hand here, feel for that – get the rhythm of this, and the other person does this… and then suddenly you’re doing something you never would have done before and you feel safe in it. But then you want to decode that so that you understand what the principle is. And then you can deconstruct it and reconstruct it in other situations that you choose. Or, forget it entirely and invent a new kind of way of being in dialogue with the forces, invent a new texture, invent a new permutation, or structure. And keep the improvisational aspect of it alive.

I really enjoyed getting a deeper sense of that. I still wonder though at this balance between an idea of intentional choice by someone who would actually feel free. There is definitely a part of me that feels free in it, but then on the other hand I wonder about how much control I actually have. Some of the best moments have been finding my body responding reflexively, in a way I didn’t think it could and getting the most amazing ride. And that’s also a way of dealing with fear – by trusting that that will happen. Steve Paxton writes something about this in the Sourcebook where he talks about the meditation practice, about making consciousness observe rather than dictate. And I think there’s a really interesting reconfiguration of intention in this practice.

Yes. I think it also flickers between, because there’s a lot of reflexive activity going on because you’re stimulating the body to feel danger in that way. You’re going past … you’re coming right up to the edge of control. And that’s different for different people. I might look much further off centre than someone who is just learning how to fall and feel that it is ok to be in a fluid state around balancing. Rather than balanced stability and trying to maintain that at all costs, there are the small movements inside balancing and then the bigger movements inside the sphere where gravity is starting to take you off balance, so you can follow that and redirect it in different ways and get a ride out of it. Like learning how far off balance is going to make it completely out of control for you and dangerous? So that exercise we did where you were tipping backwards, and you would catch yourself? You can start to control how far out of control you’re getting. I think actually in this dance form, now that we’re talking about it, I see that there are a lot of levels of intelligence being called into play. There’s reflexive bodily intelligence. There’s instinct. There is awareness, or consciousness. And there is also choice and decision.
Sometimes I use the image of “the third mind” – the idea that when there are two people meeting, to work on something, to collaborate, there’s this path which is a function of the two of them together, but neither one of them independently. The third mind is this path that emerges from the two people focusing toward one another and releasing excessive control over the situation, but also not abdicating responsibility for the whole thing. So you’re right there in the middle.
One way to check it might be to say “if you think you’re leading, stop leading”, so both people think they are following. But on the other hand I think you can become too passive, then the thing isn’t happening either. So you’re somewhere between leading and being passive. And that’s a very curious state. And I don’t think it is just one condition. I think that sometimes there’s a moment where you do take a decision. Maybe because your body is reaching a limit and you have to communicate to your partner – “no I can’t go any further in this direction. So I’m going to suggest, within the flow of this, how about a bit to the left?” And maybe my partner can’t go to the left, and they communicate back “no, not to the left” and I have to try “how about to the right?” because I can’t go straight ahead. And all this is happening very quickly! So we don’t always know when the activity is being slightly redirected, whether it’s because of the physical limitation, or a habit, or a desire or a reflex, or what’s going on. It’s a very interesting thing when you’re talking about two people collaborating on the direction of something that’s so physical.
So the activity of Contact Improvisation seems, in this holographic way that we’ve talked about, to be many things at the same time. It is engaging our intelligence on a lot of different levels.
And in the way that it is a conversation, it is not the same as a verbal conversation in that generally speaking, one listens and then one speaks, sequentially. But in Contact Improvisation it is at the same time: you are speaking and your response is a form of speech, is a statement in itself. So if you ask, when am I speaking and when am I responding? They are happening at the same time, very often. Sometimes it is more one than the other, but they are always mixed in. Obviously there’s a lot of study one can do about how the body works. But in a general way, one can say that it is functioning on a lot of different levels at once. It is speaking and listening at the same time. It is motor and sensory at the same time. It is leading and following at the same time.

And the activity is a practice of all of those things. It doesn’t actually require that you necessarily sort them out.

No, but perhaps it is one of the reasons why people feel exhilarated or notably alive after practicing it. They feel that their senses are sharpened, that they’re … there’s a feeling of being very dimensionally… activated so that you’re both able to receive and be active, not just one or the other.

The idea of the dance as conversation brings up the issue of meaning. One of the seemingly obvious differences from a verbal conversation is that you’re not meaning something when you dance in the same way that you are trying to mean something when you speak. But that seems almost too easy in a way because so much meaning does come out of the experience of dancing. And perhaps this is related to what you were saying about “metaphorising.” The way Contact Improvisation becomes such a useful metaphor for, well, everything. It seems to be so easily a source of metaphors.

Well, it can be. Because it is a specific activity: about meeting or balancing or improvising with physical forces and principles. Let’s say the principle is leverage. Leverage is a very physical thing. If I put a fulcrum under something, I push down over here and I get that to move up over there. So if you’re going to use leverage as an idea – like this gives me leverage in my relationship to so and so because I have this to offer… you know, whatever it is – the fact that there is such a thing as leverage, that it is a physical principle, allows you to refer to it in other ways. If it was a very generalised thing then it wouldn’t have the same meaning when you used it in another context. It would just mean maybe, influence, but it wouldn’t be a specific kind of influence like leverage is. Or ballast. Ballast is a kind of leverage like in a ship. If you can put a lot of weight on that side then I can lean further on this side. So if that principle of putting more weight on something in the opposite direction so that I can go further in this direction and it will balance itself out, if that principle is clear then I can use it when I’m talking about something else, as a metaphor. But if I don’t really know what specific force I’m talking about then it’s a very generalised use of that term. To use physical forces as a metaphor you need to know them well.

In contact it feels like you’re getting to understand and then use these principles experientially, not just as ideas.

Yes, a big part of what you’re learning in Contact Improvisation is the nature of the forces. So it’s not about just achieving a certain shape, but about reading the forces. And so as you get better at reading the rise and fall of weight, and the placement of centre and the structural support and the timing of the transfer, and all of these principles of how it works… like if I’m going to put my weight over your skeleton directly, instead of on the periphery or on the edge, I make it easier for you to lift me because I’m using your structure more efficiently. The same way I can use my structure more efficiently. So as I learn the structure of my body and how it works in the gravity system and momentum… you know we did that lift where you support someone in the direction they’re already going up, and then you start to turn? And by turning the momentum and the centrifugal force of the turn supports their weight as well as your activity. You’re just learning how to work with the forces so they become at your service. And then it takes less effort. As you feel these re-combinations – on the way down I can do this, on the way up I can… and every dance that you have adds more information to that sort of bank of knowledge, experiential knowledge. You have a little bit of idea thrown in – your teacher says notice this, notice that. But really, you’re experiencing a lot of variations on it and your body says “ooh why was that so easy? And wow, how did that happen?” And you only know it a little bit and you experience it a lot. And so your body starts learning from its experience, not just from the ideas. But it is a combination.

You said earlier that you can only dialogue once you know the language, so you can be in relationship to the forces…

But it works both ways, it’s not that you have to know what the forces are before you start dialoguing with them. Something can happen accidentally and you’re relaxed and you’re working with it and you think, wow – how did that work?

Oh that’s great because the paradox is that you are in the forces anyway, you’re using them, your body is using them. So it’s funny that you train to learn to use them, since you are already in them anyway.

Yes, it is a paradox. And then certain ones are revealed to you, perhaps by accident, or perhaps by experience of your partner, that you didn’t know existed. There’s a lot of unconscious learning going on. And then at various moments you become aware of it. So, on the meditation level you’re being led into a certain state of awareness: of relaxation and awareness. And then you’re just… setting the thing in motion and seeing what your body-mind learns from it and then passing that on to the next person that you dance with. And then there’s always new puzzles. And that’s what keeps the learning going. So you’re not just perfecting what you already know, but you’re also finding… it’s about learning.

Is that an opportunity that you give yourself? In the situation, I may think I know everything but you give yourself the opportunity not to know.

Hopefully. That is how you learn. And I guess there might be people who teach or study this just as a way to get good at certain things. But the fact is that the form is practiced in duet. That it is an open form, in the sense that you should be able to do it with anybody else who speaks that language. And every individual that you’re going to encounter has not only their own particular body but their own body of experience. So they’ve experienced different kinds of approaches and follow-throughs and sequencing and everything else and they’re kind of putting them up against yours. And in order for you to be able to dance together you have to adapt to one another, and so you learn. That’s why it seems like such a healthy and provocative thing to dance with people you’ve never danced with before, and that’s why people go to Jams in different places in order to stimulate their learning.

That’s a question of practicing, isn’t it, because dancing with people you know builds up a certain kind of trust.

Right, which you also want. And on the basis of that confidence and comfort you’ll explore other risks. So that’s definitely a positive thing. But then you find yourself in a lot of habits with certain people that you dance with all the time. And just sort of flowing along those well grooved pathways, you’re going to start feeling maybe a little dull, and wondering how to stimulate a feeling of freshness in it.

I was really surprised when you said at that conference: “you can’t talk too much about it”. Obviously you are involved in Contact Quarterly and writing about it, but I was surprised, because often in these body-mind practices there’s an attitude that talking about it reduces it somehow.

Well I feel that there are some points in one’s experience when it’s premature to try and articulate certain things. And if you’re forced to, it just is a little premature and it’s a strain. I don’t think it’s going to hurt anything that much. But I do think a balance is useful, of study and practice. And study on an experiential level and on an observing level. Even from the beginning we were making drawings on pieces of paper about pathways on the body, and it was playful, but it was observing and studying and questioning and bringing other materials to bare. Inventing new exercises and seeing what worked and what didn’t. And just experimenting.
I do think that it is possible to get overloaded on a cognitive level about certain principles or ideas or intentions, and just become really bogged down. So the freedom to improvise and be spontaneous gets a bit stymied. I also think it’s possible to practice in too unfocused a way. Ultimately you have to wake up for the reasons we started out with.
In teaching, every teacher is different in terms of that balance of play, image, scores, principles, vocabulary, techniques, talking, time to just let people dance. Or changing partners: how long do you let people develop their dance or are you changing partners a lot? Do you learn how to change partners but also learn how to develop a dance? There are lots of different styles. How much of a performative focus is there? Sometimes teachers who are naturally moving in that direction will set up practice situations that are actually quite performative rather than just from the practice point of view.
That’s the beauty of the fact that no pedagogy has been established per se. Each individual teacher puts themselves into it completely. And though you might first teach as you were taught, because you feel more secure about the material that you learned, you start to realise that it’s arbitrary to some degree. There are certain things that you want to teach people who are getting started, some safety things and some basic principles to get them oriented. But then you think “oh, today would be a good day to bring in this thing or to invent something to get people going because the energy is low.” And you just have to improvise your teaching. And then you make up a new exercise, like one that I had to invent on the spot early on because I thought, I can’t just show her how to do Contact and I didn’t have any words for it, so I invented something that I ended up keeping for a very long time, as an exercise: the “finger ouija” or finger-to-finger dance. The teaching is very creative in that sense, and personalised. I remember that when I was studying Tibetan Buddhism, there was a nice combination between practice and study practices. Doing it, just putting your butt on the cushion and following your breath - and your mind would go off and you’d come back to your breathing, for a long time, and you’d start to fall asleep and then you… your legs would start to ache and… you would just practice. And then other times we’d read texts or hear teachings at a dharma talk, and some things I wouldn’t understand that the teachers were talking about. They were nice stories, but I didn’t know what they were really getting at. And maybe two years later, after practising more, I would understand a little bit more of what they were getting at with the stories, but then there’d be other things that I didn’t understand. That idea of balancing your experiential practice with your understanding, your knowledge, seemed like a really workable way to go. And you can go too far one way or the other but I think it rights itself. Nothing’s going to go too wrong. You might just block and say “Oh my god I just have to forget about this.” Or, maybe the other way happens and you’ve been just so soaked in sensation that you need to think about some thing for a bit!

Well, I just read Christina Svane’s piece, “In Praise of Bad Dancing.” There were a lot of things I liked, but in particular the idea of Contact embracing the fear of itself… she’s talking about being scared to dance or scared to achieve what it is that she is aspiring to. I don’t know, what is your take on that?

Well, I’ve always loved her “In Praise of Bad Dancing.” I’ve read it a lot over the years to people, like in Round Robins; when people are dancing I’ll just read it. I think there is something very desirable about being in this open state, where you’re not sure what’s going to happen but you are present for it. And you’re putting your whole self into it and you’re finding limitations and you’re… The potential of feeling this sort of ecstatic freedom is extremely attractive and I think that the fear of failing… I mean both fears: the fear of getting what you want, in a certain way like, could you handle this? And the fear of not getting it. That’s where she, you know, brings it around, saying that it’s time we called it home. “The moments of in tune, in sync in touch… the moments where you’re riding the shared wave… these moments are rare.” But it’s the invitation, the promise of the invitation, that never leaves us.
What she describes as this ecstatic state, or this “in sync, in tune, ride of shared energy,” you know that it’s there. I’m not saying that that is necessarily the highest order of the dance. The struggling dances have their beauty, too. It’s very beautiful to stay committed to something that isn’t working out. And then you feel the tremendous satisfaction of finding a way through that mismatch. It’s one thing when you have a natural rapport or affinity with someone and as soon you touch them it’s like beautiful and you don’t even know how you got there. So when you start with someone and it’s not easy, your rhythms are not necessarily matching up very well, or your tonalities or your desire… whether you’re too slow or fast or are not quite matching up… you have to keep relaxing to find where you can meet each other.