Zjamal Xanitha
Helen Clarke Lapin
The following is a transcript of the first part of a longer conversation between Helen Clarke Lapin and Zjamal Xanitha on the road to Avalon voicing some of their concerns and experiences of CI dancing, teaching and jamming.
ZJ: I've been thinking about Contact Improvisation as an ongoing practice, in the way that Martial Arts is a practice. Martial Arts practitioners often have a long disciplined training in their form. I feel there is an infinite learning process within Contact. We need to continue to investigate the form - to have both an internal and external inquiry to our moving selves. It's important to track our individual processes and responses and perhaps even more importantly to receive guidance and information from a teacher.
H: Yes, both CI and Martial Arts are physical practices that can be continually refined over a long period of time. I was struck by the large number of veteran contact practitioners who attended CI 25 (the 25th anniversary of Contact Improvisation.), which just goes to show that this form sustains people's interest over many years. But sometimes when I think of Martial Arts it seems so serious! (laughs). Part of the delight of CI is that it is playful.
ZJ: Yeah, I agree with you. I think the issue is our relationship to playfulness and responsibility. I like to think of mirth and reverence as twin sisters - you can't have one without the other. But often that is what happens - we do have one without the other. A practise that is only spontaneous and playful becomes ungrounded, and the other way around - the austerity that you are talking about in martial arts loses a sense of flow and play, a generosity of spirit. I think you've got to have both.
H: What I do appreciate in Martial Arts is their respect for extensive training and that that's the pre-requisite for becoming a teacher.
ZJ: When I first started dancing professionally in the late '70's, I studied with Raewyn Thorburn. I learnt how to teach by travelling around with her and watching her plan and teach her classes, and eventually beginning to teach under her supervision. The apprentice/mentor relationship doesn't seem so common anymore. That's really a pity because it's such an important and rare relationship and gives you enormous insight into the professional craft.
H: My initiation into teaching was similar. In Vancouver with Linda Rubin we were expected to assist her teaching for a year and then teach under her supervision before teaching on our own. That was a very supportive way of starting to teach.
ZJ: Wouldn't it be great to have that kind of set-up for new contact teachers? I'm letting my mind wander around the idea of how we educate ourselves in a form like CI where there are various needs - to investigate things on a sensory level in your own body, to improvise and invent your own practice, and the need for safe practice. There is a necessity for a thorough working knowledge of the principles. Mary Fulkerson was talking about this in her article ėTaking the Glove without the Hand' in CQ Winter/Spring ė96. The principles of physics that underlie an informed CI practice - momentum, gravity, counterthrust, inertia - all that takes years of investigating and studying.
H: In my classes
I often used to quote Steve Paxton saying that ultimately "the dancing
does the teaching". But I think that taken out of context there can be the danger
of encouraging an attitude of "well, I'll just go to jams and the dancing will
teach me." I think the dancing does teach us if we can take into our dancing
tools/principles that keep us responsive. It's a safety issue for me. I appreciated
Nancy Stark Smith in her recent visit expressing her concern about jams
that are open to people that have never trained in the form and don't have that
frame of warm up and warm down, focus and understanding of safe dance practice
in CI.
ZJ: We are guided into the possibility of the dancing teaching itself by the developmental process the teacher creates. I imagine that in Steve Paxton saying, "the dancing does the teaching" he would have already created an incredible container of understanding and awareness for that to happen. If you put a random set of exercises together you don't get the dancing teaching itself. On the other hand, if you have an understanding of the principles of CI, your work can support an investigation into a particular focus that has it's own rewards. There is a pedagogical aspect to the teaching.
H: My recent development as a teacher has been a matter of training myself to be able to see, and I feel that's taken a long time. As my ability to see what's happening in a student's body becomes more refined my teaching has become more of an improvisational response. So I can go in with a plan and abandon it when I see what else is needed.
ZJ: Developing that kind of perception does take a long time. Being able to serve what's needed in the moment skilfully also takes years to cultivate. When I teach a series of classes or a year curriculum of classes I experience another form of that improvisational teaching relationship you are talking about. I can see from within the practise and inside the structure of the class where we need to go next. For example, in the class I just taught, I see that we need to work opening the back and so my next class would be about that. There's a subtle kinaesthetic relationship to the teaching that develops in an ongoing class process.
H: And that's the privilege of teaching ongoing classes - basically the material provides itself.
ZJ: And also the privilege of studying in an ongoing way is that you get supported in your development as an improviser and contactor through the integrity of your teacher. The continuing class situation cultivates respect for the process of the teacher being able to see what you need.
H: And guide you into it. Being your student today opened up new ways of looking at familiar material. For example, I've done navel radiation many times but the way you presented it today gave me new ways of using it and of experiencing it. And maybe the way I am ready to experience it has changed because of my own practice. It's always a pleasure to revisit fundamental principles.
ZJ: Exactly! I felt that too when Saliq came to teach in Melbourne recently. I've done navel radiation hundreds of times too but this time I still had a physical experience that I've never had before. It wasn't a new emotional or mental experience, but a new physiological understanding. Our body knowledge is infinite, we can keep exploring and finding new depth in even really old, familiar material.
H: In my teaching I notice that students often won't hear something though you may repeat it many times - they'll hear it when they're ready to hear it. Which is only possible if there is a situation of being an ongoing student. I think that in Australia there is a tendency after workshops to assume the attitude of "got that, don't need to do that again," and I think its a shame. It's really short sighted.
ZJ: Yep.
H: I still feel nourished by being a student. I don't know if it's an Australian thing or not that being a student is regarded as hard work and not very much fun. My start in contact was full of fun and hard work. A group of nine of us invited teachers to Vancouver and we travelled a lot to study with other teachers. In between we would practise what we'd learnt together. It made a great difference to our dancing to pursue teachers and I think it was a very rich time. The young dancers involved in contact in Melbourne remind me of that time with their lovely sense of community and excitement.
ZJ: Yes isn't it great to lab and research together? It gives such a multi-faceted focus to your exploration. I still find that excitement taking class. In terms of my own inspiration in dancing and dueting, I much prefer the duets I have in a class situation to the duets I have in a jam. I feel our minds are focused and therefore the subtlety, nuance and depth of the dance is so much richer - you can really meet in the quality of the dance. When you've got clear parameters you can have a research adventure together. In jamming I often find I am in a much more habitual frame of mind, so I don't reach that active engagement in a particular quality that I experience when I'm given a focus from a teacher.
H: The greatest teachers for me, not necessarily just in contact work but the greatest teachers of anything, are people that are involved in a learning process themselves. They bring their curiousity into their teaching and role model that we are never experts.
to be continued next issue
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