It then evolved to what we experience it as being today: a participatory art form. Even though social and community aspects are certainly a relevant aspect of it, I prefer the term “participatory art form“ to “social dance form“. I like to see it as a tool not only for fostering human relationships and values, but also as a container for artistic research.

A very accessible container, making dance encounters with highly trained experts possible. It has been a source for inspiration for numerous artists who applied principles to their work.

I suspect that it is the participatory nature of CI that has kept it marginal in the writings on contemporary dance (and in the funding politics of dance). Dieter Heitkamp, Tinu Hettich and I are creating a web-tool for documentation and exchange within the community as well as information of non-practitioners and easy accessibility for research (www.contactencyclopedia.net).

In addition to inspiring choreographers, encouraging artists with no dance training to participate in dancing and dance making, developing skills and knowledge about partnering and awareness, CI classes and jams were essential in Germany for the emergence of what is now a well established contemporary freelance dance and movement research scene.

Yet, it might be the egalitarian principles that are crucial for both the benefit of the form and its (seeming) stagnation and marginalization.

Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities, 1991) suggests that the ability to enunciate the idea of events occurring ‘at the same time’ when describing the history of any ‘imagined community’ (a nation, a movement, a sub-culture, to give a few examples) is one of the features of modernity. This was made possible by the invention and spread of the printing press which allowed simultaneous, popular communication through newspapers and novels. That sense of events occurring at the ‘same time’ must surely be heightened by the internet, and our geographical mobility.

Monumental history – the mapping of events across common time-lines – can be contrasted with other types of history imbued with different senses of time: cursive history (Nietzsche), for instance, which arises out of the accumulation of actions, gestures, lives and so on, of peoples within specific cultures. This kind of history is much more difficult to map in any linear sense or to show across a common time line without sacrificing so much as to make the mapping near worthless.

The resistance to writing one history of contact improvisation is linked to a resistance to codify it. We wish to share the form, learn from each other, but it would be a shame to pass over the specific histories and dialects which have arisen in intimate communities and through individual experience, which may not be translatable across time or with a sense of constant, shared time.

As Nancy Stark Smith points out by titling her report “one history of Contact Improvisation”, there are many different views on what CI has been, how it developed, how it has been taught. This helped keep the form alive: dynamic and growing.

The freedom and power given to teachers enable them to integrate their interests, specific skills and knowledge from other fields into CI, be it sports, sciences, politics, therapy, social work, sex work…

The non-hierarchical structure of the form influences its development: while a certain canon of “basic” exercises has established, there are innumerable specific exercises invented regularly. Styles and approaches form within smaller communities.

As you pointed out, Simon, time and geographical expansion brings a need for references. And I do agree that this process of verbalization needs to be done with care.

ske, 11 Feb 09. It‘s worth adding that I am not a contact improviser, although I have done a lot of it. My practice is—for the most part—a solo improvisation practice (sometimes observed, other times not). The exception here is the work I do with Kirstie Simson (who has a long history with the first wave: Paxton, Stark-Smith etc). One of her superb exercises is “listening with hands that don‘t want anything“ … in which we (dancing in duos) make simple points of contact with our hands (as the other dancer moves down a space). Its simplicity belies the complexity of what it means to listen and not want. To listen and not want! This embraces not only the possibility of presence (and an inevitable openness to what might happen, and what can happen), but also the back-grounding of ego in the process of attention.

ske, 11 Feb 09. I see contact improvisation as being at a crossroads. Its popularity has seen a strong (but not preordained or purposeful) shift towards codification as it is taught around the world (something I think Nancy Stark-Smith has resisted – at least in my various experiences of her work/teaching). We now recognise the usual form of the listening (through the point of contact) – and it often leads towards particular ways of moving. Different actions have been given names (http://slightly.net/improv/?p=73) and in their naming the way in which they become known by dancers has shifted. And yet I still experience a great deal of strength in what I come to understand and embody through the information and sensitivity provided (or shared) by another moving human being. It complicates and tones my solo improvisation practice, and reminds me (more broadly) of my place in a community of dancing (landing a genuine sense of the Other as I am working). It peoples the work.

ske, 1 Mar 09. I happened across the quote below this morning, written by Lisa Nelson. It reminded me just how easy it is in these discussions to forget the role of the audience in improvisation (or performance more generally). I like how Lisa describes an “improvisational dilemma for both observer and performer” (although of course, the term “observer” is ambiguous. Does she mean the other performer(s), audience …?).

“Within an improvisational framework, I’ve looked for the communication systems that could encompass both the choreographic craft and the experience of dancing. In tuning scores, I discovered a tool to make visible the space between the arbitrary and the inevitable, an improvisational dilemma for both observer and performer.” Lisa Nelson (sourced from publicity for her recent performance with Scott Smith in Brighton, UK)

One of the things we learn in an improvisation practice is to give up on anticipation, or perhaps to give up on the notion that the future is a ‘preexisting arrangement’ which we are attempting to get to and enact. We try to stop assuming that we know what will come next and instead open ourselves to the multiple (which I imagine being denoted mathematically as ‘reoccurring’) possibilities for the future. As a consequence, the idea of ‘pure action’ is sometimes put forward as ideal state that we ought to be working towards. (If this were described mathematically, it could be graphically shown as an asymptote. Our conscious action/movement would be curve A and ‘pure action’ would be curve B, with the relationship between A and B being asymptotic.) I often find that this privileging of ‘pure action’ is accompanied by a correlating hierarchy of body parts. Dancing with nervous systems is good. Dancing in your head is bad. The body is mapped with speeds and temporalities, if only metaphorically. According to this schema, nervous systems are fast – capable of pure action and reaction. Heads are slow: bogged down with the “rearrangement of the pre-existing”, perhaps. It is as if brains are too distant from the action; locked away in our skulls.

One of the reasons that I like Bergson’s description of the swordsman is that it undercuts the idea of ‘pure action’. It reminds us that action always entails both anticipation and memory. The nervous system is part of the brain, and the nervous system insinuates itself into most every part of our body. The nervous system, as part of the brain, has memories which allow it to anticipate.

I‘ve been thinking about repetition in improvisation. This is because I‘ve been working (for some time) with developing improvisations for quite specific dramaturgical framings and seeking ways of arriving at presence within these framings.

Recently I have been working in Melbourne with choreographer Helen Herbertson, and we began talking about the “repeat“ word. Helen would sometimes say (jokingly) “going back to“ – as a means of avoiding saying “Could you repeat that?“! Perhaps repeating an improvisation might mean settling on the energetic essences of the physical actions, whilst maintaining an engagement with the new in the improvisations. The trade-off is clear in this kind of work: to try and locate the past but risk never arriving back at what it was that first engaged us/me, or to acknowledge a more settled state of being that potentially reduces the quality of attention or engagement with the unknown.

The desire for me is to remain in the “first week“ (or the first instance), whilst accessing (forward in time) the accumulation of the weeks of work. This is clearly impossible, but the idea might provide flexibility in my attention and listening that quietly emboldens the promise of the past. Far from wanting to drop what has gone and simply move on, I am seeking to perform at the nexus of the known (but still unfamiliar and difficult to pin down) past and the surprising now.

Perhaps this is where the philosophy of Duration might be useful …

Henri Bergson’s Pure Duration is a form of temporal synthesis, the “horizon of inner life” (Guerlac 2006 p.81) in which quality, feeling and sensation are experienced.

“Pure Duration is the form taken by the succession of our inner states of consciousness when our self lets itself live, when it abstains from establishing a separation between the present state and anterior states” (Bergson 1996 p.75).

What does this mean?

Ordinarily, we consider time to be linear. This does not mean that it only ‘goes forward‘, but rather that it has a spatial element. This moment is placed next to this one, and so on. (Bergson uses the example of the hands of a clock). What is difficult to understand about Bergson‘s Duration is that it rejects spatiality. His argument is that as soon as we even consider the past and present and future, we turn duration into time. In other words, by conceptualising the past and present (and future) we spatialise and divide the experience of Pure Duration and render it as something different: time.

For Bergson, Duration is how we experience the ‘flow of consciousness‘. The power of Duration in synthesizing the flow of memory offers an escape from temporal linearity. To recognise the radical power of Bergsonian memory invites the prospect that the past is more than simply the detritus of our future, but instead is propelling us there.

“… we must enter into the thickness of a duration where our memories are forged” (Cariou 1999 p.102).

Bergson’s memory is dynamic, emergent, disruptive, surprising, and central to corporeal action. Its unique association with perception draws the past into the present, and connects it with imminent action. This is critical: rather than proceeding from the present to the past, Bergsonian memory proceeds from the past into the present, drawn to perception’s role as an “occasion for remembering” (Bergson 1988 p.66), and exists to serve action, within the flow of novelty producing Duration.

So what?

A concern for novelty—sparked by the “flare of becoming” (Guerlac 2006 p.189)—steers us away from metaphors of space in which the cultural contours of the body are statically mapped. Instead, our bodies are invigorated by their experience of Duration—dynamic, novel, inventive, and un-fixed—in which “the same does not remain the same” (Bergson 1996 p.79).

The paradox, however, remains. I sustain an overwhelming interest in this living remembering (Duration), but at the same time feel restrained by the spatiotemporal foregrounding of language, of performativity, of presence.

But perhaps, at the very least, Bergson’s resolve to celebrate non-spatialised (1) time might challenge us to seek other metaphors, other ways of articulating memory, and remembering, and the embodied singular flow of Pure Duration; to be active “as a moment in our own being in the world” (Matthews 1999 p.131); to explore a poetics of Pure Duration in which memory ceases to be consumed via a “rearrangement of the pre-existing” (Mullarkey 1999 p.9) or a clinging to nostalgia, and instead assures novelty via the “radical force of the time of becoming” (Guerlac 2006 p.63).

In Bergson’s(2) analysis of action he presents the following consideration of a swordsman:

“The swordsman knows perfectly well that it is the movement of the button [the tip of the sword] which has pulled the épée, the épée which has taken the arm along with it, and the arm which has stretched the body as it itself is stretched: one cannot lunge properly or make a straight lunge except after feeling things in that way. To put them in the inverse order is to reconstruct, and this is to philosophize; anyway, it is to make explicit what is implicit, instead of restricting oneself to the demands of pure action …” (Bergson, cited in Moore 1999 p.139).

I might pick up on this idea of presence invoking a sense of the spatial. To be present implies (whether we mean it or not) knowing where one is located. But, at the same time, we tend to refer to the temporal—of being in the now for example—as being a critical aspect of presence. Bergsonian Duration frees the experience of presence from location or space. It marks the experience as a temporal one, but not one that is locked to the current. Rather, Duration exists in flight through time(3); it demands (gently) that presence be thought of as consciousness: as flow through memory, temporality, and attention.

(1) I wonder if it is helpful, or possible, to imagine non-spatialised time; or rather that, as dancers, it is useful to imagine that neither space nor time are subordinate to the other.
(2) Bertrand Russell once described Bergson as “not a philosopher at all, but merely a mediocre poet” (Guerlac 2006 p.12). He wrote: “When his philosophy will have triumphed, it is supposed that argument will cease, and intellect will be lulled to sleep on the heaving sea of intuition.” (Russell, cited in Guerlac 2006 p.28).
(3) See how hard it is to write without invoking spatial metaphors!: “marks“, “through“. In other words, to write about presence denatures it. Writing is a spatialised act, its primary weapons are metaphors of space. it is nigh impossible not to feel clumsy when writing Duration.