contact improvisation

Contact Improv.

The fact that I have been doing C.I. for more that 36 years, combined with my unique vision of it’s possibilities, gives me a different view of what is going on in a jam. You might be wondering how I could have been doing C.I. for more that 36 years when that puts me before it’s inception date. When I was in California in the late 60’s I was exploring the fringes of movement with one partner. Unfortunately he lived and hour away from me and we didn’t have enough time to take it as far as I would have liked. When I moved to the East Coast, I was pleased to find out about C.I. which I immediately recognized as a continuation of the work that Paul and I had been exploring in San Francisco. It wasn’t long before I realized that others did not share the same intention that I had of using this to go beyond the known. It was very much a “form” back then. I was regularly castigated for not just doing movements that “followed the flow”. The experience of any type of resistence or anything that looked like pushing or pulling were strictly forbidden. Feelings, of course, had no place whatsoever. C.I., it seemed, appealed to people with very rigid mindsets. This seemed to reach a peak when I came to Austin about 15 years ago.
Now here is something amazing. Everything that is was offering the contact community at that peak 15 years ago that is was so rejected for, is now a completely integral part of what contact is known to be !! People who are just beginning contact are able to enter contact improv in this space and assume that it has always been like this.
How is it that so much of my vision of Contact has come into manifestation when I have never taught anyone? It is because the coming together of people that has been labeled “contact improvisation” is not idiosyncratic. In other words it is not an arbitrary invention of human minds. Contact improv. has more in common with breathing that it does with dance ! There are ideas that people have developed that can support you in breathing better, but we are all breathing whether we study it or not. It is just as innate for people to know what to do when they come together in touch. People can be guided to simply “loose” their minds and let their bodies do what they already know how to do, but it is not necessary to teach exact movements as it is in dance.
Contact Improvisation has gotten to the place where it runs exactly parallel with the work I have been doing except for two points. Unfortunately, these are the most important two points of all. The first point can be stated as my absolute commitment and dedication to the scientifically and spiritually proven fact that the physical world is a subset of our mind !! The second is related to the first and involves the total commitment to the continuity of the Work. The relationship between the two points looks like this: I enter into each “dance” knowing that the person I am with is not constrained to an idea of a “physical” body or “physical” limitations of any sort, and then for me there should be a continuity of the dance because there is no “physical” world to leave the dance and return to. The continuity is only broken because the other person holds their idea of the physical world as more important than the connection with me.
For example, it someone is to enter a dance with ideas such as; “I’m too old, I’m married, I’m too young, I only have one leg, etc., and considers any of this to be “real” it will subtly flavor the gestalt of the dance. Everyone has thoughts like these and it not a matter of trying to eliminate them. The idea is just to realize that they are not “real” and therefore, paradoxically, can be brought INTO the dance and not left outside as proof of the limitations of the “physical world”. I know that some people are doing this some of the time, but my commitment to it is TOTAL. I had a mind shifting experience at the age of 6 that left me seeing the world differently than others.
For me, jams lack the depth of focus that I know is possible and that I crave.

My real interest is in meeting one woman who will absolutely commit to this work 24/7
So I go to jams hoping to meet her.