I was embarrassed to look but too curious not to. My first 'contact' with contact improvisational dance was on the beach in Tel Aviv. Were they athletes or acrobats? I wondered, as I watched legs and arms tangle together - someone's pelvis on another person's shoulder, a stomach on a back. They flipped, caressed and slid down each other's legs in perfect unison as the late Friday afternoon sun sank into the horizon.
"Wanna dance?" asked an attractive young man who was standing beside me in the circle, as we watched the couple in the center break apart and join the ring.
Dance? What in the world was he talking about? What we were watching certainly didn't fit inside any dance genre that I knew about.
Even sensual Latino dancing or Capoeira had some sort of set rhythm and boundaries. But this unchoreographed free-for-all on the beach seemed too wild - even though, secretly, a part of me wished I could break through my own physical boundaries.
The African jimba drum was beating.
"No thanks. Just watching."
The young guy smiled, surveyed the area and found someone else. The two entered the circle, and in a similar manner as the first couple, composed a personal dance: a hand on the neck, a roll across the floor, a lift and a pull. No one movement could be predicted because the dancers were improvising based on their feelings and the physical places they wanted to explore.
It's contact improvisation, my friend Rivi later explained, at a weekend 'jam' that she organized. Rivi Nissim - architect, photographer and dancer - organizes contact workshops and festivals that celebrate the freeform dance style people have come to know as "contact." She runs a website http://www.bodyways.org/ which gives up to date information on dance workshops, meetings and happenings.
"I looked for a place to dance without having to ‘learn the steps by heart,' improvisation with imagination," says Rivi. "Everybody needs to dance, move, sing, feel, let go. Most of us are constrained to our chairs by society. Contact is just one of the activities that bring back the natural necessities of our being like movement and play."
Rivi likes that she can communicate with people without words through contact dance.
Plus our day-to-day life with its "continuous physical constraints like sitting still, traffic jams, and keeping quiet for too long constrain our imagination and simple happiness," says Rivi, who explains that contact can be whatever you want it to be.
"Contact can be like the game of two or three puppies. It can be a virtuous acrobatic dance. It can even be an argument or a misunderstanding."
Contact Improvisation can be traced back to the early 1970s when dancer Steve Paxton and a group of thirty dancers were improvising in a Chinatown loft in NYC.
By January of 1972, Paxton had included aspects of aikido into a performance with eleven other dancers. They rolled, jumped and wrestled onstage to a fascinated audience. A movement was born.
"By relaxing and expanding our Chi into the universe, we restore the connection from our center to the center of the other and from our center back to gravity and to earth," writes Ilanit Tadmor, a contact dance teacher.
Ilanit told me she got into contact dancing because she like Rivi couldn't dance to anyone else's rhythm but her own.
This idea resonated with me. I thought about myself as a young girl, bursting with energy and the desire to express myself, but not able to because I couldn't copy the moves the other girls picked up from MTV.
Maybe this contact dancing is a way for us to throw away the western concept of dancer and dance and to leave a space for a new kind of learning, listening and expression.
After some basic practice of my own, I understood that contact can be therapeutic not only in the physical sense but in the emotional realm as well.
During a 'light' session of contact improvisation at a dance center in Tel Aviv I was partnered with a woman that helped me see my fears. I touched her hand ever so lightly; first she guided me to corners of the room; then I her.
Later on in the evening I asked, "Are you a lesbian? I had a feeling that you were attracted to me." I didn't like the fact that I felt this, but I needed to bring it up.
"No. I am married with three children," she replied matter-of-factly.
In subsequent sessions, a whole range of emotions were brought up depending on my partner, especially when our bodies were close, at a distance where no secrets or , can be kept inside.
I personally found this dialogue with strangers too risky to endure on a regular basis, especially when I was matched with partners who were not experienced in letting their emotions flow; or partners who weren't used to being in such close contact with women.
"It's completely personal and emotional," said Amanda Loulaki, a dancer interviewed by the Village Voice in New York. "When I first started I had a hard time giving the weight to other people - I was always lifting. The moment I was able to [lean] on somebody else was also the moment I was able to stick up for myself."
Today practitioners agree that there are many ways of "making contact" through contact improvisation dance and generally whatever approach is taken, participants usually feel a deep emotional, physical, and mental change.
For myself, I tend to keep my physical contact limited to a small group of dear friends, but I am richer for the contact improvisation experience. Sometimes knowing one's limits can also be a positive thing.
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