Today while driving home, I heard an episode of the TED radio hour that gave me new ways of articulating why the practice of contact improvisation is so fulfilling to me.
Yes, I find CI creatively fulfilling. It is part of my artistic life and I love the challenge of shaping a satisfying sequence while I ride the wild unpredictability of shared weight and momentum (even if I am the only one who can fully bear witness to the patterns of pressure, texture, shape, speed, mood, connection, exertion and emotion that compose my dance.) But I also find CI fulfilling as a social practice–as a life practice–in ways that go beyond aesthetics and creativity.
Play is key. Listening to the scientists and artists on the TED radio hour talk about the many valuable aspects of play—and the many reasons that we, as a species, play into adulthood–I found myself smiling in recognition. Contact improvisation is deep play and in practicing it I have experienced and witnessed the benefits they named.
What benefits? Here are a few that stood out to me (and there’s a link to the full podcast below if you’d like to listen for yourself):
- Play leads to shared joy, positive emotions, dopamine release, and the building of trust; play builds empathy with strangers very quickly.
- Play allows us to explore options we wouldn’t explore otherwise, building our capacity for adaptability.
- Play offers a place for us to push our limits, showing us we are capable of opening to new possibilities in our lives.
- Play gives us joy, and that itself can change us.
(Ideas from Improv Everywhere founder Charlie Todd, psychiatrist Dr. Stuart Brown, and primatologist Dr. Isabel Behncke Izquierdo)
My contact improvisation students at the college where I teach exhibit all these benefits of play. They often tell me that the philosophy of contact improvisation helps them navigate situations outside of dance. They find themselves taking a more playful, experimental approach in the tasks and challenges of their day to day lives, and notice how this helps them move around blockages and take new risks. Entering into the practice of CI, they are often surprised by their capacity for joy and connection in a room full of relative strangers–strangers who remarkably quickly become well-known and trusted—and they resolve to be more playful with others in their lives. Many try to teach parts of contact improvisation to their friends, lovers, and family members. My students notice that they learn to step into the flow of CI and transform their energy–leaving class in a better mood than the one they came in with. They begin to believe in their own power to transform their energy and state of mind, changing their sense of what is possible and becoming more adaptable. And often they come back to CI class, semester after semester, explaining that they’ve found CI to be a practice that cultivates joy in their lives, that resets their state of being and their sense of possibilities, and that feeds their resiliency.
I too have experienced all these things that my students find. And I continue to experience them, 20 years into my CI practice.
CI is a messy dance form. It doesn’t conform to the values of the Western high art traditions that all-too-often dominate the ways people view dance (at least in the U.S.) Even its artistry is a private kind, only fully perceptible to the people inside the dance. It’s hard to explain (especially in the academic and dance-as-art worlds where I spend much of my time) why this practice matters (as more than preparation for partnering choreography)–why it matters on its own terms. These reflections on play give me new words to share the depth I find in CI.