If improvisation tends toward fixity, it is the job of improvisers to unravel its becomings.  Recognizing that contact improvisation is a name that has become familiar territory for many, the Touch & Play festival offers a new angle from which to explore the permutations and explosions of a touch-based movement practice which has arguably both resisted and succumbed to definition.  This research project investigates the openings created in our thinking about contact and improvisation through the frame of the Touch & Play experiment, and asks participants to articulate how their work relates to wider frames of ‘the world’ in social, natural and mental spheres.

touch + talk is a series of curated moving conversations around practice, experimentation and thoughts about how our touching and playing impacts on the world around us.  Why do we do what we do?  As Phillip Gehmacher, curator of the walk + talk performance series featuring choreographers asks, ‘How can you make sense of your own physicality and how can you speak of it?’ (Gehmacher 2009).  And, in touch + talk, how can you do this in tactile conversation with others confronting the same challenge?

touch + talk will ideally take place once each day throughout the experiment; each session will focus on one question and will be a maximum of twenty minutes.

Two or three responders will address a question together by moving and talking in a studio or stage space with an audience present.  The list of questions will be made available to the participants of the Touch & Play experiment and individuals can nominate themselves to address a particular question and sign up to perform touch + talk on a particular day.

Spillout from these encounters can take the form of further discussion, labs or performances.

Questions on the palette include those posed to dance makers by Chrysa Parkinson, Anna Halprin, and the 2007 project by Good Move, AT LARGE with Reasonable Doubt.

• Why do you dance/move/touch/play?
• What questions underlie your practice?
• What do you want others to receive from your work?
• How is your work provocative?
• What challenges you most in your practice?
• How does your practice relate to health – that of yourself and others?
• How does your work relate to the environment you live in?
• How do you refine or develop your senses? (Parkinson 2010).
• What are the by-products of your work?  What by-products do you think are garbage, or toxic, or wasted? (Parkinson 2010)
• How do you use and challenge your desires?
• How does your practice impact upon the nonhuman?
• Is there anything you would like to see change in your community of practitioners?

If you don’t understand the question, answer what you think it means.

Read Malaika Sarco-Thomas‘ biography

We experiment with swarm behaviour by setting collective scores and giving single individuals extra ideas to touch and lead the swarm. Combined with different types of games like competition (agon), chance (alea), simulation (mimicry) and vertigo (ilinx) such a jam could reveal hidden emotional bonds in a community. We try to awake the swarm intelligence in us.

Read Betrand Kludor’s biography

°1 EMOTIONAL BODY FRAMING – Our bodies hide our deep emotional grammar. We sharpen awareness and communication of our six basic emotions joy, anger, disgust, sadness, fear and surprise. By adapting our bodies to the various emotional states we plunge into these different moods. Reverse body reading is one way to induce emotions deliberately. We focus on core patterns of body language (f. ex. closing, crossing, expanding) and facial expressions. We experiment with different emotional touches and other contacts.

°2 GAMESTORMING – Having sharpened our basic emotional states, we start to construct new realities, where to use them. We play with different types of games like competition (agon), chance (alea), simulation (mimicry) and vertigo (ilinx). Being a child every moment in life is part of an interesting game. We make up our own rules. The technique of gamestorming tries to chase away the parents in our heads

Read Bertrand Kludor’s biography

I’ve been investigating and researching a project called ‘lesbian bodies/contact improvisation’ with my local community (amazingly abundant with queer women!)  in collaboration with lesbian/queer women dancers in Ireland. Our investigations include dancing the ‘shadow of contact’ score, which was generated by and came to us from the West Coast/San Francisco contact community. In it, participants write their edgiest questions on slips of paper, in this case specifically regarding sexuality and gender, initially focused on questions of if and how our experiences and identities as lesbians/queer women informed or shifted our dancing or interactions with other dancers. These questions are shuffled and anonymously asked to dancers as they move. Dancers respond both verbally and with their movement. The information that arises from kinetic space, from bodies in contact, can be deeply surprising, reveal the unexpected and offer pathways into truths we weren’t previously aware of. We’ve videoed and audio-recorded some of our research. Some of us offered a performance of it at Mazopalooza, a CI festival in Mazomanie, WI in January 2011.

http://www.vimeo.com/21837906

I would like to bring this exploration to a wider community (across genders and sexualities), using this score as a method to research gender and sexuality as we move, dance and find words. Coming from a queer-centric and kinetic perspective, this research offers gifts and depth to all of us. For me, gathering experience and information from a wide spectrum of people will deepen the research (and it will be fun!). During our time, if participants desire, we can play with variations on the score (i.e. same sex scores, all queer score, etc). I am happy to work the malleability of the score and with the collective curiosities of the group. Performance of the score is certainly possible

Read Kim Lasdon’s biography

I am including a series of questions and notes on responses that arose from the ongoing lesbian bodies/contact improvisation project as an example of where these explorations can go. This information is supplemental.

Questions from 12/5/10:

Is it possible to have two women dancing together in a way that could be read as lesbian without having any sexual content or sexual references? What is that way?

Is there a lesbian way of being? Is there a lesbian way of dancing?

How does identity arise in dance?

Gendered dance

How much of dancing as (the category) ‘woman’ is dancing as lesbian and how much of dancing as lesbian is dancing as woman?

If there is no fixed lesbian identity, or of there are so many variant lesbian identities, how do you make dance/performance of lesbian visible/readable in CI? Will it always be audience dependant?

In CI, if a wash of heterosexuality/heteronormativity is placed on everyone, how do we disrupt that as lesbians? Can the dances be queered, especially if our dance partners cannot read it? How?

Queer gender or queer sexuality? Are there ways to queer gender without queering sexuality and viceversa? What are they? Are there ways that lesbians queer gender in CI without queering sexuality in CI? What are they? How do our genders inform our sexualities and viceversa?

At jams (as in Madison) where sexualized energy is downplayed and discouraged, what part does a strong lesbian presence play?

Is there a difference between queer dancing (either male/female/trans) and straight dancing? What are the markers of these differences?

-bossy thighs

-being a base

-reciprocity (my turn to lift, my turn to ride, my turn to lift….)

Queer women avoiding each other in dance spaces due to fear of the expectation that we will be attracted to each other or that there will be an expectation that we *should* be attracted to each other.

Being ok to dance with the ‘otherness’ of another as queer. The quality of listening. Observation that it’s much more likely that a straight guy is not listening in a dance.

Lesbian identity has big contradictions that don’t really make any sense…so does CI.

Inhabiting a role and sticking to it. (tabletop)

Lifting into a pose vs. dynamic lifting; relationship to queerness

Tendencies and assumptions that are cultural markers but are not prescriptive or set to how a dance will actually go.

CI as a place for misfits and difference. Is this a queer notion? Is it our notion based on Madison or American CI? If so, is it a projection of our own queerness?

Lesbians are hard to read except by other lesbians. How much does it take for something to be read as lesbian sexual energy?

How much sexuality/sexual content has to be present when two women dance together before it would be read as lesbian? Would it be simply sexual or would it be lesbian? What other markers would have to be present/presented?

What about butch identities in CI?

What is ‘real’ lesbian sexuality?

Notion of queer sexualities as freedom from certain sexualizations.

As queers, learning when it’s safe to share and when it’s not. Does it lead to a specific deep listening?

Questions that were written as part of the “Shadow of Contact” score danced on 1/30/11. Questions were scribbled on scraps of paper and asked to dancers as they moved:

-are some types of dance more appealing to us as dykes, both to do, to watch?

-What part of your body do you feel your genders? What part of your body do you feel your queerness?

-How can the category ‘lesbian’ be visible without sex being visible?

-lesbian dance/gay male dance, why are there differences in visibility, type of work, etc?

-Where does your sexuality reside in your body right now?

-is sexual orientation the most embodied part of your identity, or dance a part of your identity? What about race, class, gender, etc?

-are there places/times in your life where you forget about your queerness?

-How does your class background affect you as a lesbian/queer dancer? Do you feel class in your body? Where?

- How would *this* dance change if you were packing/binding?

-Do you express/feel more of your genders/sexuality when dancing with other queer women than when you dance with straight men/women? Why?

- I don’t know what this has to do with dance but I’m wondering about the queer body as mother, the body of a child of queer parents with a “donor” not a father…?

-What makes a work (or a body) queer?

-When do you have an expectation that shared queerness will create a connection? Have you had times when it doesn’t?

a) The boundary between sexuality and sensuality is drawn differently by different people. This is rarely a conscious choice but mostly a question of people’s sexual and body socialization, which often differs systematically according to gender and sexuality. One major factor determining people’s strategies of desire, their personal constructions of sexuality/sensuality is the overwhelming patriarchal and heterosexist structuring of sexuality. In very very broad strokes, a structuring that posits men as hunters, women as prey, that defines desire itself as an active, symbolically male energy, where men have bodies and women are bodies, that encourages men to convert all kinds of affective energies into aggression and/or sexual excitement, while encouraging women to convert all kinds of affective energies into caring, tenderness and tears.

I am interested in the question of how and why people sort their feelings into “sexual”, “sensual” or other, specifically in the context of contact improvisation and in how they feel about the potential of contact improvisation to contribute to an emancipatory transgression of how mainstream society orders sexuality/sensuality.

b) Doing a lot of contact improvisation can change sexual desire. It can diminish, possibly because some of what usually gets channeled into sexuality (needs for nourishing touch, spontaneous movement expression, being held, etc) are satisfied through contact improvisation. Sometimes it gets more, presumably because the practice wakes up and circulates vital energy and sexual desire is one expression of that. It can also change quality, feeling deeper and fuller, sometimes more rooted in physicality and less hotwired to images and thoughts.

How:

A session of this lab could start with a sensory/physical warmup, move into contact improvisation, followed by a discussion of specific questions in small groups, then a mix of moving and talking, followed by a round for exchanging impressions.

Read Daniel Mang’s biography

How is doing this affected in practice by the gender of the people, or race, by their proficiency in the verbal languages being used? How about if one is a teacher and one a student, if one has learning disabilities, if one is well known and experienced and one a newcomer?

Many of my explorations of these topics have taken place within the queer community. I feel that queer and Contact Improvisation perspectives have so much to teach each other and am excited about the opportunities to link my (sometimes) separate explorations of the two. At the Copenhagen Queer Festival last Summer I taught a Contact Improvisation workshop titled ‘Queer in Motion’.

I believe that learning to recognise and respect each other’s physical and emotional limits can be incredibly liberating and enabling of creativity and exploration, therefore I would like to contribute to creating a Safer Spaces Policy for the event, and procedures for maintaining the event as a safer, creative space for exploration. I would also like to offer a workshop exploring these topics through movement and discussion.

Read Rachel Dean’s biography

Thus, leaving competitiveness behind and possibly redefining male sensuality, this exploration will naturally and very efficiently sharpen the men’s sensibility for their own curiosity, boundaries and desires, and be a delicious and very sensual process in itself.

The class will consist in exercises about centering and increasing the participants’ physical and senses-related awareness.  These will be followed by sensuous body-work including various possibilities of enjoying male touch actively and passively.  And then, thematic improvisations about a variety of aspects connected to this topic will lead to dances which will feel deeply connected, thrilling, and exquisite.

Read Ralf Jaroschinski’s biography

This lab is about drawing connections between some issues in queer and polyamorous relating and some aspects of contact improvisation.

We will look at dependency, autonomy, support, falling and fear of falling, reciprocity, leading and following, etc, as they appear as physical principles in the movement practice, and as they appear in attempts to forge affective relations beyond and against compulsory heterosexuality, male domination and privilege, and the norm of monogamy.

Read Daniel Mang’s biography