I strongly feel that the way many people try to teach contact improvisation is not practical, just as it’s not practical to teach breathing or walking or riding a bike or surfing by telling someone how to do it. They're the kinds of things that you learn by doing. *However*, those with a feel for and insights into a practice can provide guidance about *how to participate that invites what the practice teaches*. Ways to organize yourself, to tune in, to notice and make choices respectful of oneself and one's situation, and so on. (This is so even with something so fundamental as breathing.)
This perspective is crucial particularly in improvisation, where there’s a strong temptation to try to replace uncertainty with structure. Some structure can be useful to make the practice more approachable, but often learning to deal well with uncertainty is essential to the practice, and trying to avoid it is misleading. I think it’s safe that CI is one of those practices – we often stress the “contact” part of “contact improvisation”, but the “improvisation” part is equally fundamental and profound. We’re all gradually learning to be more clear about what’s useful and what isn’t in our practice. Being a collaborative practice, we are teaching each other what we learn by practicing together. Someone who takes on a teacher role takes responsibility for explicitly identifying and conveying what they find (and are taught) is useful. It’s tricky, though, because it’s so tempting to just reduce uncertainty by telling people what to do, circumventing improvisation. All of this and more combines to make learning and teaching CI perpetually unsettled, controversial.
I think this way of looking at the question of “teaching CI” suggests considering contact improvisation as a verb rather than a noun, asking what contact improvisation *does* rather than what it is. Looking at it this way has settled for me a perennial question that we keep bumping up against: what is contact improvisation? I suggest asking instead, "what does CI do?" I’ve found looking at it this way really useful, and hope others might also. If you're interested in what it has meant for me, I’ve been working on an essay about it: https://myriadicity.net/contact-improv/learning-contact-improvisation/what-contact-improv-does .
Thank you for this insightful response! What you say makes a lot of sense to me. Your essay is an excellent read, thank you for sharing! The "what does CI do" is a great question, one that I would answer with what it allows us to practise: disconnecting our minds and being in the moment/our bodies, listening with all senses, practising non-verbal communication, inclusivity and boundary setting; dealing with rejection, de-tabuing touch by practising platonic touch; and creative expression.
Yes, all that! (I don't think of it as disconnecting my mind so much as taking opportunity for the mind to cooperate with the body's more immediate ways of acting – reflex, intuition, whimsy, etc. – so more of our various abilities can be exercised and orchestrate.) The opportunity to actually delve into these kinds of significant visceral things closely with others, rather than just passively observing or conjecturing, is a big deal. I think it's important, and teaching can (but doesn't always) help establish good conditions for the exploration. I really appreciate your question and the opportunity to discuss it!
I strongly feel that the way many people try to teach contact improvisation is not practical, just as it’s not practical to teach breathing or walking or riding a bike or surfing by telling someone how to do it. They're the kinds of things that you learn by doing. *However*, those with a feel for and insights into a practice can provide guidance about *how to participate that invites what the practice teaches*. Ways to organize yourself, to tune in, to notice and make choices respectful of oneself and one's situation, and so on. (This is so even with something so fundamental as breathing.)
This perspective is crucial particularly in improvisation, where there’s a strong temptation to try to replace uncertainty with structure. Some structure can be useful to make the practice more approachable, but often learning to deal well with uncertainty is essential to the practice, and trying to avoid it is misleading. I think it’s safe that CI is one of those practices – we often stress the “contact” part of “contact improvisation”, but the “improvisation” part is equally fundamental and profound. We’re all gradually learning to be more clear about what’s useful and what isn’t in our practice. Being a collaborative practice, we are teaching each other what we learn by practicing together. Someone who takes on a teacher role takes responsibility for explicitly identifying and conveying what they find (and are taught) is useful. It’s tricky, though, because it’s so tempting to just reduce uncertainty by telling people what to do, circumventing improvisation. All of this and more combines to make learning and teaching CI perpetually unsettled, controversial.
I think this way of looking at the question of “teaching CI” suggests considering contact improvisation as a verb rather than a noun, asking what contact improvisation *does* rather than what it is. Looking at it this way has settled for me a perennial question that we keep bumping up against: what is contact improvisation? I suggest asking instead, "what does CI do?" I’ve found looking at it this way really useful, and hope others might also. If you're interested in what it has meant for me, I’ve been working on an essay about it: https://myriadicity.net/contact-improv/learning-contact-improvisation/what-contact-improv-does .
Thank you for this insightful response! What you say makes a lot of sense to me. Your essay is an excellent read, thank you for sharing! The "what does CI do" is a great question, one that I would answer with what it allows us to practise: disconnecting our minds and being in the moment/our bodies, listening with all senses, practising non-verbal communication, inclusivity and boundary setting; dealing with rejection, de-tabuing touch by practising platonic touch; and creative expression.
Yes, all that! (I don't think of it as disconnecting my mind so much as taking opportunity for the mind to cooperate with the body's more immediate ways of acting – reflex, intuition, whimsy, etc. – so more of our various abilities can be exercised and orchestrate.) The opportunity to actually delve into these kinds of significant visceral things closely with others, rather than just passively observing or conjecturing, is a big deal. I think it's important, and teaching can (but doesn't always) help establish good conditions for the exploration. I really appreciate your question and the opportunity to discuss it!