Cultivating Emergence in Contact Improvisation: A Path of Research
This essay is transcribed from an interview via Contact Quarterly titled “Diving Deep into Nita Little’s Teaching Practice” (2020). The editor is Colleen Bartley.
Written by Nita Little and Colleen Bartley
Introduction/Orientation
This paper brings the concept of “poiesis” into convergence with the history of Contact Improvisation as a means to consider the generation of new knowledge and new research practices. We explore emerging ideas in dance research through Nita Little’s lived experience, who, through interviews with Colleen Bartley, reflects on her participation in the birth and development of Contact Improvisation (1972) and her current research with the Institute for the Study of Somatic Communication (ISSC).
We employ the concept of Ppoiesis, as German philosopher Martin Heidegger has defined it to describe an activity of “revelation” or “un-concealment”. Our idea is that, in the same way that one may describe a carpenter’s work as that of unconcealing, is what a fine carpenter does when he reveals, or “un-conceals” something that is present in the wood with which he builds (Blitz 2014, Wheeler 2020, Heidegger 1977), Contact Improvisation dancers’ work consist in unconcealing what happens between them. While poiesis is often defined as a “making,” Heidegger deepens his analysis into the carpenter’s relatedness to the wood. Thus simple “making” doesn’t contain the ingredients necessary for poiesis as we understand it for this paper. The idea is that rather than an action of pure manipulation by a singular creative actor, an “exploitation” made possible through technology, the design emerges through “deep harmony” (Blitz 2014, Wheeler 2018) – a co-creation. The result simply needed mastery (such as what we would call training in physical thinking) to bring it forth. The difference means the carpenter’s cutting blade touches as if to listen into the wood itself, to engage with what the wood brings to that meeting through an act of revelation. In this reading there is a notion of partnership born of the carpenter’s inquiry into the wood – a meeting across forms to produce an emergent result.
This very inquiry is a core value that is built into the foundations of Contact Improvisation as the well-spring of its very emergence. As Contact Improvisation dancers, our job is to find what is available to us in partnership, in the meeting of at least two bodies in motion, bringing forth our physical relatedness into visible presence. The job is one of discovery, a revelation. This means that our practice, our skill as Contact Improvisation dancers, by necessity, is a sophisticated activity of peering through the chaos of actionable possibilities with the lens of inquiry, “What is here?” How is it here?” That lens is wielded by each of us, like the blade in Heidegger’s example, cutting through the unnecessary to find what is simply present. And, then, almost as dance’s residue, the inquiry that forms any particular dance, reveals new knowledge that once exposed to those who know how to recognize it, influences future dances. Indeed, it exposes what and how we think relations can be, and how we embody them as individuals.
Our work in this essay is to understand how an orientation toward the poietic emerged in the earliest moments of Contact Improvisation and study what that meant in actual practice, then and now. We use Nita Little’s experience with the work as one example of some of the new knowledge and research practices generated by Contact Improvisation. Weaving interviews and theoretical insights, we—Nita Little and Colleen Bartley—describe Nita’s lived experience and participation in the birth and development of Contact Improvisation since 1972 and her current research with the international network of dance ensembles that form the Institute for the Study of Somatic Communication (ISSC). Steve Paxton’s originating proposition, inquiry and movement research, initiated a legacy of embodied knowledge and generated physical and relational insights that set off a replication of poietic practices that continue today as essential to the fabric of the ISSC.
Contact and poiesis
Understanding embodied knowledge as a result of bodily felt thinking is a skill of identification that comes with a poietic orientation. One needs to master the latter to achieve the former which seems obvious to one who moves, but needs clarification for a general reader. This means that one has to be able to recognize that they think physically to be able to grasp what is present within the dynamics of experience and then develop experientially based knowledge. Dance philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone pioneered these ideas by pointing out that bodily thinking “is different ‘not in degree, but in kind’ from thinking in words” (quoted in Batson and Wilson 2014, 38). She is saying that thinking is no longer the sole purview of rational language systems; there is elbow room for other modes of knowing such as that which is emergent through the relational practices of Contact Improvisation. How could the world be different if those who value knowledge learned to celebrate its many forms, research them, and create more conditions that encourage them to emerge? It is this question that drives the writing of this essay.
There has been a continuous explosion of embodied knowledge seekers in the development of Contact Improvisation and throughout its history. Questions have given rise to more questions, not about the building of an aesthetic, but often and quite literally, about what kinds of physical embodiments allow us to dance, connecting as one mutually dynamic event within the physics of motion. For Nita there is new knowledge about embodied states and relations on multiple levels including somatic details that inform cognitive science of relational embodiments, psychological insight into such things as creative actions of attention (Nelson, 2014), and most particularly, and perhaps most significantly, new understanding of the depth of the entanglement that is the bodymind within its environments and habitats including its communicative “intra-actions” (Barad 2007, 33). The work of Contact Improvisation has also explored the limits of our cultural embodiments, and our assumptions about gender and ability – and so much more (Hennessy 2019, Nelson 2014a).
Our narrative focuses on Contact Improvisation’s beginnings, its emergence as knowledge seeking, and then jumps past most of its history to land on this present moment, today. Given the necessary limits of our focus and the vastness of our subject this telling is imprecise in its historical inclusions, and unbalanced in the weighting of the values of people’s contributions. It is in the nature of histories that they are partial. Our aim is to explain by example, not create a record.
The poietic orientation in Contact Improvisation sets up conditions for a unique continuous emergence formed by many collaborative moments and events. In reference to Contact Improvisation, Donna Haraway would call these “sympoietic” meetings (Haraway 2016) because it takes a collective action of ongoing creation, co-composition, and research. The poietic action of a singular being blurs in consonance with and across many – an action greater than any individual. This is to say that the history of Contact Improvisation as unfinished and emergent is inseparable from the collective development of the research practices that define it. Forms of research have evolved as the dance practice itself. Therefore, when speaking of Contact Improvisation as an art form or an art event the poietic/sympoietic and emergent cannot be extracted from its history.
We speak of poiesis in a number of ways within this history: 1) as an ethics or valuation that determines where attention is focused (e.g. away from shape and toward inter/intra-action) 2) as a practice of research in relational meetings of dancers on the level of physical inquiry - physical study and recall. 3) as that transformation into language, scores,and principles that became the outward recognition of internal conditions – the knowledge created.While one could say that poiesis is already implicit within practices of improvisation or touch based therapies, it took a dimensional step when two bodyminds or more met within a tactile based, weight-sharing relational practice with few to no rules other than an emphasis not to manipulate one another and to act in good-will.
All research practices are not comparable. Some practices resolve into accessible knowledge in “material” forms and actions, others become informative on an individual basis within a personal and particular creative practice without application beyond it. Knowledge “making” is particular, which is why an understanding of poiesis seems significant. In culture we are familiar with calling dance, and often even in Contact Improvisation, a generative process - a “making.” Yet, in Contact Improvisation as we have mentioned, it is quite different. The dance succeeds when it is a revelation of two bodies meeting – a sympoietic event as an emergent relationship. It is not an imposition of one upon the other, designing feats of possessive and individual will. It is not even cuing one another from within the dance (“here, do this lift now”), although there is often a non-verbal conversation with “cueing” about what is possible. At its best, it is a blending of identities (Nelson, 2014b) that resolves in events of communion conditioned by an immediacy of emergent co-knowing.
The action of inquiry is not singular, but lives within our relatedness to one another. Through it we have experienced and performed wonderful dances, and importantly with regard to expanding knowledge, discovered many physical and philosophical pathways. These discoveries now have language and scores for identification, helpful in the training of whole systems of knowledge. Examples of these illuminations include a physics based orientation within felt dynamic action, conscious distinctions between reflexive, responsive, and synchronous relations, somatic levels of physical attention, cognizant fields of communication through touch, heightened states of attention and their impact on physical/mental choice and decision making, enhanced temporal experiencing, visual/tactile modes of spatial awareness, relational intelligence, dynamic modes of practical social economics, and the articulation of presence.
The Birth of Contact Improvisation
What became Contact Improvisation began as movement experiments by Steve Paxton first over two weeks working with men at Oberlin College on reflexive action in a piece he devised called Magnesium, and then at Bennington College throughout the spring of 1972 where it took form. Nita Little began working in a studio with Paxton at his invitation with no particular idea of what they were going to manifest. Nita thought they were there for her to figure out how not to be bruised in an improvisation score for a piece, No Trumpets and No Horns, which she previously composed and had demonstrated with Leon Felder, a beginning dancer, in Paxton’s Bennington College composition class. Her climbing score, a duet that focused on physical negotiation, was quickly expanded with materials from Paxton’s practice of Aikido, mostly rolling practices, and Magnesium’s throwing and falling. Soon it was all incorporated into an exploration of how they could move together, sustaining touch while climbing, falling and rolling, using an easy flow of gravity, engaging momentum, “moving with” by merging with one another, and eliminating excess force to avoid those bumps and bruises of bodies meeting one another and the hardwood floor. This was a beginning of what came to look like Contact Improvisation and it was eye opening, a path of physical revelation. The focus was on research into the circumstances of physical performance, knowledge sought through felt sensing, not a visual choreographic result.
At its genesis, Nita recalls, Paxton didn’t give specific “instructions” for how to do what they were doing. This situation meant they had to engage other modes of experimentation than those that were contemporary in previous modern dance training. The form that we recognize as Contact Improvisation emerged over weeks when they devoted their whole physical/mental being inside an investigation of what it could feel like, look like, and mean to move in a continual weight relationship with one another and the earth. This meant their physicality had to be enquiring with an emphasis on movement, gravity and force (or rather its lack), not on shape and positions. Discoveries such as not prioritizing the vertical by actively engaging the weight of the head emerged.
Their problem was a problem of poiesis: how to reveal a form they didn’t know was emerging. Following Heidegger, Hubert Dryfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly write about poiesis, “The task of the craftsman is not to generate the meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill for discerning the meanings that are already there” (2011, 209). In order to do this work, they had to be practicing a dance form they didn’t know they were doing, and they had to develop the skills to see what was necessary to it, and what was not necessary.
There was not the traditional sense of being directed or the typical hierarchically defined roles in this exploration. Rather, there was a sense of serious play while together training a disciplined, curious body. All were invested in discovery. Leon and Nita were introduced to new, albeit unrecognizable, relational modalities imperative to this kind of physical research. They were learning to cultivate those practices necessary to discern poiesis. There was guidance but it was immersive. In Contact Improvisation, and perhaps generally, the production of knowledge is a function of the relations through which it emerges - which means “how” people come together, the quality of the meeting, creates the conditions, the potentials, for whatever knowledge emerges. The principles of Contact Improvisation value letting go of assumptions, and being ready for the unexpected through explicit and ongoing inquiry into these meetings. It is the ground for new, co-created knowledge.
The research accelerated three months later, when they met with 15 other dancers to introduce them to “Contact Improvisations” and perform together at the John Weber Gallery in NYC. They had an important new research tool: video, and a dedicated videographer, Steve Christiansen. With Paxton’s forethought, all the work was recorded. After moving and watching one another all day, the dancers turned with fascination to the video to review their practice sessions and performances. These viewing sessions extended into the night. Their use of the new technology facilitated endless repetitions of critical movement moments and helped focus dancers’ fleeting recall. It enhanced scrutiny on the particulars of felt experience. Freeze, replay, fast forward, and various speeds of slow motion brought greater precision in their ability to register the interiority of the sensations of felt physics in this emerging dance form.Sensations could be re-membered in context. Experientially the dances felt like reflexive torrents of motion - the result of what the body was doing to survive unknown actional territories, “much faster than thought” (Paxton 1988, 143). Nita recalls, “Video gave us an advantage, new eyes and a sweet spot for developing embodied knowledge that came from these temporal tools. Seeking precision and detail even in our language, enabled us to speak to the physicality of physics playing within our dances”. They created a dance form not as “a making” in and of itself, like a choreographic form, but as “an emerging” … which in this case required new knowledge where it had not been.
The combination of video and additional dancers concentrated the work, further developing not only new materials and new language but also new research strategies into physical performance. The focus was not on the reproduction of “cool moves” but on the circumstances that allowed those moves to arise. Those circumstances were as much present within the physical form of each dancer as in the engagements of their meeting.
“Every body knows” was a notion, if not a political ethic, that Paxton held from the beginning. The idea set the ground for a very unique form of research. Embodied knowing in Contact Improvisation relies on the practical and tacit knowledge that we each share a relationship with gravity and the earth. This might be one of the reasons why Contact Improvisation could escape the confines of a culture of professional dance mastery and become a social phenomenon in addition to a performance one. Authority to discover new knowledge belonged to everyone. Indeed, new knowledge required difference – in bodies, in abilities, in gendering, and more obviously now, in any and all cultural expressions.
Christina Svane was a freshman dance major at Bennington in September 1972 and Paxton was her technique and composition teacher. Although Contact Improvisation was still very young, it was already six months since its emergence. She shared that his approach shifted the hierarchical paradigm of master teacher and student and that “from the minute we started [in technique classes], it was thrilling not knowing what he was going to be up to.” (C. Svane, personal communication, November 6, 2018) She recalls asking him, “Steve can’t you teach this Contact thing you are doing? He said, ‘No, it can’t be taught you just do it. You can’t teach it, I’m not gonna teach it.’ I’d say, ‘How do I get into it if it can’t be taught?’ So he relented and announced there would be a meeting in one of the dance studios in the evening. Steve, Nita, Leon and others demonstrated.
Christina described that, ”he [Paxton] was very careful not to lead it like a teacher but he’d get us started with the Small Dance and a suggestion to find someone in the room to start a duet with. It was very much a pure concept – that the dancing is the teacher – that it will teach itself (Ibid).” She described the collaborative approach as “front and center in his philosophy” (Ibid).This form of imparting and generating knowledge was much more like “research” than “teaching.” And, it continued throughout the early touring of Contact Improvisation. We could call this “pedagogy as research.” This non-hierarchical approach allowed the possibility for the teacher to learn alongside the students and through the teacher’s participation, model the crafting ofpoiesis.
Christina described the “most wonderful attitude of making each of us feel that our perceptions and our experiments were all of equal value as research” (Svane 2018). This radical shift of bringing the dancer into the art-making/research challenged the traditional singular artist-genius paradigm by disclosing that very genius within a group of people. It shifted valuation from an individual to a group by shifting the decision making powers from the personal to the relational. This shift is the move of poiesis becoming sympoiesis.
The move away from the singular artist-genius was a political choice. “From Paxton’s perspective, Contact Improvisation’s potential impact would be to return decision-making authority to the dancer — not just the institutional professional, but anyone who moved. Contact Improvisation could ‘reclaim’ the potential that ‘the culture’ had ‘physically suppressed or selected out’.” (1993:64) (Turner 2010, 125). And, it returned power to dancers, where they had often been treated as “children” to use José Limón’s term for his company members (personal recollection, Nita Little).
Contact Improvisation as Research
How much of what became Contact Improvisation was envisioned? It is an open question. Paxton and his fellow explorers were in a process of discovery, one influenced by the Eastern martial arts and an aesthetic of less, the heritage of Paxton’s years dancing with Merce Cunningham’s Company, as well as their collective willingness to search outside of formalized movement, a Judson legacy and the Grand Union’s non-hierarchical decision making.
This inquiry was a kind of science. “We knew we did this dance in duets, but what was our purpose? Let’s see what happens when we stay together touching as long as we can…What did that do? How do we determine what belongs and what doesn’t? We’re not working from preconceived ideas but from sensation. What’s the function? It was clear that pointing toes didn’t belong - it was wasted energy, a gesture not a function. How do we know what is too much, too little (Little, personal reflection)?” The answers came directly through the quality of the meeting and the hardness of the floor. They were disclosing not another new aesthetic but something that was raw and devoid of easy cultural identifiers which included gender roles and gestures.
Over years of practice they formulated physical insights. Attending to gravity immediately took them out of the realm of dance as a series of behaviors and aesthetic preferences, a visual art form, and placed it into a new realm of technicities coupled neatly with physics. Through “new technical approaches” Paxton was “trying to describe the corporeal … We know far more than we can practice. We had to decide what to practice” (Paxton 1993, 259). In his 1993 article he called these, “interior techniques.” Knowledge in this moment, became the means by which two bodies met in a shared accord with gravity, with sensibility translating through them into a graceful dance without steps, without classic orientation, and without culturally defined roles.
These values result in methods of teaching and exploring that honor the empty availability of beginning places, gaps in knowledge or “Being in the Gap” (Albright 2003), and the “need to know” from years of Contact Improvisation. In the process of writing this paper, we discussed Nita’s approach to those early training sessions. She described the significance of “beginner’s mind” meaning that she entered a dance room with that perspective. “Beginner’s Mind” is an apt position from which to teach “alongside” one’s students, letting the dance guide us – and “in the early nineteen seventies everyone we taught was a beginner in this form. It took a repetition of this state of mind to continually question one’s experience and to escape the eager claws of aesthetic preference (knowing how to make something look good rather than leap once again into the unknown).”
The quality of a state of readiness in mind and body was significant to the honesty of a shared meeting and the mutuality of the contact engagement. Predetermined outcomes were deadly to that honesty. Research as a state of mind spoke beyond the dance itself and offered culture a new understanding of the value of embodiment in advancing interpersonal communication through investigations that mark new ideas of the human. The value of poiesis, the shared skillful discovery that moves creative actions into revelations, began with Steve Paxton and are perhaps one of Contact Improvisation’s greatest legacies.
By asking physical questions with an inquiring, intelligent body Contact Improvisation dancers discovered underlying principles as embodied knowledge. These principles guided the work. Upon reflection, it gave them language which would define new scores and further on these developed into conceptual ideas. Over weeks, then months, then years, each revelation potentiated new means, and new potentials, in an ongoing state of development. The dance, its teaching and researching were entwined. It became a way of life, a way of making art, and a way of investing in the development of new knowledge.
A whole new playground was discovered which continues to emerge even today through dances and dancers, their dialogues about the practice, their growing international numbers and their varieties of cultures. Written discourse documents the work and furthers conversations that develop new research concerns. These appear in forums like the Contact Quarterly and other international dance journals, at academic events, and on social media platforms. Although research conversations are not always comfortable, especially when they focus on biases and blind spotswithin the social sphere, nevertheless they are critical to the development of Contact Improvisation, especially when they locate physically as practice and as emerging knowledge.
Laboratories: After Contact
These initial explorations contributed to the development of different strategies amongst the founders of Contact Improvisation to sustain and create laboratories for shared learning : from Steve Paxton’s Material for the Spine to Nancy Stark Smith’s Underscore, to Lisa Nelson’s Tuning Scores to Danny Lepkoff’s Moving the Environment, to name only a few. Nita has had numerous such foci over the years.
Since the earliest days of Contact Improvisation, Nita has been interested in conscious states as critical actions that influenced movement choices. By the eighties she was calling this work Mind in Motion. Yet the explorations continued and as she matured led to years of creating dance research laboratories for shared learning. These laboratories came in many forms: pedagogical (Mind in Motion dance classes for Contact and ensemble dancing), performance (through a number of improvisational dance companies in Santa Cruz and San Francisco between 1976 to 2014), and research for the explicit building of new knowledge (dance research laboratories from 1994 to 2016).
Eventually, after getting a PhD in performance studies, this curiosity brought Nita to develop dance laboratories for research into relational intelligence – another product of Contact Improvisation’s revelatory poiesis – the concern with embodied communication. The Institute for the Study of Somatic Communication (ISSC) is an international network of post-modern research ensembles working with Contact Improvisation principles and advancing an understanding of embodied attention as a physical practice of communication. This work engages dance ensembles (called CoLaboratories) in ongoing physical and intellectual inquiry.
Beyond being the subject of someone else’s research project, as dancers often are, as we have seen, Contact Improvisation dancers are themselves researchers - but what constitutes research? Who is the research for? To what end are dancers engaging in research? For early Contact Improvisation the research applied to the form itself and the dancers who did it. Today, the ISSC is engaged in knowledge production for the purpose of identifying significant features of somatic communication in ensemble dancing, identifying transferable skills and eventually sharing those materials to people in other disciplines, industries, and organizations. The goal is for dancing to be a source of knowledge production that can serve peoples and communities beyond ensemble practice. In a world losing its ability to connect, ISSC dance researchers hope to offer new means to be together, acknowledging that we are all ecologically entangled beyond the merely human.
Conclusion
Contact Improvisation is part of a zeitgeist of knowledge production and change that turns to embodiment as a means to understand and reconceive the human as immersed, entangled, and embodied in the world as a whole. As Glenna Batson and Margaret Wilson remarked in Body and Mind in Motion, we might want to trace this zeitgeist to the enduring influence of cognitive Scientist Francesco Varela who inspired “a whole new breed of thinkers [who] began to speculate, quite radically at the time, that thought did not arise exclusively in the brain … [that it arose] out of the body, actively moving in its context” (Batson 2014, 42). He came to understand bodies as constructions, a “meshwork of selfless selves” (Varella 1991, 79; in Batson 2014, 42). Taking the body as our model, what can dancers learn to do?
In the same spirit, dancer, visual artist, and philosopher Erin Manning writes, ”I would like to take seriously the idea that research-creation proposes new forms of knowledge, many of which are not intelligible within current understandings of what knowledge might look like.” Although these forms of knowledge production might not be new, recognizing them as knowledge certainly is along with taking the knowledge further into new activities.
It [research-creation] generates new forms of experience; it situates what often seem like disparate practices, giving them a conduit for collective expression; it hesitantly acknowledges that normative modes of inquiry and containment often are incapable of assessing its value; it generates forms of knowledge that are extralinguistic; it creates operative strategies for a mobile positioning that take these new forms of knowledge into account; it proposes concrete assemblages for rethinking the very question of what is at stake in pedagogy, in practice, and in collective experimentation (Manning 2015, 53).
New knowledge forms are emergent from the creative actions of people invested in immersive research. They don’t look like classical forms of knowledge and they don’t accomplish the same things. New knowledge forms offer the world innovative means to be in and of the world. They offer fresh relationalities by which to experience the materials given in living, and most significantly, with these new forms come previously unforeseen possibilities.
Our argument that the history of Contact Improvisation is inseparable from its history as research will continue to be incomplete – which is a testament to the value of building new embodied knowledge. On every level of emergence, from the dance itself to the practices that support its continued development, poiesis is present in Contact Improvisation practices. We foresee a future of ongoing inconclusiveness, investigation, and investment that honors “not-knowing,” the establishment of new modes of knowledge creation from the physical act of “seeking to know.” We do this work for the joy of dancing, for the future empowerment of dancers as knowledge producers, and for the well-being of all.
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