July Aside
I teach an artform, not a social practice. That is my orientation and I am sticking to it. With Art, capital A, I do not have a social agenda, I have an Art seeking one. I am not interested in Art being a hierarchical product, evaluated by its societal function, or as a status symbol. Rather, I wish to emphasize that it is an important practice with a significant function – to disturb, trouble, challenge and influence human societies. Like philosophy, art has a necessary and substantial place in the lives of humans, whether they recognize it or not, to engage with what can be by exposing what is. Its job is to speak beyond any individual or social group although individuals and social groups may be central to an art action.
Understanding Art is not about understanding aesthetic experience. It is about understanding a purpose that speaks more directly to human nature and what is needed, envisioned, awakening to or revealing. I turn to one of my PhD committee members, philosopher, cognitive scientist, Alva Noë, who paraphrases James Baldwin, saying, “the aim of art is to uncover the questions hidden by the answers.”* Here, Baldwin points the way, beyond philosophy, beyond science, to value how art seeks to disclose, unsettle, challenge, review, ask anew, and outright question ways humans have come to know the world, the assumptions and habits of being they have buried in the act of living. I could say that this purpose is what CI is framed to do, in all the ways it can arise as Art.
Thinking with Noë, we understand that people are creatures of habit that easily fall into complacent and unquestioned conventions. Art is incredibly important because it is what he calls a “strange tool” used to make what seems normal, strange, no longer understood in its normal context. This forces us to ask again, what is it to be a human being? It helps us determine what that can be, yet again. **
When Contact has a social orientation, these questions are not asked and dancers often stop growing. They can miss its depth and think it’s about what their partners think about them, remaining within conventional norms. They gain social agenda’s that happen within groups. They can miss or lose focus, stop feeling beyond the human and the earth they always also are. Thinking of CI as one on one dancing, a social agenda distorts movement into what feels good, or what looks cool – things they can do which merely become new forms of movement objects to admire. Normalized spaces in which CI dancers work such as jams, then require social controls, interpersonal agreements and ways of evaluating personal agendas, especially sexual concerns, desires, and foci, which do NOT belong in any dance I would call CI. The focus of art action shifts these issues because there is another purpose to dancing altogether.
Contact Improvisation began as an art action and I continue it as one. If this interests you, too, find me somewhere, sometime and we can deepen this form together, not just for us, but for a humanity that truly needs to rethink touch, rethink what bodies are and can be, discover communication beyond words, and awaken to the surprise of being human.
*Greg LeBlanc, Oct 20, 2023. unSILOed Podcast, 341. How Art and Philosophy are Critically Intertwined featuring Alva Noë. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJwDiSBafIQ
**Alva Noë, (2023). The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are, Princeton University Press. Pg. ix
Excerpt from Nita Little’s Monthly Newsletter