What's Most Extraordinary About CI: Sharing Agency
Contact improvisation allows an extraordinary combination of mutuality and agency. It enables movement partners to learn to mutually shape more aspects of their collaboration than most practices allow. In this way CI is an opportunity to cultivate shared agency .
Mutuality and Agency
Contact improv is organized around mutual following, where personal agency is expressed in how you follow (including the option at any moment to not follow). As you learn to tune in and develop agreements you discover that your choices inform the shape of what you're doing together. You explore movement qualities and characters that are not decided by some form, but rather by you and your partner and the pragmatics of cooperating. You can explore how you mutually choose to move, a kind of shared agency. When it clicks the experience of mutuality fosters a sense of discovering new, evolving forms that are habitable to both of you and that change as each of you and your situation changes.
For More
- While CI is something that you learn by doing, like walking or bicycling or surfing or many intrinsically physical activities, guidance can be useful for participating in a way that invites what the practice teaches.
- Steve Paxton, the person originally responsible for framing contact improvisation as a practice, talks about how it started for him in Steve Paxton: The Initiation of Contact Improvisation. I see what he says as expressing the essence of tuning in to CI.
- In What Contact Improv Does I discuss a perspective that I find most useful for learning and teaching CI.
- To see how contact improv originally developed in the perspective of those who developed it see the video Fall After Newton Part 1 (9 minutes), Part 2 (6 minutes), and Part 3 (credits, 7 minutes). It's narrated by Steve Paxton and is organized around the CI development of another central CI progenitor, Nancy Stark Smith.