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ABSTRACT
Autoethnography – Contact Improvisation – Intimacy – Skin – Touch
This article investigates the experience of touch within the dance practice of Contact Improvisation. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in Montreal, the author explores the conventions/taboos regulating touch and the redefinition of intimate boundaries under circumstances of close proximity. The emergence of Contact Improvisation in the 1970s as a “touch revolution” is compared with today’s politics of touch – strongly impacted by #MeToo – to understand dancers’ oscillation between attraction and fear. Based on ethnographic and autoethnographic research, this article highlights aspects of the mindful body, such as the interrelatedness between touch, weight, movement and intention. Drawing on skin studies, it unravels how tactile communication encompasses information about kinesthesia, orientation, grounding, and weight, and proposes a novel take on the relationship between physical proximity and emotional intimacy.
Acknowledgments
This investigation was only possible thanks to the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation in the form of a Postdoc Mobility Grant (P2LAP1–184157). I am grateful to all Contact Improvisation practitioners who danced with me, told me their stories and helped me see things through their eyes. I am also thankful to dancer/photographer André Blanchet who accepted to share his beautiful pictures for this publication. Finally, I thank the anonymous reviewers and particularly Prof. David Howes for their valuable comments and time in editing my paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. I mainly danced in Switzerland (Bern), but also attended jams in Paris, Copenhagen, Brighton and Aberdeen (UK). During my stay in Canada, I danced (briefly) in New York and Vancouver. These short visits allowed me to evaluate similarities and differences between CI communities. I found that each place is shaped by its own esthetic: the dance would be more or less dynamic, acrobatic, smooth, meditative, playful or humorous.
2. A jam is a collective gathering based on improvisations in solo, duet or larger groups. Dancers enter the dance floor without talking and engage temporarily in a dance. A workshop is led by a CI teacher and focusses on specific skills (lift techniques, communication in dance, improvisation skills, etc.). In workshops, dancers improve their ˝technical˝ skills to feel more confident in jams.
3. All of the photographs in this article were taken by André Blanchet at the annual jam of Montreal in November 2019. This jam was the last event I attended within the CI Montreal community, gathering many dancers I encountered during the previous months.
4. Overlapping the CI community, the “cozy community” gathers individuals around touch, massage, and bathing. The one I attended (by coincidence) was a semi-private event with masseurs and CI practitioners. After the announcement of guidelines precising the boundaries with sexuality, we spent the evening in a very soft atmosphere of Zen music and candles, offering each other massages and caresses in the swimming pool. These events are also known as “cuddle parties.”
5. Cynthia Novack wrote the first ethnography of American CI (1990). After her marriage, she changed her last name to Cohen Bull.
6. In original language: ˝extimité˝.
7. My use of embodiment draws on Brenda Farnell. With embodied knowledge, she refers to various forms such as actions acquired during childhood (talking, hand/facial gestures during social interactions), mundane skills (eating/dressing), specialized bodily techniques (craftmanship), choreographed action sign systems (rituals, ceremonies, sport). Embodied practices are ˝systematized in various ways (…) involving cultural convention as well as creative performativity˝ (Farnell Citation1999, 343).
8. Originally from Arizona, Paxton joined Merce Cunningham’s company in New York in 1961, before developing CI (Novack Citation1990).
9. The negative definition is no accident. The notion of negativity is a specific feature of the emergence of contemporary dance, starting to be a feature in this time until the high pic of the 90’s (Schellow Citation2016).
10. Dena encountered CI in its “second wave” with teacher Mary Cerny in Minneapolis, later taking intensive workshops from dozens of others before bringing it to Montréal in 1977. She was the first to offer classes in CI in addition to co-founding the performance collective Catpoto and being the driving force behind Tangente: https://tangentedanse.ca/.
11. The underlying structure of the jam.
12. D. Erdur wrote a dissertation on the implementation of CI in Turkey.
13. Hall distinguishes four spaces, each one regulated by another proximity/distance between bodies: intimate (- 40 cm), personal (40–125 cm), social-consultive (120–360 cm) and public (+ 360 cm). The personal sphere is characterized by the distance of an elbow and the social sphere by a stretched arm distance (Hall Citation1963).
14. In original language: ˝ le proxime est le corrélat de l’intime˝ (Nancy Citation1996, 103).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Claire Vionnet
Claire Vionnet is an Anthropologist, Dance Scholar and Dancer. Her Ph.D.research was on production processes in contemporary dance, exploring notions of body, improvisation, senses, gesture, shadow, autoethnography, and phenomenology (University of Lausanne, 2018). In her current postdoctoral research, she explores the phenomenon of intimacy in/through dance, both experimentally and ethnographically. Supported by the Swiss National Research Foundation, she spent a year at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University in Montreal, attached to the Humanities program. She works creatively with dance communities (Contemporary Dance, Contact Improvisation, West African Dances), reflecting on the way dance produces knowledge.