Contact Improvisation as a Somatics Approach
Contact Improvisation (CI) is the most modern Somatics practice that I’ve come across. It combines elements of Modern dance, Martial Art and Inner physical and spacial awareness and perception. And so it feels like a breath of fresh air among other popular yet highly specific somatic approaches like Yoga or Martial Arts, which were all conceived and developed over more than a thousand years ago.
CI not only builds on top of the principles of these few ancient somatic practises (gravity, sense of physical touch, momentum) but also makes it a social phenomena for human connection, something that is no longer alive with yoga or martial arts in the modern day.
Sure there are yoga communities and martial art classes where people come together and practise in groups but the disciple itself doesn’t have any sense of an “Open Jam” or a playground where you test your skills and perception with others in real time. Open Jams are undoubtedly a part of the CI practise and not tacked-on on top as a social layer.
It is this improvisational aspect of CI, no drills or steps followed in sequence, which is the essence of Open Jams that makes CI so beautifully new, deep and a constant mirror of our emotions and our world as we perceive it.
An under discussed aspect of CI Jams is its quality of being a microcosm of the universe, a reflection of each of our own inner worlds, projected and played out simultaneously on one screen, in real-time. A dancer never dances alone, he’s always in a world of his own. Dancing with his thoughts, emotions, questions and conflicts. In a duet, two planets cross the others orbit and there’s a merging of their gravitational fields. They have a play of spinning, spiraling, colliding and slingshotting into and out of each other.
When there’s harmony between these two dancers, they sense and exactly match the gravitational pull of the other, equalizing and reaching an equilibrium of frequency, energy and force, eventually being in-tune with each other. The dance then becomes an exchange of energies and ideas, of motions and emotions, of presence and perception. The two worlds are no longer separate or isolated with long distances between them, there’s a wormhole that opens up between these two worlds, sometimes it stays open for years, other times just for a few minutes.
When two same dancers meet again, their landscapes and geographies have changed, and so it is a constant process of evolving, listening and fine tuning to match and keep open this wormhole and open up yet more wormholes between new worlds.
Once in a while you’re hit by an asteroid, a free falling celestial body that has no or negligible gravitational force and is pulled in by the nearest orbit. Though they are far and few in-between it’s important to acknowledge and see these asteroids before they trigger a cataclysmic event.
Seeing the dance as a 3rd Person while being in the dance, it becomes possible to feel the parallels between the inner and the outer world, from microcosmic to macrocosmic.