I have been dancing Contact Improvisation for over 40 years and teaching it for almost as long. I started teaching because I and my dancing friends wanted more people to dance with. I have been lucky enough to dance with and learn from wonderful people including many well known contact improvisers. I also create and perform work for myself and other
people. It varies from pure movement work to work with text and character. I also have a practice I call Embodying Landscape, which focuses on composing poetic responses in movement to the memory of place. I qualified to be a teacher of the Alexander Technique in 1987 and the insights from that practice remain fundamental to my life and work. I treasure the intellectual foundations that I got from studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford University, but I don’t think the skills I learned there are much use without a poetic, intuitive disposition towards the world. I have danced with, taught
and created for a very wide range of people including those who might be considered to be disabled or differently abled – physically, intellectually and sensorily. I have danced with and for children of all ages and with people in their senior years. I have taught in ballet schools, stage schools, ordinary schools, universities, colleges, studios, theatre schools. I have performed, created and/or taught in many places, mostly in Europe but also in Palestine, Israel, Siberia and South Africa. I have taught intensives at Contact Improvisation festivals in Russia, Italy, Germany, Romania, Ireland, Israel.
I have been repeatedly invited back to those places. I live in Derry in Northern Ireland where I am artistic director of Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company. Growing up in, and returning in middle age to, a place with a long history of political conflict related to colonialism has a continuing presence in my practice and thinking. I am more and more convinced that art is
essential and that paradoxically the more we emphasise its instrumental importance the less important it becomes. I think we should channel the creative spirits, be taken into realms of mystery and always do art for art sake… and let anything that comes into existence work its magic.
Contact Improvisation into Performance - Intensive
C.I. POETIC PERFORMANCE
This workshop will invite participants to practice putting the typical and special physical, attentional, interactive and somatic understandings characteristic of Contact Improvisation practice into a broad compositional context.
I propose: To dance a lot in pairs and to & jam a lot. To watch each other from inside our dances, as watcher-participants in dances and jams, and as audiences.
To treasure the internal, somatic experience while emphasizing attention to the objective reality of the dance that exists beyond the private realm. To avoid proposing rules or methods. To offer focused and disciplined ways to develop sensitivity to compositional parameters .
To allow the detailed studies that we practice to emerge from and be gifted back to the magical, poetic, intuitive practice of improvising in movement. To integrate the specifics of Contact Improvisation into a general field of attention to the
parameters of presence, time and space. To explore phrasing, vertical space, proximity, intention levels, adaptive-directive
phases of movement, dispositions towards space, addressing levels. To dedicate ourselves to taking armour off rather than putting it on because armour resists transformation and lack of transformation limits compositional and
performance possibilities.
To notice that armour isn’t always hard – it can also be soft. To study the breath because it is always a fundamental feature of the composition and of the complex poetic meaning, whether we notice it or not when we dance – an attentive watcher is always tuned to the breath of the dancer, and through the breath to the poetics of the dance.
To deepen the sense of our dancing as already performance rather than creating a performance.
The idea of performance proposes an audience. It proposes a desire to make sense, to have structure, to have grammar and syntax that invites a watcher into a world that has coherence and transformation; a world that may resonate with the watcher. The dancer is the first watcher of their own dance, just as the poet is the first reader of their poem and the musician is the first listener to their music. The watcher also wants to make sense of what they watch.