On my way to Freiburg with my son now 20 years old and studying architecture, we visited the Cathedral in Strasbourg. Liam drew my attention to a stain glass window by Chagall, that touched and moved me, and started an inner emotional dance that resonates with a fundamentally human principle that he defined and so often taken for granted:

“One does not do a thing if one does not love” Marc Chagall

A contact festival "extraordinaire", that was sold out in 24 hours. Contact Festival Freiburg is a beacon for dancers from all over the globe. But not only for the dance, it can’t be, why else should we all be so keenly flocking there? There must be more to it, the place, the context and the containment of the meeting by Benno, Ecki and Barbara? With genuine, open-hearted leadership they shape the setting and gather the community with a range of incentives. Firstly for the teachers weekend meeting, food and communal dormitory in a studio or camping is included; teachers delivering sessions don’t pay at all; teachers from past festivals get to join the team of 45 teachers to share ideas insights and jamming. We arrive on Friday and go till Monday lunch. We get directed as to how the festival is going to run so we share and create the festival together.

From the start there was a sense of resolution that we were all there to ensure the care-taking, safety, accessibility, flexibility and enjoyment. The teachers meeting was a weekend to dance but also to get us all singing from the same song sheet. We all had responsibility to ensure the 200 participants would get the best week possible. The mission; to be generous, open and embracing leadership together, with the view that we are all part-taking in the dance, in contact improvisation, to promote and preserve the form.

A Festival is an exchange beyond cultural boundaries, in this case, through the dancing body, allowing shifts and changes for individuals whether at a physical cellular level, or spiritual and energetic. In the initial teachers weekend the potential was realised through the formal sessions, and with the Jams offered up an opportunity for professional networking, connecting and reconnecting, for me with people I haven’t really seen for 16 years! This encounter marked this point in time as a source of inspiration and growth for each person present to carry forward and nurture.

I recall dancing beyond my limits by allowing my partner and I to meet almost on a performance level, challenging ourselves with the knowledge of our years of experience and our trust of ourselves and our own virtuosity. It was as if each dance manifested the energies of two personalities, playing, testing, pushing, resting, lying, jumping, flying and falling, pushing the boundaries of our own experience and expertise to make something unique and new. This level of exchange was the icing on the cake, the going away present, the self-affirmation that nurtures and inspires us to continue dancing.

The teacher’s weekend clarified our roles and responsibilities. We were there to teach, to facilitate Jams, to offer one to one sessions, to ensure each person gets the vital information in their own language, to be a buddy to new comers, and a whole list of practical house keeping tasks. When the 200 participants arrived on the Monday, the enormity of this commitment became real, the vested importance of this event was impressive, and the huge opening circle was joyous and celebratory.

The festival wanted us to consider our role in the purveyance of CI; the QUESTIONS for the teachers were;

• What is it about CI teaching that is different to teaching in other contexts?
• What principles are common to teaching in any context? What do we do that is different? What modes and methods of teaching are specific to CI?
• What characteristics made your favourite CI teachers special?
• If you saw two people doing something they thought was contact improvisation and you didn’t agree that it was, what might be missing and what might be present that makes it not CI to you?
• One key question we were asked to ponder; “What is the core proposition of CI for you?”

Each person noted her/his own and they were put into categories that we then discussed in smaller groups or danced and felt in the body. The festival would offer up many more, to do with principles, methods and processes, participant responses, CI in performance, and so on. Clearly finding one that encapsulates the overall nature of the dance, the game, the art sport, that defines CI, is not easy.

Written notes from teachers (Photo: Patrique Beelaert)

The questions for all festival participants were more general:

• How do you imagine yourself taking an active part in the CI festival?
• What do you want to develop or learn? What would you like to go away with?

With hindsight we may all reflect upon the week and find our own answers. In general it seems to be that in our choice of intensive or class, we all look for information that enriches the dance and this comes in many guises; this may be through aspects of the personality, personal journey and insights offered by the teacher. Or it may also be through specific pedagogic principles that enlighten our bodies and minds, or maybe through somatic study and the application of anatomical information that enhances the sense of fullness, engagement and physical presence, i.e. embodiment. It may be through energetic qualities, analysis and reflection, or through silence, blindfolding or closing the eyes.

In each case surely the “core” intention is about coming here to discover, to expand my potential, to provide a greater freedom or sense of liberation of my body in movement? But is it just the body? It seems that it’s a metaphor for much more, as the body is site for our social, political, cultural being. So liberating the body becomes a metaphor for the liberation of the person, of our personal sense of who we are, freedom from aspects of our lives that tie us down, oppress us, close us in, protect us. In this lies and the wider socio-cultural proposition that becomes controversial and a potential site for conflict, both healthy and problematic, as we aren’t all ready to be liberated and we will all have different definitions from our own conditioning as to what this is!

HISTORY TALK
The challenge always at CI festivals is how to allow the dance and liberation, exploration and discovery to happen and how to deal with the inevitable emergence of issues and debates, disagreements and conflicts. The History panel presentation was to prove an effective means to fill in and contextualise the revolutionary nature of CI and to affirm its essential experimental aspect. Going back to the roots, hearing the story again, seeing how CI is by necessity about the moment of being in and letting go reflexively, starting and ending, with minimal thinking or mental intervention. The presentations captured the attention of the audience in a calm, respectful and informal way. We watched “Falling with Newton”, and we heard from the panel about their first experiences of C.I their first teachers and what about the future? We are all making history, we are all doing as the video says, but we love to complicate it with added agendas, which actually can be informed by this experience rather than become imposed upon it. The panel included Caroline Waters, myself, Bernd, Ray Chung, Chris Aiken and Sarah Shelton Mann. Dieter Rehberg facilitated with questions and allowed each person to interpret and provide personal anecdotes. My only regret is not saying more about performance, or concerts, the importance of the performative, perhaps for another time. Isn’t the Round Robin a form of communal witnessing and a form of performance, or reconstruction? We have the feeling of being watched and we modulate to that dynamic? Isn’t the performance night a place to display the aesthetic and fullness of the form necessarily defined in the moment? Isn’t it an opportunity for people who have a relationship with someone in the dance, that will captivate an audience as well as themselves, to step up and do? Isn’t it displaying the true nature of CI when we let go of needing to know and trust we do know, in the body so the tyranny of the mind is laid to rest? Isn’t this part and parcel of the reclamation of the body dancing and making dance outside of classical culturally imposed forms?

On reflection after so many years and so many dances I recall a key moment where my mind jolted.
Many years ago (1990) Steve Paxton defined the teacher’s role to me as a form of “benign autocracy”. I have pondered this many times in different contexts and weighed up the implication against different kinds of power structures that I have encountered. Steve established a means to self efface, to step aside of the centre and away from the pedestal that could easily have been his to take. The message here is clearly that by stepping aside others step in, follow the lead, and the form transmits through compassion and generosity and avoids cultural expropriation that results in classicism. Steve Paxton’s legacy is socio-cultural and as such has political implications for us if we chose to go that far. Is it inevitable that we translate the practise into other aspects of our lives? Sometimes this is possible others not. Sometimes we face autocrats that disallow and suppress freethinking, free flow, and improvisational practise. How to mediate this and empower ourselves to survive these situations? It may enable us to make educated decisions about where we belong and how to make choices.

It is no coincidence that the presence of Touchdown Dance, a company of visually impaired and sighted dancers that was founded by Steve Paxton and Anne Kilcoyne in the UK in 1986, affirmed this principle. Stuart Jackson, Holly Thomas and Janee hall have all danced for many years but due to visual impairment they are excluded from most dance experiences that communicate through sight. Their presence stimulated and challenged the festival to shift it’s comfort zone and become accessible to their needs. Teachers had to consider how to teach, how to demonstrate and enable the visually impaired dancers to get the information. So in keeping with the principle of benign autocracy, the student becomes the teacher, they express what they need, to each other. There is a quiver of discomfort as patterns adjust and change but then a sigh of satisfaction and tears or cries of relief as they discover how to take time and how it works and that is works. There were many “wow” moments as Asha said to me “I have had a wonderful time with Stuart, an amazing and wonderful time, I wish to continue this dance when I get back.” Touchdown also performed two scores from the current show CLOSER, and so it seems, it has finally coming full circle, back into the wider community of Contact Improvisation, from whence it started. It was and will remain a touching and empowering experience for all of us.

5 half day INTENSIVE courses
Sarah Shelton Mann with “inner and outer worlds”, Mans Erlandson with “moving in contact”, Caroline Waters with “moving from where we are”, and Chris Aiken with “Fulcrum”.

Chris Aiken - Fulcrum
Chris led one of the intensive workshops, of 6 morning sessions of two hours till lunch. Chris teaches dance, with clear guiding principles and poetry, his strength being in the clarity of thinking and balance between form and freedom.
Each session began with either a mix of partnering with hands on exchange and some individual stretches into floor work, or with individual stretches into relating to each other in the space and more crossing the floor dancing.
The time was rich and wonderful with moments of “mah”, or epiphany when he related a quote such as “creativity is trying something out and seeing what happens” (M Bourne). Or “high art requires little ego”. These short cliché type sentences would wake up the mind of the room, create a shift and then we’d continue. His poetic anecdotes about making the dance your “home”, the space you are for, affirms the idea we need to “love” the dance if we are to not then “regret” the dance!
Embodiment principles came through too, reference to Irene Dowd’s concept of the “Visceral Sphere” that moves in counterbalance to the reaching side and so gives the feeling of “leaving something behind” and provides a fullness of tone in the body. This sense of lingering, waiting and supporting even in the lofting section was intrinsic to the timing required and the total listening we need to be fully connected.
Chris read the needs of the group really well, and the momentum of the days, less was sometimes more and then when we got more we ate heartily. I loved the personal presence invested in his teaching, his logic and pertinent provision of tips to avoid injury, his time to demonstrate and take suggestions and feedback and his reverence and respect for his teachers so clearly integrated into his own methodology invested in and carrying the form. “Steve in his teaching was very clear, “I am not a therapist, so it’s Ok to feel but use the practise to ground you”.
Chris worked most intensively with duets, with the concept of the “over” and “under” dancer. So Steve’s core proposition in CQ of is affirmed (Oh Joy!!)

“…do under your partner as you would have them do under you”. Steve Paxton

Photo: Patrique Beelaert

Questions & answers from OTHER TEACHERS!
The Festival; A site for inspiration, growth and learning.
As a contact teacher for many years I have come to understand that becoming a teacher is thanks to all the dances I have had. We learn from doing, from sharing the dance, by developing relationships through dancing and learning to respect our bodily intelligence and its memory. This is particularly the case as CI is mostly about falling, whether “up” or “down”, our body seeks a sense of flight or 3 dimensionality in space. We may start lying down, horizontal, do stretches and move towards the vertical, via the sagittal, as we have to move forward and back at some point to get up. But CI is constantly moving through all those dimensions, hence the fullness of its physicality and its seductiveness, it stimulates us to respond in the moment, to take risks and chances, hence the addictive quality, we just set the bar higher. Even as adults we can discover our body and its movement potential. It can be transformative, emotional and totally too much.

Safeguarding the community.
One important standard at festivals is the insistence on telling participants about the importance of self-care. We guard against “parking”, people sitting and talking in the dance space. We guard against over exuberance or over energetic dancing when it’s crowded or risk of collision is evident. We guard against the possibility of people feeling invaded, abused, aroused or forced into moving in a way they are not comfortable with. Teachers volunteer to facilitate the evening Jams as guardians for the safety of people, because of the familiar vortex, getting totally absorbed in the shared kinesphere and forgetting the wider space, the possible merging with others.

Our reflexive responses are in constant play in the contact dance. They underlie our ability to co-ordinate and respond when we move with or against gravity and through the 3 dimensions. Dis-orientation challenges our vestibular sense and educates our prehension to trust and follow as we flow in and out of each other’s kinesphere. The dance does require a certain re-education of our normal movement patterns so there is a need for form, to enable us to maximise our potential and range in the dance experience. With this a recognition of emergent or quantum methods of learning, the “aha” moment of grasping the feeling of the movement as well as the form can come at any time and generally when the thinking mind has let go. On reflection now I come to understand the magnetism of the intensives and the necessity of the Jams, both are essential learning contexts for receiving and integrating the information and allow for a time frame where each person can decide for themselves how much they can take of each.