Solo Contact Improv

I have been navigating living with intense neurological pain for four years.  The journey has taken many turns and my relationship to the pain has slowly but profoundly shifted.  My first response was double strength Vicodin for a month when my doctor and I both thought the pain was a temporary response to antibiotics clearing a Lyme infection.  When the pain persisted and continued to escalate we did a few more tests to see if the pain was related to any skeletal problems.  I finally accepted that while the infection may have decreased, the gradual 20 year nerve damage was not to be dismissed so easily.  At first I did what any normal person would do, I let my mind run wild with visions of living for decades with intense pain that no one could substantially change.   I tried more neurologically appropriate pain medications, but they made me feel weird and had only a minimal impact on the pain.  At this point I was forced to accept the unacceptable, a miracle that only became possible when I disconnected from the fear tapes and relied on the deeper wiser place that 35 years of meditation had introduced me to.   I could at least love, laugh and enjoy the rest of my life, even when it hurt.  I became immensely grateful for every nuance of beauty and wonder.

Gradually I was able to be present with the pain.  I could stay in the room with it, listen to its story, and marvel at how deep in time the roots were buried.  I could feel the myriad people who shared the deep fear at the root of it, most powerfully my mother.   I could sit beside it and listen.   I could allow the pain to be there and I could function, not physically, but emotionally and intellectually.  I figured out how to continue my consulting business at home, and my husband gradually took over cooking, cleaning, shopping and everything else it takes to run a house.  I just struggled to do as much as I could without biting anyone's head off or messing anything up.  I was with the pain, yet still separate from it, not fully interacting with it, holding it gingerly, a bit afraid of moving because it made it hurt even more.  It was easier to hide out at my desk and be "useful."

More pain, accompanied by violent and persistent muscle spasms, began making it even harder to work and cope.   Muscles that have been atrophied for years were regaining muscle tone and the ability to move, but only in violent painful spasms.  Perhaps this escalation is a good thing, or at least could be.  After my mother died unexpectedly, something shifted.  She too had suffered physical pain and difficulty functioning and we shared many of the same issues, but she was not easily able to release the fear and needed to rely on pain medication to make her life endurable.   At last she is fearless and pain free and her love and support seem to reach out to me in a flood of momentum that encourages wading in deeper.

Separate is no longer good enough.  It suddenly feels imperative that I stop working and release the strong competent watcher who could continue to answer everyone's questions while my body bravely struggled on.  I need full access to my power and creativity instead of just plugging into what I know how to do.   I long to surrender to not knowing and give myself space to explore.    Now in the midst of the rapid dismantling of my 20 year consulting business a new relationship to my body is just beginning to emerge.  It seems to be an odd blend of yoga and solo contact improv. 

My daughter, Lauren, is a dancer and for the last several years she has been exploring contact improv.  When I sent her a draft of this piece with my fuzzy way to think about contact improv, she sent me a fantastic description, which is so good I’m adding it as an addendum for anyone curious about really understanding improv.  Her  description echoes my experience:   “…, the subtleties can become very loud--the slightest shift of weight or muscle tensing in one's dancing peers can inspire a whole, impulsive new spin of movement.  In this way, our 'state of being' can be broadcast into life, something bigger, evolving, and constantly feeding the next moment.  And then sometimes stillness settles.  It just does.  One can think about it and search for it, but it is most satisfying when you relinquish control and let the dance decide for itself. “

My body is calling my awareness into this sort of dance.  If I begin a yoga movement and encounter pain and resistance and stay fully present I can detect tiny openings, a slight pull to move in some direction.  The movement expands and picks up momentum, moves until it reaches its limit and settles back into stillness.   If I rest in the stillness, the sensation slowly builds into another movement which I follow.  Lauren’s clear descriptions sift in and expand my capacity to trust the movement and I marvel that both my mother and my daughter seem able to send me clarity and encouragement.  After an hour or so I' m profoundly tired and sore and head off to a hot bath with Epsom salts followed by a long period of deep silence.

I still hurt but I feel a flood of curiosity and excitement.  I am in my body, an amazing feeling like when I first learned to swim and could keep afloat and move.  I don't know where it's going,  I no longer remember what it's like to be without pain, but as I explore the burning fire I can perceive subtle differences where a movement has a flowing quality that is pleasing in comparison to the stuck contraction.    I begin to think that my brain and my muscles are struggling to reconnect to each other and need my conscious cooperation to rebuild the lost connections.  This may be a figment of my imagination, yet I am enveloped in a flood of enthusiasm that gives me momentum to get up and work with it again and again.  I am reminded of the earnest persistence my children showed when they learned to walk.  I am experimenting; I have nothing to lose, but I sense the possibility that I may have something to gain - another chance to walk again.

Contact Improvisation 

Lauren Ehnebuske Day sent me this fantastic description to help me in writing this, but it is also helping me trust the knowing inside myself that is capable of “following the flow.” 

Usually, CI happens with multiple people beginning to dance together with an awareness of one another and some kind of physical contact.  It is beautiful in that the more each dancer is centered and inspired in and of themselves, the easier and better the connection between the dancers becomes.  Ideally, each dancer could, theoretically, just be dancing by themselves--it is that fluid and easy.  If one dancer is just in a 'support role' mentality, there is a lot less for his or her partners to engage, and the partnership tends to fall off or take a lot of work.  That said, if one or more dancers is overly focused on themselves and not being present with his or her partners, the partnership is equally doomed.  The power is in simultaneous presence with oneself and the peers and/or world around one--the whole becoming something more powerful than any of the pieces.  Since it is improvisation, you never know where it is going.  You have to be fully present, able to respond with nearly no delay, yet also temper things with common sense about not hurting anyone or anything in the process or remembering choreographic intent.

To dance fully in CI takes all one’s faculties, mental/spiritual/physical.  Even a small shared rolling-point-of-contact* can be deeply engaging if one really pays attention.  (*Remember how in gymnastics I used to practice rolling a ball along my arms from one hand to the other?  Well, imagine that with another body instead of the ball, and that's an example of rolling-point-of-contact, though it can happen with any body surface).

There are multiple "camps" of CI.  Some say you can't use your hands, hoping to help people relate to one another in less familiar ways.  Some disciplines focus on a point of shared weight, which people can roll around between them (elbow to hip can roll into shoulder to thigh, for example) and idealize a dance where that point of contact is never broken, it just moves around.  The side of contact that I like to immerse myself in is more closely related to modern dance.  Literal touching is not necessarily constant as it is with the rolling-point-of-contact: the momentum of movement trumps it. The dancers are aware of one another's trajectories as well as their mass, and they can actually respond to the velocity as if touching, without touching.  They can carry it along, spin against it, go with it, and even bounce it back--all things that are more easily understood with a physical connection, but that can be quite tangible regardless of spatial contact among in-tune dancers.  Both main camps, rolling-point-of-contact and the dancier versions, rely on rotation to facilitate coming in and out of connection.  To come together, two dancers can spin like two gears, and when their paths are tangent, they have effectively eased together without going against either dancer's trajectory.  Also, all camps of contact rely to greater or lesser extents on improvisation--even a choreographed ballroom dance will likely involve in-the-moment responses to a partner's unanticipated weight shift.

After practicing CI a while, the subtleties can become very loud--the slightest shift of weight or muscle tensing in one's dancing peers can inspire a whole, impulsive new spin of movement.  In this way, our 'state of being' can be broadcast into life, something bigger, evolving, constantly feeding the next moment.  And then sometimes stillness settles.  It just does.  One can think about it and search for it, but it is most satisfying when you relinquish control and let the dance decide for itself.  When everyone in a group of dancers is tuned in, the "oiji board effect" can be incredibly powerful.  There is something in muscles and movement that seems to have a mind of its own

An intermediary to contact improv is dancing with the surfaces of the built environment around us.  All dance has to interact with whatever surface is taking the gravity of the dancers (usually just the floor), but this relationship can definitely be exaggerated.  Sometimes it's fun to roll my back along the wall, for instance, or go upside down and walk my feet along the wall, or push off the back of the couch with my arms.  Although the opportunity to be present with our "partners" in this case does not seem to have the richness of engaging other animate objects, it can still involve a way of 'experiencing' I associate with CI: open, playful, accepting, responsive.

A lot of our lives are caught up in the mental constructs of "not hurting anyone" and "remembering our choreography."  The more these thought patterns dominate our brains, the less successful contact improvisation usually is and the less we can let in the powerful creative, "being" powers inside and among us.  When we have trained ourselves to instinctually not land on one another's knees or heads using what seems like muscle memory or brain stem thinking, then we are freer from the frontal lobe constructs (in which we live from day to day) while still being able to get along alright practically, and that's nice.  I am pretty sure that we can get further out of our minds as we usually know them by delving deeper into our presence with our partner(s).  When the flow is really happening, people don't get hurt.  If the flow is happening strongly and then one or more partners gets distracted and stops being present with the moment, bad things can happen instantly.  At the very least your partners will feel your loss and usually respond by being less creative.

At this point, you are already dancing.  You can mentally pull out, but you'll get hurt.  Follow the dance in its natural trajectory, whatever that may be, and you might be safer, more whole, and have more to offer the
world.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDOMzj3MqL0&feature=related