Week 2 Reflection cont. After reading the introduction of Anne Cooper Albright's How to Land (2019), I was deeply inspired by her discussion of Contact Improvisation and how she believes that creating new habits of movement can impact one's understanding of interpersonal exchange and self-image. For Albright, the physical, social, and political are mortally intertwined:
"For me, Contact Improvisation is less about learning movements per se, and more about cultivating a certain way of being embodied in the world—one that is open to falling off balance, engaging other bodies across conflict and intimacy, as well as releasing into the support of the ground" (Albright, 8) To further articulate this point, Albright quotes Susan Foster (2011) who writes about the practice of Contact improvisation as a parcticable social ethic and an extra-ocular approach to navigation. "Spending many hours learning to sense gravity’s effects on motion and momentum, and to develop a porous and sensitized skin that could discriminate subtle shifts in one’s own weight and that of another person, contact improvisers purposefully dehabitualized their bodies’ tendencies to rely on the visual for orientation” (117). Returning to the realm of urban pedestrian scenarios which are the focus of this study, I am curious about how the regular practice of Contact Improvisation might not only affect the way that city-dwellers physically interact with each other but also with their surroundings. I am reminded of Marshall McLuhan's aim to re-frame the surfaces of the skin and the city as “just outlines and interfaces, just structure” (McLuhan et al. p.10), sites of contact rather than impermeable barriers or boundaries between the inside and outside of things: sites where biological, kinetic, and energetic exchange should be leaned into rather than recoiled from. To improvise play with the endless silhouettes produced by bodies and objects in motion like how two hands can transmute into all sorts of wild animals in a shadow puppet play... But is walking in the city not a form of Contact Improvisation? (Consider walking in a crowded subway station during rush hour- is this not a collaborative dance between your body, the city infrastructure, and your fellow commuters?).
All this is to say that I am interested in experiencing Contact Improvisation but I lack the confidence and competence of a dancer. As with Parkour, I am curious about how developing fluency in this language of movement (very de Certeau, walking as annunciation) might change my understanding of my body's relation to space (ie. many parkour practitioners develop what they call "parkour vision" which allows them to identify lines of flight that are not intuitively accessible to the average city user). I feel that much of my early performance work (see How to Move Properly in a Courtyard not Meant for Bodies (2017)) was a form of contact improvisation with the city but since I have allowed myself to become accustomed to the choreography of this urban landscape, I am no longer so viscerally compelled to act on the impulses that lead me to dance the architecture of the city in the same way- I want to remember and for my sensitivity to the city's rhythms and textures to return. As a first step, I decided to attend an Ecstatic Dance gathering to loosen the sediment in my mind and body. What I found was the relief of the choreography of the city.
