Special Events Ongoing Jams/Classes People Organizations Map

Birthday Presence

This is a collection of "statements" reflecting on contact improvisation from a broad range of artists, dancers, choreographers, teachers, writers, therapists and program directors from all around the world.

Eva Karczag

consider weight - and a generosity in giving
consider breath - and a generosity in taking and returning
consider having arrived - and a generosity in presence and availability
consider energy - and an abundance
consider emptiness - being open, available, willing
consider fullness - being full of possibility, full of movement

this is a place where there is no judgement - no thinking about should or can't
this is a place where moving is

© Eva Karczag

Deborah Hay

"Personally, I think Contact Improvisation began with Steve Paxton and me dancing together, locked in adrenalattraction, at parties and clubs in the sixties. He wanted more of that feeling so he invented CI."

Deborah Hay

MY LIFE IN CONTACT - Rachel Kaplan

My first experience of Contact Improvisation happened during my last term at Wesleyan University, which was, I think, the summer of 1985. I was in the summer school program finishing my B.A. degree, and I took classes with Bob Dunn and Irene Dowd. Even then I knew this was a good thing. I got involved that summer with a man named Andrew Clibanoff, who was a dancer, and who had some small involvement with Contact. The first time I saw people doing Contact was watching Andrew rolling in Dena Davida's lap. It looked fun and it looked sexual and when Dena said to Andrew: "The colors of your eyes are so pretty," when she saw him a few nights later at the theatre, I knew she was attracted to him, and since I was attracted to him too, I wondered what this Contact Improvisation thing was and what it had to do with sex.

When I finished my degree, I left Wesleyan and moved to Northampton and studied for a brief moment with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. I called the folks at Contact Quarterly because I knew about it and because I was in town. I told Nancy Stark Smith I had moved to Northampton because I thought there might be dancing going on there and she laughed, and said she didn't know why people thought that. I was disappointed, but I met Nancy Edison through that phone conversation to the Contact Quarterly, and we befriended one another at a time when each of us had very few people close to us in the strange, puritanical town where we both lived. I didn't do any Contact at all while I was in Northhampton. I didn't like living there at all, so I left after about six months.

I went to Austin, Texas to dance with Deborah Hay, who may have in the past had something to do with people who do and make Contact, but who definitely doesn't do it herself. I was wildly affected by her teachings, which catapulted me into an entirely new way of seeing, thinking and being from what I had learned at Wesleyan University. I wanted to be a dancer. Better yet: I was a dancer.

A few months later, I moved to San Francisco with Andrew, and we became involved with the local dance scene, which included an East Bay Contact "community", ballerinas, modern dancers, and among other things, an exciting performance group called Contraband, led by Sara Shelton Mann, whose dancing had roots in Contact. I studied from Sara in a haphazard and mostly hazardous sort of way, and Andrew got more involved in the Contact scene. I went to one jam at Harbin Hot Springs, and I remember Carol Swann and Chris Mathias sitting in each other's laps in the hot tub, which was something new to me, being a recent recruit to California living. I also remember dancing fiercely, gathering oos and aahs from the crowd, and ending the weekend with a sore knee. I hated the drumming that went on all night and the self-righteousness with which it was defended, so I never went back.

I decided to stay in San Francisco. I studied Hawkins technique with Jim Tyler, one of the original members of Mangrove, and a former dancer with the Eric Hawkins Company. I learned to tassel my hips, and I learned about discipline. I learned about going to the studio every day and about practice. Sometimes I went to contact jams, but mostly I was not drawn to the scene. Some time later, when Andrew and I left one another in a rather brutal way, I developed an allergic reaction to the contact community because it had been his. I knew all of this had something to do with sex and attraction, but I wasn't sure what.

I kept dancing. I began to perform, and I also began to write criticism about performance. I wrote some essays which were published in the Contact Quarterly, which I always subscribed to, sometimes read, and was always grateful for. Karen Nelson read a piece I wrote called "Towards a New Criticism" and she invited me to the Contact Jam at Breitenbush Hot Springs which she and Alito Alessi co-produced. They wanted me to lead a conference they were doing on criticism. This was the first time someone outside my home town had acknowledged my presence and my work; I was excited and ambivalent. I didn't know if I wanted to be doing contact, but I knew I wanted to go. I also knew that if I didn't want to do the dance, I could always take a walk in the woods and would be quite fine.

I had an explosive time at Breitenbush. I was introduced to the work with differently abled dancers, and it blew my mind. The open-ness of the environment blew my mind. The lithium steam room blew my mind. Alito blew my mind. The river which takes our stories away blew my mind. I loved dancing. I loved the people I met. I loved the way I was received. I saw people living an international, traveling lifestyle, wandering around the world, teaching and dancing. I looked at it from the outside, and I wanted it. When I arrived home, high as a kite and with myriad plans for taking over the world, my friend Jess Curtis said, "You better calm down or you're going to hurt yourself." A few days later, I went to a jam at the Marin Headlands, and when I was dancing with Jules Beckman, a first for us, and watching Liz Ozol and wishing I were as strong as she, not a first for me, I tore the anterior cruciate ligament in my right knee. Down for the count. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Years.

My injury grounded me, quite literally, and changed my life. I learned about stillness and listening. I learned more deeply about the metaphors of my body. I learned about healing and its roots and relatedness to injury. I learned about stepping forward, on my own two feet, standing straight and tall. I went back to dancing after a full year away, rehabilitating and sitting, and when dancing with Ray Chung at my second Breitenbush experience, I injured my knee again.

This time I was not so patient with myself. I was distressed at the re-injury, angry that the rehabilitation hadn't "worked", and impatient and sad to be sitting on the side lines, again. This second injury, which was then followed by a third one year later, solidified a feeling of fear and hesitancy in my body, to which I have had to pay meticulous and loving attention. I have done many different things to "heal" myself over the years and to shift away from this place of weakness and broken-ness. I have seen all the physical correlations of my injury mapped on my psychological and spiritual terrain. I have worked on my knee, but I have also worked on my mind and my heart. I don't spend a lot of time anymore wanting to be in anyone else's body. I am more aware of my own limitations and my own desires. I am more in contact with the kind of dance I can and want to have. Now, I go to Contact jams infrequently, mostly because the predominant style of Contact in the Bay Area where I live is highly athletic and trickster-ish, lacking a certain delicacy and intimacy which my body needs to survive, whole. Contact was always about a certain kind of love, but it took a long experience of pain and darkness for me to find it.

During this time of healing and breaking and healing again, I did some performing and some waiting, and through a circuitous chain of events, was offered a job by Aat Hougee at the European Dance Development Center. I taught performance art and theatre at the school, and after my first visit there, took a trip around the world, the first time I had ventured so far afield. This was the first year in five that my knee didn't go out on me. I returned to the EDDC/Dusseldorf at the end of my trip and taught another session of performance art. I was a newly confirmed traveler, and glad for it. From an essay published in Contact Quarterly, I had found a whole new way of being in the world which included dancing, injury, teaching and travel.

This has been my trajectory every since. Even though I do not practice Contact on a regular basis, I feel myself fully within the conversation it proposes, and the perameters of the community created around this vital and vitalizing form. I continue to teach at the EDDC, and in other places at home and abroad. When I do, I teach a contemplative movement practice combined with writing, and I invariably offer a simple score called Making and Breaking Contact. Not based so much on the principles of exchanging weight as Contact Improvisation is, but on the principles of coming together and going apart, which I have also learned so much about from the form of Contact itself. This score always bring people in relation, to themselves and one another. It has something to do with sex and attraction and where you wanted to lay your body down. That has always been true.

I go to Contact these days with a little trepidation, but also a lot of love and appreciation for what the form has given me. Some of my best friends do Contact. I thank everyone who has been with me on this journey. From first exposure until now, I am dancing the constant shifts of weight/meaning/relating which are metaphorized by the form. I wish I could be with everyone on this birthday celebration for Contact. I am just returning from touring a performance piece in northern Europe, and right now dancing in North Carolina with Anna Halprin at the American Dance Festival. I will try to bring our spirit there, but I have no doubt that it will already be present. I will meet it with joy when I arrive.

With much love,

Rachel Kaplan

Karen Kaeja

Hi My partner and I (Allen and Karen Kaeja) will be attending CI25. We have been working with and teaching contact for the past 10 years. For the past 3 years we have been brought into the National Ballet School of Canada to do workshops of 2-3 weeks with the ballet students. It has been the schools first experience with any alternative! dance forms. One of the students recently wrote us a letter, she writes

"I was very entusiastic with this new form of dance you had introduced to us. It had a great influence on my dancing, not only physically, but mentally and emotionally. Your contact class awakened a being in me that has made me realize, yes, I want to be a dancer." Mira Peck, National Ballet student.

This is a young woman who has been studying ballet only all her life toward a professional career as a ballerina. Allen and I were pretty excited by her response and others. If this fits into your collection, feel free to draw on it.

Bye for now,

Karen Kaeja

Contact Improvisation Happy 25th Birthday (a presence)

In Holland you say Hartelijk Gefiliceteerd (hearty congratulations) and sing "Lang zal zij leven" (long shall s/he live) ending with HIP HIP HOERA three times, the last shouted with arms thrown high!

What a gift contact has been - in the early seventies when women's edging toward more equal footings was far from a given, here was a dance form where it was practiced without question. When the somatic practices are so familiar to us today were not yet (alternative) household words, contact was a way in to a deeper study of body/mind in movement.

My own story, contacting Steve and other Bennington pioneers those early years (Nita, Lisa N., Lo, Karen Radler, Christie, Danny and, and), was one of a technically trained dancer's resistance to letting go of familiar form. It took time to see that what was being pointed to was the deepest level of support and sensing. The new challenges and potentials of contact became something to rise to and I was hooked.

Community-side simplicity and groupness. When I moved to the Boston area and no contact community existed, it was necessary to help get the ball rolling to be able to relate to people in that immediately profound way. Moving to New York in the later Seventies, the contact community and the downtown dance community were wonderfully interlinked. Being part of the contact tribe made Gotham workable.

Now at EDDC (European Dance Development Center) experience of contact is essential fundamental dancer training. Where else do you learn so quickly to listen? To attend to sensation and forces essential to felt dancing. So much contemporary work uses the vocabulary extrapolated from contact - it has become (for better and worse) integrated in fringe and mainstream dance practice.

I'm grateful that contact improvisation was born and reached this venerable age on a lot of levels. Personally I'm deeply happy to have had this way of being in my own body with others. My kids are delighted with the throw and catch part. Culturally, there are dancers out there who come to dancing precisely because contact improvisation exists. The watchers too get a new take on human potential. As someone for whom dance seems to be a lifelong endeavor, who follows the field in its growth and changes, contact improvisation has clearly been a revolutionary move forward.

So, once again, LANG ZAL ZIJ LEVEN. HIP HIP HOERA!!!

Lisa Kraus, May 1997
Arnhem, the Netherlands

Martha Myers

It is difficult to imagine today's dance without CI. Its concepts and practice have permeated our dance training, performance and choreography. On its own it is a major technical development in late twentieth century dance. As one of several ingredients comprising the loosely defined "new dance" or "release technique" it is seen across forms and throughout the country.

For almost 25 years I've listened to questions from colleagues and students as to how you categorize contact. Among them over the years have been: Is it a dance from? A spiritual path? A kind of folk dance? Is is more meaningful to those who participate than to an audience? How has it affected the aesthetics and practice of dance today? What are its particular risks for injury (granting that each dance form and sport pose specific hazards)? These are questions common to innovation in dance since time immemorial. Did Steve Paxton and pioneers Danny Lepkoff, Nancy Stark Smith and others suspect back in the late sixties what a powerful "virus" they had unleashed? That their inspired investigations of movement would affect contemporary dance - modern and ballet so deeply?

Certainly I didn't, and although fascinated, approached it in the beginning cautiously. I was interested in introducing it into the curriculum at ADF. But was it "safe" for our student population in the intensity of an ADF summer? Thinking that an opportunity for a longer period of study (beyond the six-week length of ADF) would be a way to begin, I incorporated a CI class into the dance major at Connecticut College, and later to classes at ADF with Paxton, Lepkoff and Wendell Beavers.

CI continues to evolve. It has expanded our movement vocabulary and creative options. It has outstanding performers and teachers, a rationa