Notes on facilitating a warm-up at an open contact jam
I’m writing this quick note primarily for people who come to gatherings that I host who may want to lead a group warm-up into a contact jam. I find it useful to get more specific about what the invitation to lead a warm-up is. There is openness to the invitation, but I think it is useful to clarify the container.
Basically, i really want people facilitating a warm-up to find their personal way and inspiration for it, but i also have found it useful to clarify what we are aiming for. I hope this is useful.
The very short version
A warm-up should
- Get people relaxed and mentally present, with an awareness on the body
- Transition people into moving, waking up the body for movement, ready for a wide range of states, speeds, directions of movement, and explorations
- Warm people into sensing and working with other bodies physically and get people comfortable with touching, physical listening, giving weight, receiving weight, moving with each other in physical contact.
- A mixer is useful: “break the ice” by offering some “mixing”, with people initiating some form of physical contact with several different people, moving into and out of contact
- Stay within the time frame (for example 20-30 minutes), so that the jam is primarily open, do-it-yourself practice space
The longer version
What makes for a good warm-up for a jam?
To start, think about what a good jam is like, and then think how to get there with the group that is coming together.
What is a Contact Jam?
Different people have different, sometimes quite opposing ideas about what contact improvisation is and what a contact jam should be. I don’t want to get too deeply into that here. I will just say that what I aim to support are the core practices of classic contact improvisation. These include sustained weight sharing, exploration of the unique possibilities of moving in physically interdependent contact, allowing oneself to be moved by another and exploring how one in turn moves someone else. While it is very open, a contact jam is not simply an “open dance space”. In this context, solo movement should be a support and preparation for movement with another and not a distraction from it. The contact jam is also not an ensemble movement practice based in visual presentation and group coordination, but space for a diverse range of independent explorations of the mechanical consequences of moving in physical contact. Ensemble exploration may occasionally arise, but the duet is the central practice. Also, while a contact jam should be a convivial, welcoming shared practice space, and there is a natural warmth that often comes with working in physical contact, it is also not a space of assumed intimacy and community. That is, the “purpose” is not community or personal bonding, but a mutually supportive shared space for personal sensorial, mechanical, and aesthetic curiosity. Ideally, at a contact jam, people should feel a freedom to go into explorations that are at times quite divergent from those explored in other duets, with just a little attention to helping the group collectively get to depth in idiosyncratic explorations. While a shared focus can sometimes support a jam, particularly for getting the less familiar more comfortable with finding their way into dancing with others, forcing a unified “vibe” can also kill a jam, reducing it to least common denominator and preventing people from following their own curiosity within the container of contact improvisation.
I say this, as out in the world of people who use the phrase “contact improvisation”, there are many people who would disagree with some or all of this. The term “contact improvisation” no longer has a coherent shared definition. I do not try to create a container for all the practices of people who use the term “contact improvisation”. I’m not particularly interested in the words “contact improvisation” or a forced sense of community around those words or the people who self-identify with them. I’m interested in the specific practices that emerged in the 1980s via the direct social transmission from the explorations of Steve Paxton and others in the 1970s. If you need a term, call it “classic contact improvisation”. Again, ‘a shared space centrally exploring the unique possibilities of mechanically interdependent movement through physical contact.
I think it also useful to remember that the contact jam is itself rooted in the informal non-performative performance exploration of the Round Robin. Central to the jam is a shared physical investigation, a desire to support others in deepening into duets, a curiosity in others’ curiosities and the mechanical results, a moving into and out of duets.
Who is coming together to be warmed up?
I’m thinking about writing this for a jam as part of a big open CI gathering, like a weekend jam or festival. There will be a large group of people, with different skill levels and both different amounts and different kinds of experience dancing in an open jam. Some people will know each other. Others will be relative strangers and some might not know anyone. For the people who are more beginners, there may be some disorientation, some not being sure what to do in an open practice space, and also some unease about starting a dance. The biggest purpose of the warm-up should be to help “bring the bottom up” as it were and get the less comfortable more comfortable. Also, different jam spaces have different tacit norms about how to use the space, how to enter and exit dancing. Some will come thinking that the norms that they are used to are somehow natural, consensus, and right, when in fact, they are idiosyncratic to the people they have been working with. Even for the experienced, it can be useful to have a facilitated space in which to experiment together before open dance.
The warm up should bring people away from the social insecurity of wondering what we are doing into being present mentally and binging the attention to the body. From here, the body should be “warmed up”: we move and get ready for a wide range of physical explorations and states. We also specifically should warm-up physical interaction… physical listening, comfort with norms of touch, giving weight, receiving weight, delivering force and adapting to force from another. It’s quite helpful to have an element of a “mixer” in a warm-up, where people are specifically facilitated into entering and exiting contact with several people, to physically establish this as a shared norm. We want to introduce an ease of creating new dances and establish something of a shared temporary practice community. While the duet is a central exploration, we also don’t want to be too personal or precious. There is something to be “tuned” in the group of both encouraging deep dives into duet exploration and also remembering that it is a shared practice space, where disruption is an invited guest.
I find an interesting tension between the aim of wanting people to feel permission to deeply follow their own curiosities and bodies in different directions and the fact that sometimes a shared focus can take all individuals farther. Sometimes in a warm-up, I’ll take people together into a shared state and then just release people into dancing. Sometimes I specifically facilitate people going into different states and investigations to normalize difference.
There is something to be balanced between extremes of allowing duets to continue so long that they become impenetrable and duets being disrupted so readily that they are not able to develop. There’s no one universally right answer there, but whatever answer is found will have an effect.
Ending the warm-up
A central question: do you launch people into dancing, “fading out” the warm up facilitation by just telling people mid-dance that they are now on their own, or do you finish the last dance of the warm-up and formally close the warm-up together so that people find their own beginnings to the open jam?
Most of the time, I end the warm-up as a launch. Particularly with mixed groups, it’s good for those newer to big open jams to be left dancing so they can drop in and get comfortable more, not give time for doubt to creep back in with a formal end. Sometimes, with more experienced groups, I’ll stop with a sharing circle, but I would only do this if I thoroughly trust everyone’s comfort with themselves in finding their own way into dancing. Even then, I still will usually use a “launching” ending, to take advantage of the deepening of some exploration in the warm-up.
PS. It’s also good to remember that it is just a short warm-up and not worry too much about it. The warm-up is just a bit of “extra credit” to help at a gathering where relatively intelligent people basically already know what to do.