“Contact Improvisation is a sport and as such, you risk injury when you participate.”
That is a phrase I feel is not often enough emphasized in contact improvisation circles. Instead, much of the rhetoric of the self-identified contact improvisation community focuses on utopian ideals.
“Contact improvisation is a safe space.”
“Contact improvisation is healing.”
… those are sometimes true, but I think dangerous to have faith in.
I’m going to get up on my high horse a bit for this writing, as I am frustrated at what i experience to be the deterioration of skill development in CI (at least in jams), which either makes CI more dangerous or severely limits what can be done. I find myself frequently limitted in jams compared to 20 years ago, because of what feels like a lower level of safety awareness in the space. I seem to also be hearing both about more injuries and frequent complaints of lack of investment in training amongst jam-goers.
(If you think that CI does not cause injuries, except rarely, maybe jump to this Facebook thread, and then come back…)
Sure, CI is relatively safe in comparison to other contact sports like Rugby or American football, and certainly there is much physical and emotional healing that occurs through contact improvisation practices. However, you are significantly more likely to get physically injured in CI than in other social dance practices, like tango, salsa, or clubbing. Even if you personally are not doing anything particularly physically risky, you are vulnerable to other people’s choices and collective group risks. Tuning out and relaxing on the side of the space may lead to a shattered ankle, broken ribs, or a debilitating concussion (actual reported events) because of what other people are doing. Long term practice often leads to torn ligaments or worn out hip joints, unless you pay an unusual amount of attention to protecting yourself with constantly maintaining and refining technique. The number of long term contactors who have had reconstructive surgery to hips or knees is disturbing.
A lot of people have false impressions of how safe contact improvisation is, including a lot of relatively experienced teachers. I think I was practicing CI for about 20 years before I started to realize how much I was personally underestimating how physically dangerous contact classes and jams are. Some reasons are relatively simple. On the one hand, there is a bit of a cognitive bias to underestimate risk due to the utopian thinking that is often reinforced (sometimes unconsciously, sometimes consciously) in CI classes, particularly in the “contact community” (as opposed to “contemporary dance”) context. I was guilty of this myself for a long time, treating injury as a rare exception rather than as a not uncommon risk. On the other hand, there is the fact that injuries tend to be hidden and made quickly “invisible” in the culture of contact improvisation. In a jam or class exercise, if there is an injury it is quickly moved to the side and others are encouraged to keep dancing to not disrupt the flow of the explorations. Many don’t even realize that something happened, and those who notice often forget quite quickly unless they were actually caring for the person. Also, there is usually not a diagnosis until the person has left. People tend to say “don’t worry about me” and “it’s probably nothing” until they discover later how injured they actually are. Once injured, they are no longer around everyone else, so the injury is invisible in the often very dispersed community of urban contact jams. People keep practicing contact, constantly surrounded by not-injured dancers, giving a false impression of how frequently injury happens.
A bit of preaching here…To be as safe as you can be in contact, I think it is important to remember that it is NOT a safe space and that we need to constantly be aware of other people’s unpredictbale movement. CI will not magically take care of us. Even with caution, it is likely that it will at some point injure us and it may injure us permanently. The risk of such is greater if we ignore the risk.
Even if you are being safe, someone else might not be.
Even if you consistently try to be safe, you are imperfect and sometime will not be.
Even if everyone is following typically safe practices, sometimes shit happens.
An imperfect empirical survey of risks…
As a less-than-perfect assessment of the risks of contact, I started a thread on the German CI Facebook group, asking people to share CI injuries that they had witnessed, heard about, or participated in. I did this to get a sense of the variety of injuries that occur in CI as well as get a sense of some of the most common CI injuries. It had a very quick flow of responses from about 40+ people naming injuries. I also heard from a number of people off-line.
Mostly, the common injuries that I heard about are what I expected to hear… torn ligaments around the knee or torn meniscus were relatively common for the more serious injuries. Bruises for beginners are so common that they were not even mentioned as injuries. Back injuries were also very common. What surprised me a bit was how common broken ribs are in CI. I had known of a few cases, but didn’t actually think about how common they would be. They seem to come from a variety of situations: small person relaxing and not organizing defensively while receiving weight from larger (usually more stiff) person, someone receiving weight quickly from someone in the ribs while on the floor (worse when they are stiff, of course), but also from falling on a stiff part of someone’s architecture (like a knee), or from being aggressively lifted.
The next most common injury seemed to be a concussion, either from falling/being-dropped on one’s head or from flying or being swung into a pillar. Most, but not all of the time, this was because someone had done something that removed the ability of the person to take care of themselves.
From here, I was surprised at the incredibly wide variety of injuries that happen in CI… torn rotator cuff or dislocated shoulder, broken arm, twisted ankle, broken fingers, torn ligaments in ankle, shattered fibia and tibia with broken bones sticking out of the skin (simple lift gone wrong), black eyes, serious internal organ damage (from someone lying on the side of the space and a dancer falling on them), a few cases of needing hip replacements, several cases of losing one’s front teeth in impact with the floor, micro-tears in the joint capsule (bursa) of the knee leading to water-on-the-knee, broken noses, dislocated sacro-iliac joint, torn pectineus muscle, ripped off toes nails, broken toes, etc, etc.
Responsibility and Avoidance
This variety and hidden frequency of CI related injuries brings up a number of issues, but especially thoughts about responsibility and avoidance. Starting with responsibility, I offer two stories. The first is the old maxim from CI which is that the only rule of contact is to always take care of yourself … and don’t remove your partner’s ability to take care of themselves. Will following these two principles keep things safe? No. A completely safe space is impossible. I do, however, think they go a long way to making things safer. I always recommend that folks only take risks with small chances of small injury, and don’t restrict your partner’s ability to get their feet or hands underneath them to catch themselves in a fall. There are ways to stay safe that don’t obviously follow those rules, and fun things happen sometimes seemingly violating these rules, but know your risks and try to maintain consensuality with imposing risks on someone else beyond the normative risks of CI jams. I also remember and always pass on something my capoeira instructor, Mestre Acordeon, used to say. “In capoeira, if you get hit, it is your fault for not getting out of the way. If you hit someone, it is your fault for not being in control (so you better mean it if you hit someone).” I think it is mostly more important to think first about your own mistakes that led to you or someone else getting injured. Definitely think about what the other person did and what they could have done differently so you don’t make that mistake and you can help them and others not make it, but focus on your own mistakes first. How did you mess up?
If i ever hear someone say that they did everything appropriately when an injury happened, that speaks to me of a dangerous dancer who is not trying to improve themselves, who does not learn from their mistakes.
Avoidance of injury is the other big topic that comes up. Really, that is a big long topic full of mostly context specific principles, probably better for live instruction in a class, though maybe I’ll give it a go to communicate some of the things i’v learned over the years as a written blog post in the future. For the moment, I feel the most important thing is simply to take CI seriously and recognize the possibility of injury… never forget it! Manage your risk taking appropriately. Take classes from skilled instructors … both in CI and in other arts to fill in the gaps from often times spotty and unordered contact classes and workshops. Be humble. Don’t take feedback defensively. Learn to enjoy criticizm and use it to improve your own technique, even if it involves recognizing that you aren’t as good as you thought or hoped, or interpreting feedback from someone you don’t entirely agree with. Recognize that there are objective skills to learn and that you don’t have them as well as you could. Recognize that there will be people who are better than you are and learn from them. Issues also tend to be gendered, since we live in a very gendered society. If you are male, you probably really need to check your ego, learn to be more physically aware, and accept that you probably over-rate yourself. (For another bit of writing on contactors (especially male contactors) over-rating themselves technically, here is another blog post on “Blue Belt Syndrome”.) If you are female, you probably need to be braver and recognize more your own strength, influence, and agency.
I think risk taking is vital for learning, but small risks of small injuries, not big risks and not risking big injuries. Small risks teach one quickly by giving you experience in a wider variety of situations, though only if you are really paying attention and trying to learn. It’s all pointless, of course, if you break your neck or severely injure someone else. What is a small risk and what is a big risk? That entirely depends on who is involved. One person can do seemingly spectacular lifts and falls quite safely and with minimal risk because of their developed technique. Another person needs to build up technical skills that support even basic off-balance CI dynamics. It depends on where you are on the ladder of technical development.
A few quick injury avoidance points.
- Work on the alignment of your knees with the forces you are conveying from the floor through your body into contact, thinking especially about how you use your hips in relation to the knees and incoming force. This is life-long work and I feel training this should be part of your regular practice if you want to save your knees.
- Similarly, work on the alignment of your lower back, particularly when doing lifts. I find that for most people, a quick-and-dirty fix is to slightly actively tuck the tail during lifts (from the front), but this is just a rough improvement over common bad form, and not a nunced map to ideal form. As with the knees, this is to maintain proper alignment of your lower back and make sure that forces are being delivered through your lower back via aligned vertebrae, with forces going through the big working surfaces of the joints, rather than the edges of the working surfaces… bad for the joints and strains the muscles otherwise, which eventually leads to back issues. Also, don’t force lifts that require strain.
- PROTECT YOUR HEAD. Don’t hit it on hard things and don’t let people hit it with their feet or elbows. Accept bruises to other parts of your body before accepting impact to your head.
- Be paranoid when you are resting or in micro-investigations when there are people moving with any momentum in the space, even if you are on the side of the space. There is no “safe” part of the room. If i have my eyes closed, I always keep my ears active for footfalls that are getting within my “safe zone” and make sure that i am fully aware of where people are and ready to defend myself should they fall on me or go to kick me in the head. That happens a lot in contact. Relaxing and micro-explorations are vital and central practices to CI, but Stay Awake! Many fun-loving people get more reckless than they intend at times.
- Only move with the momentum that you can control safely as needed. Don’t be a jerk, inflicting risks on other people. Don’t kick people in the head… know where your feet are and where the other bodies are in the space, particularly their heads. Don’t kick your feet into space if you are not sure that it is clear of other people’s heads. Don’t “get lost in your dance”. It is never safe or appropriate to check out from the space when there is off-balance, momentum based exploration in the space, particularly if you are that thing with momentum.
- Think constantly defensively, like a martial artist. Train defensively.
- Assume that there are unconsciously suicidal people in the space taking risks they don’t intend involving your body. (There is a tension between assuming that people will take care of themselves and knowing that sometimes they won’t… always test out that assumption and remember constantly that it is an assumption.)
CI is riskier than many will tell you. Denial of the risk increases it. It’s still a lot of fun, and I find it worth the risks. I take risks continuously, but i try to keep them within reason.
Of course, as several people pointed out, injuries are “lessons”. Obviously, we (ideally) learn to not do the thing that got us injured or injured someone else. Beyond this, injuries also act as restrictions to our dancing. If we are curious and open, keeping investigating within the restrictions of an injury may bring us into territories that we would never go into otherwise.
CI is still mostly very healing, as long as you are careful not to get yourself killed.