Many contact improvisors get stuck at relatively low levels of technical development in contact improvisation. Me saying this is not just me as someone obsessed with technical development in CI being curmudgeonly, but something I hear from other more experienced dancers or those coming to CI from other disciplines. Peter Bingham in Vancouver recently told a number of men who had been coming to his classes for years that they had to stop coming as it was transparent that they were simply using the class as a place to dance and not as a place to work on developing their technique and functional physical awareness skills. There are some who practice and even teach contact improvisation for decades who are not as technically advanced as some others who have only been practicing contact for a few years. This is often in the face of continuing to try things that would at least be improved through continued study and skill development. I understand part of this dynamic via a syndrome first explained to me by my college Hapkido instructor, Dr Norman Link, which he called “blue belt syndrome”. It goes as follows…
Blue Belt Syndrome…
In the beginning, as a white belt, one knows that one knows nothing and one learns fast, acting a sponge for information. Eventually one learns a sufficient amount of technique to be a yellow belt.
At yellow belt, you think you are pretty damn good. You are impressed with yourself. As a result of this decline in self-critique, your learning slows down. It takes a lot longer, then, to get to the next level of technique. Eventually, however, with time, you make blue belt.
Once you receives your promotion to blue belt, you think you are absolutely amazing. In fact, you think you are on your way to be the next Bruce Lee, and you think you are almost there. IN fact, you’ll be better than Bruse Lee in no time. You are wildly overestimating how good you are and as a result, your learning pretty much stops. Thankfully, there are helpful brown belts around who will consistently knock you on your ass, pummel you, and brutally force you into submission with joint locks. Through this generous help, you eventually downgrade a bit your self-assessment and start to slowly learn again. After a long period of time, against the resistance of your ego, you manage to acquire the skills to make your brown belt.
At brown belt, you are learning, but slowly. You sadly still think you are pretty damn good, which continues to dampen your self-criticism. Luckily for you, there are some perseverant and patient black belts around who will with great and under-acknowledged generosity consistently knock you on your ass, pummel you, and brutally force you into submission with joint locks. Eventually this helps you discard a bit more of your ego and you are able to start learning at a decent rate again.
Eventually, you recognize that you actually know almost nothing. It is at this point that you make black belt and you finally begin to learn in earnest.
Now, taking this metaphor to contact improvisation, we see a problem. In contact, there is no sparring. No one is beating you up and forcing you into submission, so the ego is allowed to balloon unrestricted. Unless you are a very fortunate individual, there is no one showing you how little you know. It’s a lot of work giving people detailed feedback, and many experience even light critical feedback sometimes being met with resistance or even defensive aggression. We don’t in contact have a culture of encouraging constructive critical feedback and some people even frame other people sharing this with each other as somehow threatening to a myth of horizontality in CI. People get stuck at blue belt with no one showing them the error of their ways. “Yellow belt” classes are advertised as “advanced”. My experience is that most people who manage to break through the blue-belt syndrome in CI have come from other cultures of practice, like martial arts or contemporary dance technique, where there is a lively culture of constructive critique and a cultivation of the pleasure of disciplined self-criticism.