Body Research Approach to CI

Approaching Contact Improvisation as a profound opportunity for self-study — physically, emotionally, and aesthetically –Body Research offer in their workshops many roads into the investigations of contact, looking at what is unique to each encounter and what is universal about bodies and physics. The aim is to cultivate greater ease, power, and pleasure in being in a body as well as greater presance in physical inquisitiveness and aesthetic exploration.We start with the Fundamentals of Contact Improvisation. From there both deepen study of body use along the lines of the fundamentals and broaden our study into idiosyncratic physical studies as well as emotional explorations, theatrical, and aesthetic explorations.

Vertical Approach: Pursuing the Fundamentals further, we come to deeper understanding of our bodies in relationship to each other and our environment. We cultivate a greater functional awareness of movement’s subtleties, opening up thereby whole new pathways of interaction. We look more deeply into questions of efficiency, ease, and pleasure in the body in motion. Cultivating greater availability for rich investigation, creation, exploration, interaction, and play. goto Passive Sequencing Work for more details on deepening body-awareness studies through release approach to contact and goto Levels for a description of a logical progression of skill development within this study.

Horizontal Approach: Aside from this more vertical skill set (where one thing builds on another), contact is a framework for vast array of “horizontal” studies: interesting avenues of exploration which can all be approached independently, able to be synthesized, but interesting and valuable in their own right. The contact fundamentals then serve as a support and container for vast array of idiosyncratic physical studies as well as many interesting scores and frameworks for studying the self on emotional and psychological levels, for aesthetic and theatrical sourcing, and for play. on a kinaesthetic level, the frame of contact allows an enormous variety of qualities of investigation and movement that could not happen out of contact. In terms of looking at the self in relationship to other and environment, contact improv not only contains innumerable metaphors for how we live and interact, but actually works with the basic coordination patterns that build our ways of relating… it becomes not just a kinesthetic playground, but a unique avenue for looking at ourselves.Body Research classes and workshops in contact improvisation usually mix an array of vertical and horizontal studies in contact, suited to the particular mix of students.