Curiosities

Curiosities:

These are frames for duet explorations of contact. The idea is to have a simple, clear frame, a thing that you are investigating, hold onto that as the constant reference point. Use the restriction to generate specificity and to interrupt the usual and thereby reveal it.

I came to this way of leading contact explorations after many years of teaching and wanting to get back to ground zero… why would one be interested in investigating contact with another? This was the original frame of investigating contact improvisation. After a short while, a few answers were found and they became encoded as the base of exploration. Why should we, 36 years later, be confining ourselves to answers found by people who had only been exploring for a few years? So, with these explorations, we might have abilities cultivated from past experiences with contact improvisation, but we let go of the intentions behind those skills and start over. What happens when we move into contact in different ways? What is interesting? These frames help make these questions more specific.

This list is just a beginning…

Examples:

Space: Explore spatial relationship, proximity, distance, facing without touching. Explore them as felt kinesthetically or geometrically vs emotionally or relationally. How close can you get without touching? What is it like to keep a very specific distance while your partner is in motion? What is the physical and mental challenge like? What is the emotional resonance of the relationship in space? As some interesting thing is noticed through gross level adjustment, try to steer into the sensation via subtle adjustment. Steering into the sensation is different from satisfying a desire. For example, a certain proximity may generate a desire or an impulse to move away or towards. To Move away (or towards), would then likely remove the sensation. Amplifying the sensation involves not satisfying it, subtly adjusting until the impulse is felt stronger, rather than satisfied.
Movement into and out of light touch (including geometries of approach and disengagement): Explore the coming into and out of touch. Feel the variance of sensation from grams to 100s of grams. Feel the sensation of light touch, but then also the physics… the subtle push, pull, support that happens even with a few grams… feel the guiding onto and off-balance, yielding resistance, just on the level of grams. As you notice a possibility to make contact, perhaps you do, but then perhaps you don’t so you can sit with the possibility of contact. The same for shifting contact, sustaining contact, leaving contact.
Pressure
Texture of Touch (Slide/Role/Stick, Sharp/Broad, etc)
Skin – Explore the surface of the body, but also explore the actual organ, the skin. Manipulate the skin. Move the body and feel the moving of the skin. Grab part of your skin with another part of your skin. As you grab your thigh with your hand, you may feel the skin of your thigh, but you can also feel the skin of your hand. It is all one organ, the skin. Feel how it moves across the flesh underneath… and then catches. Feel how it is pliable but actually has a quite limited stretch. Explore your own skin and explore your body through your skin. Explore your partner’s skin and the rest of their body, connecting through and with the skin. Explore your own skin using the relationship to your partner and their skin. Explore an equanimous sense of the whole organ vs specific parts of the skin, light as well as more vigorous interaction with one’s own or one’s partner’s skin. (note in many BMC influenced circles, “skin” is code for light touch … when I suggest to explore skin, it is much more open-ended and can be quite vigorous)
Effort level – very relaxed and low effort, vs lots of muscle use and effort
Joints and articulation – follow curiosity in both sensation and function of articulation and coordination of the joints. Explore a single joint and how it articulates. How does it move the body as it articulates? How does one articulate the rest of the body to move that one joint through space? Explore the interconnections of the joints, how movement of one joint involves others. There is a curiosity that is purely about physics and geometry, but also about he feeling of the movement of the joint, the pleasure of folding, unfolding and twisting. The feeling of proprioception, the felt sense of the body, is primarily from nerves in the joints which give more articulate information the more released the body is, the more we release muscular tension around the joint and allow the movement of the joints to be more fluid. what do you know about the anatomy of the joint, the bursa, the cartilage, the lubricating synovial fluid?
support/be supported/yield
amount of body in contact – very small amounts with the rest of the body pulled away, lots of the body wrapped around or smeered into one’s partner. Again, what happens mechanically, how does it feel? When we try something mechanically with our partner, how much of our body goes into contact? What happens if we tweek it?
Space between torsos while in physical contact. 1cm, 3 cm, 10cm, etc… how do they all feel, what possibilities emerge?
Balance/Off-balance – personal (off)balance vs duet (off)balance: Explore being on-balance vs off-balance. Explore using your partner for balance and then taking back your own balance. Exploring falling as your partner moves while they are supporting you. Help your partner stay on their balance, or take them off-balance. Together with your partner negotiate a shared balance vs a shared off-balance Redirect motion by redirecting balance and coming back into balance.
Manipulation/Surrender/Resistance
Eyes (looking at, fuzzy eyes, peripheral look, look away, closed eyes, examine other vs eye contact, etc)
Tone level – very relaxed vs maintenance of higher muscle tone (this is different from effort level, though related)
Emotional Content (personal vs relational) vs kinesthetic experience
Stillness & Motion – the effect of constant motion vs interrupted motion, the effect of relative stillness for varying times, movement within relative stillness, stillness as a deliberate action with effect
Speeds – holding fine grade control of speed and momentum range, speeds of different parts of body, functional and social implications of different speeds
Exploration of “my” vs “your” experience – movement of the body is actually not very interesting in and of itself… it is interesting insofar as it effects the movement of experience. How do we move experience in meaningful ways. Stillness of the body can contain and generate enormous movement of experience. Rapid and constant movement of the body might make for a superficial and static experience.
Organizational awareness states – ways of organizing the body in relationship to sensation, environment, memory, personality, etc… States work. Examples … animal impulsive athletic vs intellectual vs specific emotional states or characters, induced mental states