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Contact Improvisation Essay

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These past five weeks have provided a seemingly endless chance for me to explore opportunities that pertain to so much more than just the form of contact improvisation. Now I believe that contact improvisation is a basis of dance. Dancers need to experience contact improvisation because it engages them in the experimentation of simple body movements that encompass our lives. Every day when I step into class, I feel different about contact improvisation. I find that contact improvisation and I are slowly growing on one another; truly, we are in a relationship. At times I find myself fully content with what contact improvisation has to offer, and other times I find myself absolutely unengaged. Although I feel this way, I am gaining an understanding …show more content…

These ideas arise from many instances such as: freely moving, inner experience, improvisational moving developed from the rock era, concepts developed from Merce Cunningham, Anna Halprin, and Erick Hawkins, as well as concepts from the creator of this art form, Steve Paxton. Honestly every day that I step into class, I feel as though I am working on engaging these concepts as illustrated in Sharing the Dance, which leads to me furthering my language in contact improvisation. First of all, when we work on our improvisational skills at the beginning of class and jams, we are applying our “subjectivity”. This “subjectivity”, as coined by Anna Halprin illustrated in Sharing the Dance, allows us to “expand our range of movement rather than confining it to a codified vocabulary” (Novack, 1990, p.30). Novack (1990) also states that Halprin, “emphasizes direct experience of movement sensing the body’s changing dynamic configurations” (p. 30). We do this all the time in class, and it is one of the fundamentals in contact improvisation. In many instances we use many of our body parts to conjure this dynamic configuration. An example of this is when we applied our contact with one part of our body, this was using our dynamic configuration. Another concept from Sharing the

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