Resisting both the idealised body of ballet and the dramatically expressive
body of modern dance, contact seeks to create what Cynthia Novack calls a
‘responsive’ body, one based in the physical ease of weight.... the physical
training of Contact emphasises the release of the body’s weight into the floor
or into a partner’s body. In Contact, the experience of internal sensations and
the flow of movement between two bodies is more important than specific
shapes or formal positions. Dancers learn to move with a consciousness of the
physical communication important within the dancing....But human
bodies, especially bodies in physical contact with one another, are difficult
to see only in terms of physical counterbalance, weight and momentum....
On first seeing Contact, people often wonder whether this is, in fact,
professional dancing or rather a recreational and therapeutic form. Gone are
the formal lines of much classical dance. Gone are the traditional approaches
to choreography and the conventions of the professional stage. In their
place is an improvisational movement form based on the expressive communi-
cation involved when two people begin to share their weight and physical
support. Instead of privileging an ideal type of body or movement style,
Contact Improvisation privileges a willingness to take physical or emotional
risks.
(Albright 199 7 : 8 4 –85)In other words, Contact Improvisation cleaves to a non-representational credo
emphasizing the ‘kinesthetic sensations and physics of weight and momentum
rather than the visual picture of bodily shape within the stage space’ (Albright
1997 : 86).
Dancing identity
The second way in which dance can help us to understand expressive potential is
in the ability to forge identity. This identity can be of a number of forms. For
example, there is identity which simply consists of evoking a mood. Nonmimetic
and non-representational, this kind of identity citation can be powerful. Identity
can be constructed by dance at the level of individual experience, or at the level
of social assemblages.
What dance is in the case of identity is one of a number of techniques for creating
new forms of awareness and persistence. Two examples will suffice. The first is at
the level of individual identity and is Pini’s (1996) account of her mother’s
devotion to dance – Irish step dancing and rock and roll – as a young woman (see
also McRobbie 1991). For her mother, dance was a way of expressing herself
- her private space and her ‘real’ identity – a way of producing and channelling
desire, and a means of making sense of her situation. So that, as she grows older,
her declining dance powers become a significant challenge to her sense of self.
I just feel really sad when I can’t do it properly. Maybe I hate people to be
better than me. I just feel so sad when I see them all doing it; and I hate to142 Part II