Introduction - Contact Quarterly: The College Issue
Contact Improvisation, often called CI or contact improv, is a dance form based on the communication between two or more bodies in physical contact and gravity, momentum, and inertia (definitions vary). Contact improv grew out of classes taught by choreographer and dancer Steve Paxton at Oberlin College in 1972, and has had a presence at Oberlin and other small liberal arts colleges since then.
Contact improv can be found at both Carleton and St. Olaf: at Carleton, a class is offered and students occasionally hold group dance sessions, and at St. Olaf, students have formed a dance company around contact improv and partnering.
This exhibit was inspired by a 1983 issue of Contact Quarterly, CI's magazine for discussion, education, and communication about the dance since 1975. Contact Quarterly: The College Issue explores the specific experiences of students and teachers practicing contact improv in a college setting. This issue was actually created by students at Oberlin College as part of a class taught by Nancy Stark-Smith, an Oberlin alum and important figure in the history of CI.
The magazine opens with an editor's note from Nancy: "Mmmmmmmoving the Vehicle", in which she discusses the challenges she encountered while guiding the magazine's creation. The students mostly hadn't been exposed to contact improv before, and weren't totally on board with Nancy's idea to hold small dances at the beginning of each meeting. Gradually, the magazine progressed until it began to rapidly come together. The note ends with an anecdote that echoes a theme present throughout the entire issue: the tension between teaching for college credit and the freedom and informality inherent to contact improv.
"It wasn't until very close to the end, sitting around a called-in pizza, when someone looked at me with a funny gleam in her eye and said, "You know you can give A pluses," that I remembered where I was."
CQ: The College Issue continues with a series of letters between Wendy Perron and Paula Clements at Bennington College. Clements was a senior when the letters were exchanged, and Perron was an alumnus already partway into her career as a dancer and instructor. The letters further explore the difficulties inherent in trying to grade and evaluate a dance form based on spontaneity and imperfection. In addition, Clements and Perron talk quite a bit about writing together with dancing. Clements finds similarities in the activities of dancing and writing:
"I used to think that writing and reading were distinct, unbridgeable worlds from dancing, but now I feel that the way I involve myself in both activities is very similar and that it is almost essential that they concur."
For Perron and Clements, dance was very much connected to the academic pursuits that occupied much of their days at Bennington (for Perron, as a teacher, and for Clements, as a student). In the letters we can see Perron attempting to apply some of the rationale of dancing to her performance criticism class, while Clements thinks about how much of the work behind a dance piece should be exposed to the audience using comparisons to different types of academic writing.
In "After the Fall: Post-Graduation Disorientation", Oberlin student Lauri Nagel writes about contact improv in relation to the space and routines (or as she calls them, movements) of college. She describes college as practicing for a dance, but not realizing that the performance space is not the same as the dance studio:
"For four years we make our small movements inside these four walls. We know that our movements are limited. Perhaps we are practicing for larger movements, collecting the tools needed to make them. We start by learning where the movements come from, feeling the tiny sensations where they originate ... After four years, our period of grace is over and we realize, left with no walls and, in fact, no tangible boundaries, that the world is not a box but a sphere. Everything has extended out, not just into a larger box but out in all directions. The tiny movements we've come to experience are suddenly lost in the shuffle. Where are we? Disoriented."
Nagel goes on to explain that the physical space of the college becomes integral to our sense of direction: this building is this way, the dining hall is that way, my dorm is over there... Liberal arts education aims to give students experience in many areas, both to ensure a well-rounded worldview and to provide a multitude of options post-graduation. But especially at rural schools like Carleton and St. Olaf (and Oberlin), it's all too easy for students to become isolated from the real world and grow used to the "cardinal directions" imposed by the physical space of campus and the temporal structure of one's class schedule. Disorientation is a major element of contact improv, and Nagel proposes a solution to post-graduation confusion based on what would happen in an actual dance.
"If my experience with Contact Improvisation has taught me anything it's that orientation does not always have to mean that your feet are firmly planted on the ground, your head in the air, and your weight over your center. It seems that we can learn to orient ourselves in the spinning by working with the forces that spin us and using them to ride on."
This exhibit will explore the different ways students at Carleton and St. Olaf engage with contact improv, in class and on their own. Although information is limited about what contact improv looked like at both colleges in the past, I have tried to intersperse recent material with items that hopefully provide a glimpse at the evolution of the dance form in Northfield.
