What is a definition of Contact Improvisation?

Question

Or what is the proposition?

Answer 1

My daughter is studying contact improvisation right now in her summer program plus has had it in college. I got to see a performance that used it, so I'll do my best to answer.

It's a modern dance style of partnering that goes beyond mere touching to anything a choreographer and sets of dancers think to do with each other, from pushing someone's face to grabbing a leg. The moves are worked out through improvisation, but the choreographer is still in charge and directs the overall ideas and flow of the movement. In the case of the leg grab, he directed partnered pairs to have one person find the motivation for raising a leg and the other person to grab it. My daughter's partner kept wanting to just kick without paying any attention to where she was and kept repeatedly whopping my daughter, which isn't proper partnering. There is still supposed to be control and a logic to the movement which the dancers are supposed to work out together.

The final performance piece is gradually worked out through this process and rehearsed. Dancers still need to get to certain spots by specific points in the music, but if someone gets there earlier, they improv moves to fill the gap. The audience should not notice that this is going on, as the final piece looks like most other modern dance performances and the overall piece will look similar from one performance to the next.

For someone who is ballet trained, my daughter had found this style to be very challenging, as dancers can't rely on pre-programmed moves, but must really think about movement and understand it in order to create something that is authentic.

Answer 2

My memory of postmodern dance pedagogy is pretty weak, but contact improvisation is a technique (or maybe style) that uses touching (the contact) as a starting point for the dance, making it up along the way as it is performed (improvisation).