(This talk was given by Nancy Stark Smith at the International Contact Festival Freiburg in Freiburg, Germany, August 2005, and is reprinted from Contact Quarterly, The Place Issue, CQ Vol. 32 No. 2, Summer/Fall 2006. All rights reserved to author/photographer.)

There are many histories of the same moment. Maybe from this we can gain perspective. So this, naturally, is my version of the story.

Contact improvisation was created by an American dancer and choreographer named Steve Paxton in 1972. Steve was born and raised in Arizona, and he brought many lines of movement training into his dancing. He was an athlete, a gymnast, a martial artist, and a modern dancer. He came to New York to study and danced with José Limón’s modern dance company for a while and with others—classical modern dance.

In the early 1960s, Steve danced in the company of Merce Cunningham, a revolutionary choreographer who was collaborating with musician/composer/ artist John Cage. Cage was influential in the development of new thinking and practices in dance and music in America and elsewhere. Cage asked his protégé Robert Ellis Dunn, an accompanist for Martha Graham, if he would teach a composition class at the Cunningham studio for the young professional dancers.

Bob Dunn encouraged the dancers to open their thinking about dance and art. What kind of movement can be in a dance? Where does a performance take place? Where does the audience watch from? What kind of lighting or sound situation is involved? He encouraged them to try new things. For their homework, they made many different pieces—Trisha Brown made a dance that happened simultaneously across several rooftops in Manhattan. Lucinda Childs made a piece in which the audience, in a loft studio, was instructed via audiotape exactly what to look at down on the street while dancers, stationed on the sidewalk amidst the pedestrians, pointed things out. Nowadays this doesn’t seem very radical, but at the time it really was! Steve made a piece with a large group of people doing the “small dance” (that many of us practice in contact)—the small reflexive movements that happen while standing still. It was called State.

The dancers in Bob Dunn’s class came up with many interesting experiments and were very excited by each others’ propositions. They wanted to share their work with the public and looked for a place to perform. The minister at Judson Memorial Church in downtown NYC welcomed them to use the gymnasium in the church. From 1962 to 1965, the “Judson Dance Theater” produced many exciting evenings of performance there.

This period opened up new possibilities for what kinds of movement—pedestrian, athletic, etc.—could be material for dance. Yvonne Rainer, an important artist in this dance revolution, made a project called Continuous Project —Altered Daily. Steve was in this group. One aspect of the project questioned leadership, and by the end, Yvonne wasn’t the leader any more; it had become a collective. This project evolved into the Grand Union—a dance/theater/ improvisation group that included Steve Paxton along with Yvonne, David Gordon, Trisha Brown, Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, Nancy Green, and others. They made spontaneous performance. The members were dancers in various companies, but when they came together as the Grand Union, they had no plan, no set choreography. They used anything and everything on hand—props, lighting, music, text, costumes, movement—to build their improvised dance theater.

As a child and teenager, I was an athlete and a gymnast. Dance was not very interesting to me—I’d see the dancers standing in front of a wall of mirrors looking at themselves and making little movements. I didn’t understand what was exciting about that.

When I went to Oberlin College, in Ohio, in the early 1970s, this opening up of the dance field by the Judson Dance Theater had just occurred. In college I still did some gymnastics, some sports, but the emphasis was more and more on competition, and I became less interested. I thought maybe I was going to be a doctor like my father, but I knew I would always be moving and writing somehow.

During my first year of college, there was a January term project in dance, and someone suggested I try it. It was a monthlong residency with Twyla Tharp and her company, including classes, rehearsals, and performances. Twyla’s work was avant-garde and just starting to become better known. She used a wide variety of movement, and the training was physically and mentally rigorous. I got excited by what dance could be from working with her. The director of the modern dance company at Oberlin, Brenda Way, saw me in this residency and asked me to join the company. For the next year, I trained daily in modern dance techniques, performed, and began to choreograph.

The following year, 1972, the Grand Union was invited to Oberlin College for the monthlong January residency. Each company member taught a technique-type class in the morning and a performance class in the afternoon. Steve’s morning class was at 7 a.m., and it was dark and cold. He called it the “Soft Class.” We would come into a beautiful old wooden men’s gymnasium, and there would be a chair at the door with a box of Kleenex and a little plate of cut-up fruit. You took a tissue and a piece of fruit and came into the gym. Steve led us in standing still, the small dance, while we kind of fell asleep and woke up, and also did some yoga-like breathing exercises. Then you’d blow your nose and eat the fruit, and after an hour, the sun came up and that was the end of the class. My mind was definitely opening. I had no idea what we were doing but I was curious and somehow very moved.

The performance class Steve taught in the afternoon was for men only. They used a very large, old, dusty canvas tumbling mat in the gym. Steve had also been practicing aikido, tai chi, yoga, and meditation. He had been to Japan with Merce and there, as well as in New York, had been exposed to Eastern practices. This was all coming into his dancing and dancemaking.

Steve talks about his work with the men in the Fall After Newton video. He says he was training the men “in the extremes of orientation and disorientation”—standing still and experiencing the small dance of balancing, and then practicing big falls and rolls, like aikido rolls.

At the end of the month, Steve made a piece with the men called Magnesium, performed in the gymnasium on the mat. The audience watched from a running track above. The men began by standing still and then started to fall off balance—falling through the space, spilling onto the mat, rolling, getting up, with little soft collisions, slides, falls —staggering around the space like they were drunk or something, a beautiful fountaining of men, for maybe ten minutes, and then they finished with more standing.

I was in the audience and was very moved. Magnesium, the Soft Class, lots of new ideas about performance from David Gordon, Yvonne Rainer, Barbara Dilley—my mind was stretching. After Magnesium, I mentioned to Steve that if he ever worked like that with women I would love to know about it.

Steve went to teach at Bennington College in Vermont that spring of 1972 where he continued to develop his ideas from Magnesium. He got a small travel grant and decided to bring a group together in New York City in June of 1972 to do a performance project. He invited some young dancers that he had met in his travels as a guest artist—at Oberlin (Curt Siddall and me), the University of Rochester (Danny Lepkoff, David Woodberry, and others), and Bennington (Nita Little, Laura Chapman, and others)—as well as a few of his colleagues in New York City.

We worked for one week in a loft studio in New York with a small blue wrestling mat. We worked all day, practicing a few things for a long time—like the small dance, during which Steve suggested different images of the skeleton, the flow of energy, the expansion of lungs; identifying small sensations. We also practiced a lot of rolling techniques—forward, backward, aikido, invented rolls, handstand-rolldowns—in order to be comfortable falling and rolling in different directions.

Another thing we practiced: one person stands toward the back of the mat and everybody in turn runs and throws themselves at this person, who would try to catch them and somehow manage the weight. This usually meant going down to the floor together and rolling out of it. For hours: catch 1, 2, 3, 4…big people, small people. There would be people on the side to help, if needed, in the gymnastic tradition of “spotting.” We also did some head-to-head dances at this time.

At some point, we’d dance in duets on the mat: we’d try things, explore possibilities while improvising in contact. The others would watch intently. Sometimes the dances would last ten, twenty, thirty minutes. We’d watch for hours and then at some point you’d have a go. We were just figuring out what was possible, and we learned a lot from watching each other.

Another line: video. In 1972, when Magnesium happened, video was just becoming portable. Cumbersome but portable. A man came to Oberlin to videotape the Grand Union performances and accidentally videotaped Magnesium, thinking it was the Grand Union. Steve saw the video and got very excited to have this feedback, so he invited the videographer, Steve Christensen, to join us in New York in June. So all of our practices and performances were videotaped. Every night we’d watch them in the loft where we were all staying. It was total immersion.

After one week of practice, we moved to an art gallery in downtown New York City—the John Weber Gallery—set up the mat and performed for five hours a day for a week. These were the first performances of contact improvisation. Steve made a postcard announcement—on the front was a picture of the Coney Island parachute jump, a ride at the amusement park. He also went to Chinatown and had fortune cookies made with a fortune that said something like, “Come to John Weber Gallery—contact improvisations,” and we gave them to everybody in the street.

When people arrived at the gallery, they might walk through and look for five minutes or sit down and watch for a while, maybe come back the next day. We practiced throwing and catching, the small dance, and duets—the dances were almost all duets in the beginning. Sometimes, when we wanted more space, we’d move the mat away. These performances continued for five days and then were over.

I often think that contact improvisation could have just been a piece that Steve Paxton made in 1972, and that was the end of it. Many artists get an idea, bring people together to rehearse, show it, and that’s it—on to the next idea. So the fact that we’re here today—33 years later, with people all over the world practicing contact improvisation—is very interesting.

The dancers at the John Weber Gallery event went in different directions. I went to a summer retreat with the Oberlin Dance Collective and Nita went to a summer job teaching dance. Several of us were very turned on and wanted to continue exploring the dancing we had done with Steve.

The nature of this form is that you need a partner to do it, and I think this is one of the most important reasons it has spread. If you could do it alone, I don’t know how far it would have gone…. To get a partner, you have to make one; you have to find a way to communicate the form. Steve did not stop people from doing that—he didn’t say, “No, you have to get it from me.” So, many of us tried to share it, to create partners so we could continue to dance. And it started to grow.

For the next few years, whenever Steve had a performance in New York or elsewhere, contact improvisation was often what he showed as his work. He would bring a small group together to perform—Nita Little, myself, Curt Siddall, Danny Lepkoff, and David Woodberry were regulars, plus a few others—in New York, on a California tour in January 1973, and on a tour to Rome (at L’Attico gallery) in June 1973.

Three years later, in 1975, I had graduated college and was living in northern California. Steve called to ask if I would tour with him in the Northwest of the U.S. A few days earlier, I had been surprised to find a flyer on a wall in San Francisco that said, “Contact Improvisation!” with a picture of Wonder Woman. It was a class by Nita Little! (I hadn’t known she was in the area.) I suggested to Steve that we get together with Nita and Curt for a reunion, which we did, forming a company called Reunion that met every year for several years, with invited guests, to tour the West Coast, teaching classes and giving performances of contact improvisation.

At that first Reunion tour in 1975, we started to hear about people who had seen us previously and were now practicing contact. We also heard of some injuries…a few pretty serious. In our group, we had had bruises but nothing more serious than that. The safety issue really concerned us. There was some theorizing that our training —especially things like the small dance and the subtle sensing work—was keeping the bigger, more dangerous interactions balanced and safe. But people who just saw a performance would try the bigger, flashier moves without the other training.

So we thought that in order to keep it safe, we should copyright the work, so that you had to train with us to do it. We wrote up the papers and almost signed, but decided not to. I like to think that we could see our future and did not want to become the “contact cops” of the world—where we’d have to police contact and hear about someone teaching somewhere and check: “Do we know them?” And if not, tell them they can’t do it…

There was also the sense that if it’s exciting for people, they will do it anyway but just not call it contact improvisation, and so the coherence and connectedness of the developing work would be lost. So instead of copyrighting, we created a newsletter, where everyone who was involved could write about what was going on with them: “I taught here…this is what I’m learning”—invite people in instead of pushing them out. And hope that if someone was really working in a dangerous way that people wouldn’t participate. The worst would be that the work gets a bad reputation. But there was also a feeling that if you glimpse the seed of the work, you’ll find your way to some better information, hopefully.

So that was the origin of the Contact Newsletter, in 1975, which is now Contact Quarterly magazine (with a CI newsletter in it)—to encourage people to stay in touch and communicate about how they’re working. Lisa Nelson joined me as coeditor in the late ‘70s, and we’ve been editing and producing the journal together ever since.

After the first Reunion tour in 1975, the number of contactors grew considerably. Since then, many individuals have contributed significantly to the development of the dance form as practitioners, teachers, and performers. In addition, by the late 1970s/early 1980s, several notable contact companies had formed—Mangrove, Contactworks, Catpoto, Fulcrum, Freelance, and others—in San Francisco, Minneapolis, Montreal, Vancouver, and New York, each bringing its own distinctive approach to the body of work.

For me, our early performances were a showing of a phenomenon. From the beginning, people asked, “Well, is this dance?” Big question. It came from a dance-art mind and intention. It came at a time in American history, and probably world history, when established roles—of gender, authority, etc.—were being questioned. Part of it was a change in the way dance was made, that it could be made collaboratively. Also you had women lifting men; I didn’t think much about it then, but when we would show the work, people were amazed by things like that—by falling, by being on the floor, or by men being sensitive with each other, women being strong, people being a little bit out of control, and the pure physicality of it. People would see the work and get very excited and probably a little confused as well.

One time early on, Steve wanted to show the work to a few of his artist friends in New York. He and I danced at a downtown performance venue called the Kitchen. We showed a few video clips and demonstrated contact. Simone Forti was there and said, “Hmm, it’s kind of like an art sport.” We were excited about this term “art sport.” It temporarily solved some problems. That name was used quite a bit for a while.

There’s no set pedagogy or certified way to teach contact. People learn a lot when they try to teach. Often they start by teaching what they were taught, then change things a little bit to fit the particulars of their students. They incorporate material from other work; they invent new things. This use of related material can sometimes cause confusion for students: how is contact distinct from Body-Mind Centering, or yoga, or other partnering forms, or release technique?

Because of this freedom in teaching, people have created a lot of teaching material—principles, exercises, language, scores, formats. These become part of the canon, and that’s wonderful; but it can create a problem if you think you have to get good at all these techniques before you can do contact improvisation. That’s not true. Once you get a clear feel for the basic premise, develop a few safety skills, and get your reflexes primed and ready, then you’re off. You learn by doing.

Often teachers teach what they like or what they’re good at. They create an exercise to show how they do what they do—to give you easy access to it. There’s a lot of teaching material now —sluffing, surfing, this and that lift, a lot of principles and vocabulary. The issue is how to digest it and improvise, because improvisation is an essential part of the work—not just to learn steps or moves and put them together, but to meet, make, discover, and be curious.

Jams: This was a new phenomenon. I mean, you don’t have modern dance jams or ballet jams. Usually in the contemporary dance world, you have class, rehearsal, and performance. I think the jam model came from Steve’s experience with the martial arts and the dojo mentality of people at different levels training together. It answered the question of how to keep practicing. Maybe someone set aside two hours on a Sunday to practice with a few people. And then another thinks, “Oh, this is great. Let’s go away to a hot springs where we can soak in the mineral water, take saunas, and dance all day.” “Nice idea, let’s do it for a week. Let’s start with a led warm-up,” etc.

The Breitenbush Jam in Oregon was one of the first retreat jams, at a beautiful, remote hot springs. After a few years, there wasn’t enough room for everybody that wanted to come, so another jam started at the Harbin Hot Springs in California. And then the East Coast people didn’t want to have to travel so far, so they made an East Coast Jam. And then festivals started and facilities (like Arlequi in Spain and Earthdance in Massachusetts) began to offer regular CI workshops and events.

Since there’s no teacher certification, the way that teachers stay current is to meet each other, have conferences, ask questions, create dialogue. Instead of arguing over an official interpretation, teachers are encouraged to communicate with each other, and a number of teacher conferences and exchanges have developed.

Throughout contact’s development, a gentle anarchy has prevailed over its “organization”—with individuals freely pursuing their interests and local and regional associations forming to support organized activity.

I think some problems might arise from not having a certification, but at the moment it seems more beneficial to the form to have people be free to contribute their creative energy to it. It adds tremendous value to the work.

QUESTION AND ANSWER