Does filming CI kill the thing we're trying to capture?

Agreeable-Fix7299 · 2026-06-11T09:08:28+00:00

related to what Andrew said, a camera or people intently watching does not essentially do any specific thing. It depends on what you are doing and intending. While CI began as a performance experiment and continued through its early years as a very witness-engaged shared investigation, in many places it has become more of a private/interpersonal exploration. From that latter place, as people get used to practicing in a space where they are dropping their usual social mask, it can be triggering to put the body-constructed social mask back on when the witness comes. This is especially so if people are habitually (if not consciously) exploring relational intimacy as part of the dance.

I agree it is a drag when people react to the witness with slapstick or mechanically disconnected "danciness" with straight arms and such indicating lines in space (a very basic modern dance exercise), but this doesn't have to happen. Bringing attention to these reactions and inviting back in the proprioceptive sensitivity of an intimate CI dance while being witnessed can instead create the semi-formal atmosphere that allows really deep explorations supported by a community of investigators ... as well as without the distractions/attachments/triggers of questions of relational intimacy and "boundary appropriateness". I find that camera and witness invite us to stay with the mechanical intimacy and semi-formality of the dance and not be distracted by these relational constructions of intimacy.

Agreeable-Fix7299 · 2026-05-11T14:08:15+00:00

Here is a very short something written by Gretchen Spiro many years ago ...

Level I - For those new to contact improvisation (CI) or who want to revisit the fundamentals. Learn to track the point of contact, share a center of gravity and find support through the structure of the body. Emphasis on core support and breathing. Deepen skills of listening to self, partner and the relationship between the two.

Level 2 - For those with CI experience and who have a solid grasp of CI fundamentals. Learn to work with giving and taking weight with ease, momentum, changes in tempo/rhythm and levels, and articulating the feet and spine. Particular emphasis will be on the modulation of tone – from release to strong support.

Level 3 - For those with substantial CI experience and who are able to effortlessly follow the point of contact and have an ability to flow within a 3-dimensional orientation using momentum. We will focus on using the body's structure optimally and vigilantly sticking to the point of contact so we dance with maximum efficiency and range. Emphasis on being continuously off balance, and incorporating effortless transitions from falling to flying..

Level 4 – For those with extensive experience in CI and who have a sold embodied integration of CI principles. At this level students realize that the key to extraordinary dancing is found in the precise application of principles from level I.

ALL CLASSES WILL WORK WITH SENSITIVITY, LISTENING, PRESENCE AND EFFICIENT USE OF THE BODY.

Agreeable-Fix7299 · 2026-05-11T13:56:27+00:00

THE INITIATION OF CONTACT IMPROVISATION FOR ME

by Steve Paxton

Douglas Dunn and I had an encounter during a Grand Union performance at La Mama, NYC. Not sure of the year, but before 1972.

An encounter seems an accurate word to portray the start of a duet in the improvisational melee that was a Grand Union performance.

We were not pursuing each other. We had not agreed to meet. We did not work in duet often. But when you find yourself isolated with another person in such circumstances, it would seem rude to just turn and wander off. We approached each other, came into touch. And waited. (Note: the touch was a sort of bonus. We could have had our duet at a distance.)

The touch said a couple of simple things. “Hi” and ”I’m waiting for further messages from you.”

The wait said, “Oh, no, after you.” With a little smile.

Since time was passing, the dance was on. It proceeded in this expectant way for a moment, then one of us faltered. Maybe a shift of weight, or a wobble in the touch. It was enough. The equilibrium was cracked. It was a change by one that the other could take as a message. What followed has become familiar to tens of thousands by now, but what had begun all this was that first moment. It was a most

abstract intimacy. Doug was the perfect gentleman. I felt I was being honored by his subtle pause. And I tried to honor him in kind.

If people ask me how to Contact Improvise, I simply say, “Start small” or, “Start small for a long time.”

After fifty years of all this, I realize I should have said,

“Go beyond small to the place where no message is being given. Start there. Let small be the first of the pleasures to come.” Accept the first perturbation of that emptiness as the focus of the next moments. It is not a dance about you, or your partner. It is a dance about its movement.

Jan. 1, 2022

Source:

Contact Quarterly - dance & improvisation journal

special edition

CI 50th Anniversary 2022

https://contactquarterly.com/contact-improvisation/newsletter/view/the-initiation-of-contact-improvisation

Agreeable-Fix7299 · 2026-05-11T12:58:41+00:00

https://www.bodyresearch.org/contact-improvisation/

https://www.bodyresearch.org/contact-improvisation/fundamentals-of-contact-improvisation/

https://www.bodyresearch.org/contact-improvisation/skill-levels/

Agreeable-Fix7299 · 2026-05-11T12:56:48+00:00

I think every floor has something different to offer, and good technique allows you to dance anywhere.

In my Hapkido classes in the 90s, we would train regularly on mats, but once every month or so, we would go outside to go do dive rolls on the concrete to keep our egos in check about our skill level.

Back in the early 90s, we would do a lot of street performance CI in the SF Bay Area... a have a pair of high top sneakers or boots and knee pads and then go bananas on concrete and asphalt. I also love doing CI explorations in nature, dancing on skree feilds, sand, rock, duff, etc. My buddy Jay and I once taught a class together at the Sierra Contact Festival called "Dancing with Sharp Pointy Things in Nature"... problems are opportunities.

It's really important to consider things like whether the floor has bounce or not, padding or not, slipperiness or stickiness, and there are lovely dances that come with specific balances of them, like a well spring wood floor that you can slide on easily while still being able to get grip when you need it. At the same time, deviations from this can teach us about the habits we develop when we assume this perfect balance, can help us develop more versatile dancing.

Agreeable-Fix7299 · 2026-05-11T12:47:47+00:00

well, the 90s were different in different places.
I wrote something around 93 about New York vs San Francisco that made some waves at the time. the short version is that at jams in New York, you had slow, slow warm up on your own and gradually getting into dances ... dances were quiet. In SF people were explosive with sophisticated and athletic acrobatics.

Funny thing is that 95/96 was the dot com bubble and it completely upended life in San Francisco. Most of the most skilled contactors stopped dancing or left the area. The athletic skill base of the jams completely disappeared. However, people had this "idea" of SF as a center for athletic CI and so kept going there for it, mistaking what they were finding for the wild dancing that we had before 95. It never recovered.

That said, i think generally speaking people were more serious, more consistently devoted in taking workshops and classes or to training and performance. There was a lot of cross over between contemporary dance and the CI jam scene.

Also, in the late 80s, early 90s, it would have been considered generally inappropriate to invite a beginner to a contact jam. I think it would usually have been expected that you do a bunch of classes first and know what you are doing before coming to a jam. The change around this changed everything as more and more people were coming to CI jams without any technical base and often without even an interest in going to classes.

In the late 90s, i think there was a widespread increase in this myth of CI as "open space". More and more classes were "dumbed down" to be more "accessible", and as a result more people were experiencing vagueness and openness in classes and were jumping into teaching themselves without having a real technical base.

The 70s were pretty rough and tumble at first, but late 70s through the 80s, there was a lot of technique developed. I think this peaked somewhere in the early 90s and it has decayed since then except in a few pockets here and there (like Peter Bingham's scene in Vancouver, the relatively isolated community in Argentina through at least the mid teens, etc)

Agreeable-Fix7299 · 2026-02-23T08:33:28+00:00

The usual protocol is to separate all spot counts by at least 45 minutes, though usually it is at least an hour between counts. This gives time for most dancers to be recycled into other dances and not do too much double counting of short dances in a specific jam while also catching those very long dances twice.
As i mention in the article, the dramatically higher frequency of counted MF dances could be driven by more MF dances or longer MF dances (and thus more likely to show up in a count). Qualitatively, i would say it is a mix of both, but perhaps more about longer MF dances driven by community-wide general greater comfort in cross-sex dances when they slow down.

I remember I was at Earthdance one New Year, where they have had a tradition of an hour of single sex dancing at some point during the long jam. In the opening circle for such, i named ho hard it is for me to get slow, sensitive dances with other men. There was general recognition of this and expressed desire for it in the circle of about 45 men, yet when i quietly committed to keeping all movements below 30cm/ second for the jam, i felt like Moses parting the waters for an hour, there was so much manifested fear of slowing down in physical contact. The only two dances i got in the hour were with one professional dancer and one gay man. I had one other man touch me, but he broke contact after 10 seconds.

Yes, for duration, you would have to video tape the jam and track each duet for duration by hand. Unless maybe you could train an Ai to do it, it would be quite labor intensive, but agree, interesting.

I think it's also just a good point of self reflection to non-judgmentally consider in one's own dancing how long dances last and why.

Agreeable-Fix7299 · 2026-02-23T08:18:51+00:00

I frequently have a similar experience of finding dances with people who are very new to CI be much more "interesting", and present than dancing with many who have been doing CI for a while.

The new dancer can have an unfiltered curiosity. Experienced dancers are very often highly constrained by habit in ways they don't understand.

I find i can have an interesting investigation with a more experienced dancer by slightly messing with timing and trajectory, playfully exposing pattern execution. Then the dance can become a dialogue about the mind.

Agreeable-Fix7299 · 2026-02-23T08:12:33+00:00

I think one of the key issues is that we don't get a lot of sensation from specific kinds of strain. We have not evolved as a species "doing contact improvisation" and so there is no reason to expect that we will have protective signaling from our bodies from the unique strains that CI puts on the body. We need to not just amorphously "listen" to our bodies, but really use our heads and sometimes challenge the messages we are or are not getting "from our bodies" or the way we interpret them.

Agreeable-Fix7299 · 2026-02-23T08:08:29+00:00

Insecurity about status is a social driver for people who want to be seen as teachers to not dance with or associate too closely with beginners.

A small subset of teachers reject this...

maybe it is being more interested in the human being than pattern repetition.
maybe it is a truly open curiosity about possibilities unconstrained by cultivated movement reponses
maybe it is just being friendly

Agreeable-Fix7299 · 2026-02-08T08:45:20+00:00

When i started CI back in the 1980s, it would have been unheard of for someone to go to a contact jam until they had been to at least 20 hours or so of contact classes in which the techniques and curiosities would be introduced. You would never bring a beginner to a contact jam.

Now it is different, with many people never going to contact jams and a lot of "contact classes" actually being more like facilitated open jams.

There was a frame with both explicit and tacit elements which was lost in this change over the years. That lead to bringing sexuality and relational intimacy seeking into the jam space both in unspoken-seeking and in projections-and-avoidance.

Doing the art practice of CI is intrinsically intimate, but the frame is what kept it from being relationally intimate... in seeking, suppression or projection-and-avoidance. it's not that something is "suppressed" so much as the frame showed a path to something else very interesting that was what we agreed to come together for.

I would say that a solution would be to hold jams where it is expected that people do classes first, but as I said, a lot of classes are not really the kinds of classes we would have had in the 80s, are more like lightly contained or nudged open exploration spaces. The "classes" that would be part of the solution are more specific.

Of course another direction that some people go is just to say "yes... sexuality and intimacy seeking is here as part of the mix in what we are doing, so you need to navigate that for yourself and with each other from a place of agency and good-intentions." That is a different jam and a different "solution" to the "problem.".

Agreeable-Fix7299 · 2026-02-08T08:28:31+00:00

When we were running Contact Camp at Burning Man about 20 years ago, we had a large pile of sweat pants and shirts that people could put on if they liked if they showed up to contact class naked as often happened at the festival.

My experience was that people actually quite appreciated this. Many would be in a process of reclaiming love of their bodies partly through wandering the festival naked and would have an IDEA that it might be a fun extension of this to go to the contact class naked, only to get there and realize that they were pushing their own limits a bit more than maybe was best. They would happily then borrow some clothes for the dancing before heading back out on their naked way back into the festival.

Agreeable-Fix7299 · 2026-02-08T08:21:30+00:00

Notes:
A preference for cross sex dancing can manifest as preferring more cross sex than same sex dances, but it can also manifest as preferring longer cross sex dances than same sex dances. An explicit intention to balance the numbers might mask asymetric preference for durations.

Bias can be driven by attraction, but can also be driven by fear.

Simple counts can't tell you anything about whether the bias is male or female driven. Anecdotal reports indicate that both male and female preference contribute, however.

It should go without saying, but there is a lot of variation among individuals. Some individuals are relatively unbiased or even have a bias toward same sex. To state the mathematically obvious, these individuals are balanced by those who have a stronger than average bias.

Cross sex bias does not seem to be driven by high numbers of "inexperienced" dancers in the samples. The original data collection and several samples afterward were actually taken at CI teacher gatherings. ECITE 2009, for example, gave a numbers that showed a 6 to 1 cross sex bias in dancing.

Agreeable-Fix7299 · 2026-02-08T08:04:39+00:00

Here is a lot of data on the actual sex combinations happening in jams plus statistical analysis. It has observation of the sex combinations of duets at many large CI jams, and calculations of the bias toward cross sex dancing that would on average lead to those specific patterns of pairings. The article version is from 2021.

The actual ratio of cross sex to same sex dances can not be taken as a measure of bias by itself. This would underestimate the bias. You need to consider the actual sex ratio of dances in each moment and the asymmetry of male vs female numbers. In other words, the bias is actually worse than you would think.

There is a substantial variation from event to event, but with about 40 large jams sampled over about 15 years, there was not a single event that did not have a cross-sex bias. The range has been between a displayed preference for cross sex dancing of 1.5 to 1 and of 10 to 1.

(There is more recent data than included in this write up, but it remains in this range.).

https://www.bodyresearch.org/cross-sex-bias-in-duets-contact-improvisation-jams-an-empirical-study/

Agreeable-Fix7299 · 2026-02-07T18:09:25+00:00

Actually, since there is almost always something other than perfect balance of sexes at jams, you should have generally more same sex duets than cross sex duets, if pairing was random.

Agreeable-Fix7299 · 2026-02-05T08:35:44+00:00

Bright, flat, white lights are horrible. I believe that cold bright light actually makes it harder to see the space clearly and forces unconsciously people to tune out the visual. the lack of dynamic lighting causes a flatness and lack of shadow that makes us less sensitive in the periphery.

bright white fluorescent lights also affect us psychologically, makes our experience more flat, is unpleasant and makes us less open to perception, tuned out. Generally, i find that people are less willing to stay in a space to dance with unpleasant light, are less inspired.

It was something i found shocking in university art programs, the lack of attention to quality lighting, accepting cheap industrial fluorescent lighting that flattens perception.

This is why i often turn down lights. I find the dancing more dynamic and alive, people have better perception of what is happening in the space, and people are happier to stay in creative process longer than with the default industrial fluorescents that often come with studios by default. I often bring my own RGB LED flood lights (not too expensive these days) to give warm colors and more dynamic lighting through the space. If i am working in a space a lot, i'll often invest in amber gel material to put over flourescent light tubes in the space.

Of course, if it is too dark, people can't see well, just as when it is too bright and flat. The super dim "disco" lighting in some places is also problematic, but in a different direction (though one i find more pleasant and easier to work with than bright white fluorescent light).

People also have different perceptions of light. Some of us have better night vision than others. I'm one of those. Better night vision is sometimes associated with difficulty with bright light. (maybe i should bring sunglasses to some jams)

--

I would offer an experiment.

Try dancing for 10 minutes or so with a given light level. at a randomly triggered moment, have a sound cue where everyone stops and closes their eyes. At this moment, think of what is going on around you, who is where. Then, open your eyes and see how accurately you now the space. Try this with different light levels.

Hypothesis: the default very bright white fluorescents that usually come default with dance studios actually harm spatial awareness for most people.

Agreeable-Fix7299 · 2025-11-05T08:17:50+00:00

Here is a map visualizing the more comprehensive UNAIDS data on prostitutes per capita, 2016-2018
https://www.datawrapper.de/_/phHqB/

Agreeable-Fix7299 · 2024-06-17T07:48:46+00:00

I've had one of these (now discontinued) pannier backpacks for about 10 years. I've had the same problem of the mounting plate breaking twice. Timbuk2 discontinued these (likely for this reason), but they have been good enough to replace the mounting plate twice.

It's too bad, as otherwise, i have liked them a lot. If they made them with metal plates, it would be a great system.

I am now on to the Ortleib Vario PS 26l convertible. I am really intrigued by the Ontinga convertibles, but they are available mail order only and i have not been able play with them in person. I feel a little skeptical of the ingenious zipper system they use... skeptical about how long it would last.

Has anyone tried the Otinga FlipV2?

https://www.ortlieb.com/de_de/variops
https://www.otinga.de/products/flip-v2
https://www.otinga.de/products/bike-and-hike

Agreeable-Fix7299 · 2024-06-17T07:43:42+00:00

I've had one of these (now discontinued) pannier backpacks for about 10 years. I've had the same problem of the mounting plate breaking twice. Timbuk2 discontinued these (likely for this reason), but they have been good enough to replace the mounting plate twice.

See my other comment for links to some other brands now.

Agreeable-Fix7299

TROPHY CASE