Improvised Touch Facilitates Deep, Mindful Touch During COVID-19 – The Oberlin Review

This semester, college fourth-year Nina DiValentin and Piper Morrison are leading a mixed-level contact improv class through Oberlin Experimental College. Contact improvisation is a form of dance that involves giving and receiving weight and moving organically and harmoniously with other dancers. In flowing contact “jams,” dancers come together, find a point of contact between their bodies, and move in tandem with each other.

Contact improvisation as it is known today originated in Oberlin in 1972 with dancer Steve Paxton, who taught the art form to twelve men on campus. Paxton drew on his experiences with aikido and gymnastics to create a form of dance that was more concerned with body awareness and the experience of connecting and interacting with others rather than performance in front of an audience.

“I think it’s important to point out that people have probably been doing this with their bodies for well over fifty years, but the codified term ‘impromptu contact’ was coined by Steve Paxton at Oberlin,” Morrison said. “It started as a kind of experiment, with a group of guys throwing their bodies at each other. It was initially very inspired by aikido and other forms of martial arts and modern dance, and it all fit into this raw habitat playground, and now it’s become a worldwide phenomenon.

Morrison and DiValentin are the first students to teach an ExCo course on improvised contact since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Both are experienced and passionate about fitness.

“Unlike other forms of dance, it’s really about the act of doing and the experience of movement in the body, versus preparing something to show,” Morrison said. “That’s not to say he wasn’t executed – and we talk about that a bit in Varsity Contact – but that’s not his primary function.”

Morrison vaguely knew CI before committing to Oberlin, and she had her first extensive instruction with the form when she took the ExCo in the fall of 2019, then taught by Rebecca Janovic, OC ’18. DiValentin became involved with CI in the fall of 2021 taking the class of dance teacher Ann Cooper Albright. Morrison and DiValentin met – and, over time, became closely linked – when they both took part in the intensive CI project Winter Term with guest artist Jurij Konjar.

“For me, finding the contact [improv] want to find a home in dance,” Morrison said. “It felt like a bridge between more social, free-form dance settings and traditional dance classes. [CI classes] were places where I could experience dance in a space designed solely for dancing, rather than a social space, like a party.

Morrison and DiValentin noted that this iteration of CI consists of an unexpected majority of newcomers, rather than a balanced mix of levels. Both Morrison and DiValentin said it was both a source of difficulty and a moment of opportunity for them to push themselves as educators.

“Something that I would say I find difficult to teach at ExCo is to try to root this idea that we’re not playing for each other,” Morrison said. “We watch and support each other in our movements, but the point of learning different techniques and strengthening exercises is to be able to dance to the maximum of our abilities. It’s not to make it look a certain way.

According to Morrison, the increased interest in CI among those who have never experienced it is related to the overlap of the social and artistic aspects of the form.

“I think a lot of people were really curious about what it would be like to engage in close contact in this form of dance which is social, but also artistic,” Morrison explained. “It’s often unfamiliar, and even bizarre, to be so close to strangers or new faces and without the connotation that it has a romantic or sexual connotation.”

The challenges of teaching CI to beginners are heightened by COVID-related anxieties.

“I think there’s a general sense of foreboding around going into people’s personal space bubbles,” Morrison said. “When we’re running a course where we’re directly asking people to do it, we have to be very careful and careful to communicate clearly why we’re doing what we’re doing, and we have to make sure we provide alternatives for people who aren’t at comfortable or maybe not quite comfortable yet. Since the pandemic, there’s this bubble that everyone has that is much more nerve-wracking to break than in the past. you have to go slowly.”

While the pandemic has made the already vulnerable experience of dancing in intimate contact with strangers more stressful to navigate, it has also heightened the collective desire for meaningful touch. People are eager, perhaps now more than ever, to feel present in their bodies and to feel physically close to others.

“[During the pandemic] it was like my body was screaming to be touched by other people and to have that skin-to-skin contact,” DiValentin said. “And then, in the improvised touch, someone tries to really feel your body through their body and merge your weight and their weight. It’s a conscious, meaningful touch. To have that kind of touch when I had The urge to touch was spectacular for me.It was exactly what I needed.

Brooke Levan, a sophomore at the College, is one of the newcomers to CI. So far, Levan has found his CI experience liberating, especially post-COVID.

“We all avoided [physical] contact for the past two years, so it’s been really nice, honestly, even if it requires a change of mindset,” Levan said. “It’s like I missed something. …I think physical contact is an important form of connecting with others.

In the future, Levan wants to integrate his experiences with CI into his daily life.

“After my first class, I felt much more present and aware of my surroundings and my place in the space,” she said. “I think it’s something I’d really like to wear in everyday life if possible, especially given the crazy hustle and bustle of school. I don’t know if I’m still there, but I would like to get there.