Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T16:54:31.475Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Teaching Styles in Contact Improvisation: An Explicit Discourse with Implicit Meaning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2012

Gunn Engelsrud
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Since contact improvisation was “invented” in North America in the 1970s, it has gained widespread acceptance; teachers have been travelling extensively to conduct seminars and workshops. The dance form has been documented and researched from several viewpoints, but, as I see it, there is general agreement among practitioners and scholars—including United Kingdom-based Helen Thomas (2003), Norway-based Hilde Rustad (2006) and Eli Torvik (2005), and Cynthia Novack (1990), who worked in the United States—that contact improvisation is a form of nonhierarchical relations that entails an appeal to accept mutual responsibility for each other and that also implies a specific lifestyle. In her book Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture, Novack, as an anthropologist, perceives contact improvisation as embodied culture where the movements are central constitutional parts. Her position is that through the study of contact improvisation, “the history of the dancing serves as a vehicle for investigating powerful interrelationships of body, movement, dance and society” (8).

Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , Winter 2007 , pp. 58 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Bar-On Cohen, Einat. 2006. “Kime and the Moving Body: Somatic Codes in Japanese Martial Art.” Body and Society 12 (4): 73–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bordo, Susan. 1990. “Reading the Slender Body.” In Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Sciences, edited by Jacobus, Mary, Keller, Evelyn Fox, and Shuttleworth, Sally, 83–112. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Czordas, Thomas J. 1993. “Somatic Modes of Attention.” Cultural Anthropology 8 (2): 135–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fieldseth, Melanie. 2004. “Performativitet og Kropp I Samtidsdans” [Peformativity and Body in Contemporary Dance], 3xt, 13: 6–13.Google Scholar
Hall, Edward T. 1976. Beyond Culture. Anchor Press Book.Google Scholar
Johannisson, Karin. 1996. Det mørke kontinentet: Kvinner, sykelighet og kulturen rundt århundreskiftet [The Dark Continent: Woman, Illness and Culture around the Turn of the Century]. Oslo: Aventura.Google Scholar
Johannisson, Karin. 2001. Nostalgia: En känslas historia [Nostalgia: The History of Feeling]. Stockholm: Bonnier Essä.Google Scholar
Johansen, Anders. 2003. “Samtalens tynne tråd” [The Thin Thread of Dialogue]. In Skriveerfaringer [Writing Experience]. Oslo: Spartacus.Google Scholar
Johansson, Thomas. 1997. “Den skulpterade kroppen” [The Sculptured Body]. In Gymkultur, friskvård och estetik' [Gym Culture, Health and Aesthetics]. Stockholm: Carlsons Bokforlag, Borås.Google Scholar
Kåil, Lisa. 2006. “Det humanistiske fakultet” [Expressive Selfhood]. PhD dissertation, Købenshavns Universitet.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Lepecki, Andrè. 2004. “Concept and Presence: The Contemporary European Choreography.” In Rethinking Dance History: A Reader, edited by Carter, Alexandra, 170–81. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Markula, Pirkko. 1995. “Firm but Shapely, Fit but Sexy, Strong but Thin: The Postmodern Aerobicizing Female Bodies.” Sociology of Sport Journal 12 (4): 424–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2004. The Worlds of Perception. New York: Taylor and Francis.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Novack, Cynthia J. 1990. Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Parviainen, Jaana. 1998. Bodies Moving and Moved: A Phenomenological Analyses of the Dancing Subject and the Cognitive and Ethical Values of Dance Art. Tempere, Finland: Tampere University Press.Google Scholar
Paxton, Steve, and Smith, Nancy Stark. 1988. Fall after Newton [Documentary]. Videoda, Contact Collaborations.Google Scholar
Rustad, Hilde. 2006. “Kroppssubjekt i dans og kontekst. En undersøkelse av mening i kontaktimprovisasjon.” [The Body Subject in Dance and Context: An Investigation of Meaning in a Contactimpovisation]. Master's thesis, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim.Google Scholar
Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. 1999. The Primacy of Movement: Advances in Consciousness Research. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, Helen. 2003. The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Torvik, Eli. 2005. “Den raske kroppen og den langsomme tanken. En problematisering av forholdet mellom kropp og tanke I kontaktimprovisasjon.” [The Rapid Body and the Slow Thought? The Problematic Relation between Body and Thought in Contact Improvisation]. Master's thesis, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim.Google Scholar
Turner, Brian S. 2005. “Introduction—Bodily Performance: On Aura and Reproducibility.” Body and Society 11 (4): 1–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Young, Iris M. 1990. Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar