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Displacing Vision: Contact Improvisation, Anarchy, and Empathy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2018

Hannah Yohalem
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Abstract

In this article, I specify and historicize the modes of communication that were at play among practitioners of contact improvisation+ and between the dancers and their audiences throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s. I argue that contact improvisation's turn away from dance as a performed visual medium and toward the tactile experience of the participants exceeds a phenomenological reading and instead needs to be considered in light of anarchist theories of mutual assistance in which group behavior supports individual development. At the same time, however, Steve Paxton, the founder of the form, became concerned precisely with its opacity for an audience. I locate this ambivalent engagement with the performance of a participatory action in the edited video recordings that Paxton made together with Lisa Nelson, Nancy Stark Smith, and Steve Christiansen. These mediated videos, aligned with the rise of video art, paradoxically aim to spark a stronger connection than Paxton thought was possible during the live demonstrations of the form.

Keywords

AnarchycommunicationContact Improvisationempathyintersubjectivitymutual aidSteve Paxtonvideo artYvonne Rainer
Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , August 2018 , pp. 45 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © Dance Studies Association 2018 

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Footnotes

I would like to thank DRJ editor Helen Thomas for the time she spent improving this text with her insightful feedback and editorial assistant Francesca Miles for her invaluable and detailed corrections. Thank you to my anonymous peer readers who saw potential in this piece and made suggestions that let me see how to transform it from an essay into an article and to Hal Foster for his probing comments on its earliest iteration. To Nancy Stark Smith and Lisa Nelson—thank you for helping me make these questions of visibility visible with the photographs and video stills of contact improvisation. I was able to dedicate time to developing this article thanks to the generosity of a fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. And finally, my thanks are always due to Jane, my most patient of readers, and to Emma, for reading this first and last and for everything in between.

References

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