Berlin CI Jams: A Personal Reflection from 2013
Berlin CI Jams: A Personal Reflection
originally posted here in CQÂ in the Summer/Fall issue from 2013
by Andrew Wass
I have had an ongoing love/hate relationship with the jams in BERLIN, GERMANY, probably mostly due to my issues with CI. When I first got here I was really down on the jams. I felt that people didn’t know how to transition between levels, i.e., do a lift and then continue to the floor; that improvising was more of a theatrical sort than a physical sort; that no one was focused, everyone was chatting; that there was too much influence of Tango and other social dance forms.
Since being in a master’s program in Berlin for the past 1.5 years (Solo/Dance/Authorship at the Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum für Tanz [HZT]), I think I understand why the CI here in Berlin has the flavor that it does. Dance is in service to theatre. Totally abstract physicality is still somewhat new here. I have encountered the attitude here that pure physicality is not enough, so the theatrical creeps into the dance: the dance of the subject vs. the dance of the object; a dance of chemistry vs. a dance of physics. But maybe that is human nature—that all new tools eventually get pulled back to the human condition. How many millennia on and we are still writing love songs?
After teaching CI for five weeks to the BA students at my school, I had some realizations about the form and what I was trying to convey. As they weren’t the most physical group, they had some difficulty with a more physical approach to CI—that is, taking weight during body surfing, meeting the ground. Because of this, I started to focus more on the improvisation, the “What are we improvising when we do Contact Improvisation” question. Contact as adjective and improvisation as noun. Going away from the vocabulary (choreography/pathways) of contact and more in the direction of what I think Danny Lepkoff talks about.
Since that realization, I have been having a better time at the jams. My duet experiences are not what I enjoy (I prefer the duet style of the California Bay Area/West Coast-lots of negative space between the bodies, full weight, level changes, more bone/muscle than skin, continuation of contact through multiple levels, “forceful” manipulations of partner(s), use of hands, possibilities of staccato and flow), so I have been focusing more on the duet of me and the whole jam. Contact between self and other. When others are having a theatrical/subjective/chemical experience, I can still have a dance/objective/physical experience.
I still think the jams are too theatrical, with not enough ensemble awareness and too much duet social-dance influence. But I have learned how to negotiate this for a more satisfying experience.
The rooms are also either too small or too full, so full extension of body and flying through space are rarely possible.
Thank you for listening.
How to Read Body Art
How is the observer intended to interpret the atemporal durational corporeal installative performance of an apple core tattooed to the left temple of a white male? Does the left side of the head indicate the leftward (cognitive) political leanings of the individual? The apple core representing the ingestion of sustenance that reveals the means of regeneration. Or is it indicative of Eve, an Illustration of the fault and acceptance of said fault of the fairer sex? What is the observer supposed to do if left up to her or his own devices?
Streams of Information
Just as a musician is normally spatially static and yet continually imparts information and aural stimulation to the audience, the dancer has the potential to remain spatially and kinespherically static and impart a continual stream of information and visual stimulation to the audience.
Vowels
There is no “i” in choreography.
Improvisation begins with “u”.
Three Principle Senses of Choreography
Within the scope of theater dance, one finds three principle senses of choreography: the set of embellishments left to the individual artist to select from during an improvisation; choreography as a process of setting movement to then invent original material from during an improvisation; and choreography for its own sake that is brought to a high level of performance.
-a slight rewording of Curtis Carter’s three principle senses of improvisation. From pg.182 of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2000.
An Nth defintion
Improvisation is a performance that tests a hypothesis.
[ _____ ] is always [ _____ ] of something
“performance is always performance of something”
“consciousness is always consciousness of something”
“plenty is always plenty of something”
“happiness is always happiness of something”
“poetry is always poetry of something”
“inference is always inference of something”
“singing is always singing of something”
“problematizing is always problematizing of something”
“crying is always crying of something”
“reading is always reading of something”
“need is always need of something”
“hope is always hope of something”
“dance is always dance of something”
“shouting is always shouting of something”
“writing is always writing of something”
“listening is always listening of something”
“wanting is always wanting of something”
“hate is always hate of something”
“sadness is always sadness of something”
“fear is always fear of something”
“lack is always lack of something”
“community is always community of something”
“painting is always painting of something”
“thinking is always thinking of something”
“eating is always eating of something”
“love is always love of something”
Is CI a Cunningham chance operation?
‘The dancers are called on not to express a particular emotion, or set of emotions, but instead to develop refined coping mechanisms for creating continuity between disarticulated movements while remaining sensitive to their location in space. They must keep time without musical cues; sense the presence of the other dancers on stage; know blindly proprioceptively, what these other dancers are doing; and adjust the the timing and scope of their movements accordingly, thereby expressing the “human condition” at hand. All this work is “expressive”-it belongs to the “category of expression”-insofar as it is demanded by a human situation on a stage and insofar as human situations on stages (or otherwise) constitute an embodied response to the present moment, an embodied response to the utterly unique conditions of existence at one given point in time.’ – Noland, C 2010, ‘The Human Situation on Stage: Merce Cunningham, Theodor Adorno, and the Category of Expression’, Dance Research Journal, 1, p. 55
In this quote, Noland is referring to Cunningham dancers dealing with the re-ordering of set phrase material.  When she writes (or otherwise), she could be referring to a contact improvisation jam.  I think it is a very apt description of an silent CI jam. In CI jams, dancers are constantly “using refined coping mechanisms for creating continuity between disarticulated movements while remaining sensitive to their location in space.”  [Though, how much contacters are actually aware of the whole space is open for debate! IMHO]
What people do at CI jams is, I would say, “an embodied response to the present moment, an embodied response to the utterly unique conditions of existence at one given point in time.” [Though, how much is actually an embodied response and not actually another iteration of habit is also open for debate. IMHO]
Are Cunningham choreographies that are governed by chance operations a contact improvisation jam?
Are contact improvisation jams a piece of choreography by Cunningham?
Paxton danced for Cunningham, after all.
Embodied Experience
“That embodied experience of staged performances has sharpened my observational and analytical ability to see past the spectacle of performance, the glamour of the costumes, and the dazzle of the footlights.  This enables me to provide a unique analytical picture of the performance of these ensembles – viewed through a trained angle of observation, informed by the practice of performing (my emphasis)…” – Anthony Shay from the preface of Choreographic Politics: State Folk Dance Companies, Representation and Power
Yes! An academic (who is also a practitioner) who gets it!!!