I often hear Contact Improvisation teachers emphasizing the importance of ‘keeping one’s own solo dance’ (variously phrased). What they mean seems to be the following: as you dance in contact with someone else, do not lose yourself in the duo, but try to retain your own autonomy.
We live in a weird society in which the dusk of liberalism and capitalism is progressively replaced by a new way of socialization in which people exist in networks of acquaintances, yet mostly mediated by distance, imaginary, and language (i.e. by social media). In a sense, we all try to live in ‘community’, and yet our way of socializing is extremely fragile and indirect. This context creates a sort of schizophrenia in which our society tends to be both hyper-individualist (a train pack with people and nobody talking or even acknowledging each other) and hyper-communitarian (an Instagram profile with thousands of followers and reactions).
In this context, the idea of ‘keeping your solo’ can be interpreted in the sense of retaining your own autonomy as an individual (liberalist interpretation). But this autonomy does not exist and should not be strived for. It does not exist because we’re clearly relational beings, and if we have any autonomy at all, this autonomy needs to be conceived in relational terms as well. And an individualist autonomy is not something we should strive for either, because it is from this striving that then the need for ‘reconnection’ arises, and given this demand, there you go with the selling of virtual communities as a new commodity or merchandise to be offered to atomized consumers.
When I have to speak in a language I’m not too familiar with, I still feel a moment of silence in which the ‘idea’ I want to express exercises a sort of pressure within my cognitive system, as if it was searching for a way of piercing the shell of silence and bursting into words. Similarly, I can understand what is the ‘spirit’ of the teaching about ‘keeping your solo’, while I strongly doubt the fact that it is phrased with the right words, given the context in which we live.
A way of retranslating this teaching would be that of adopting Spinoza’s notions of activity and passivity. According to Spinoza, we are ‘active’ when we can produce effects (e.g. movements) that can be understood on the basis of our own nature and striving to express ourselves. By contrast, we are ‘passive’ when we produce effects (e.g. movements) that can be understood only by taking into account specific external causes and circumstances that somehow manipulate and steer our power of acting in ways that we wouldn’t otherwise do.
Three things to note here. First, passivity is not sheer inertia. When we’re passive we do a lot of stuff, according to Spinoza (e.g. all forms of sadness, hanger, and hope are kinds of passions for Spinoza). Yet, when we’re passive, whatever we do, we do not fully understand it, and we do not fully endorse it. We ‘loose’ ourselves in the external causes that manipulate us (even when we think we endorse this process of manipulation—which is called adaptive behaviour). Second, both activity and passivity unfold in relation to external causes and conditions. According to Spinoza, we are relational beings (we are ‘modes’ and not ‘substances’), hence, whatever we do, we do it with others. Activity and passivity are thus just two different ways of relating to others. When we’re active, we cooperate with others in such a way that whatever we do is also the result of what originates from within ourselves. We agree with the external conditions and causes, and hence this agreement propels us forward. When we’re passive, instead, we do not cooperate, but we are led to do things and to use our resources in ways that we wouldn’t otherwise do. Third, activity and passivity are not categorical opposites. In each ‘operation’ (any instance of causal interplay), there is a degree of activity and a degree of passivity. Even when we feel we are fully active, there might be a degree of passivity; and even when we feel we are fully passive, there might be a degree of activity. The point is not to choose one over the other, but to maximize activity over passivity in the degree that fits best the current conditions.
The teaching about ‘keeping your solo’ can thus be rephrased as ‘maximize your activity’. Why does this matter? For two reasons. First, because it makes more sense. As relational beings, we’re never moving just out of ourselves. We move only because we are in a certain environment and we constantly shape our movement based on the space we inhabit (which include the space of past conditioning and future-looking expectations). This is something encapsulated in another aphorism often mentioned in CI classes: ‘the floor is always your partner’. The floor (the ground, earth) is what we need in order to move, and hence even our ‘solo’ is just a ‘duet’ with the floor.
Second, the point of maximizing activity is not to enforce something that we want to do, but rather to find first a way of establishing a dynamic system in which we and our partner(s) can coordinate and ‘agree in nature’ (as Spinoza would say). Within that space, we can thus carry on our own actions. We do not need to create this agreement ex nihilo, but we can use tools to maximize it over other conditions, and to unearth its presence for our conscious experience. The way of doing it is by using what I call ‘constructive constraints’. We impose constraints on our movements, but constraints that are such to create a need for us to coordinate and cooperate together, without any party involved dominating another.
The general formula of a constructive constraint is the possibility of balancing out two tendencies. I’ve been calling them variously over the past months (e.g. here), and now I’ll use the most recent terminology of ‘release’ and ‘rebound’ (from here). Release is what brings us back to oneness. We melt in gravity, we dissolve on the floor. We lose our discreteness. Two-ness dissolves. This is one extreme. Rebound is what animates us and makes us move against, through, across, amidst the environment, contributing to our individuation. We jump out of the background. We become something different. We claim our own rhythm. One-ness dissolves. The constructive constraint consists in balancing these two forces, so that we are both one and two, and neither one nor two. The space to create this balance is what (borrowing from Nancy Stark Smith) I call ‘earthing’: there is a movement of release towards the partner(s), and at the same time there is a movement of rebound away from the partner(s).
In more practical CI terms, it seems to me that the whole sophistication of the ‘point of contact’ is based on the exploration of this space of ‘earthing’ (first between my living structure and the floor, then adding complexity and exploring it between the floor, me, and other living bodies). The stronger the element of release, the higher the sharing of weight. The stronger the element of ‘rebound’ the smaller the sharing of weight and the greater the sense of ‘reaching’ through the other towards their ground. And the two can also intermingle and entangle to some degree. Earthing is not a fixed point, but a spectrum of exploration. The artistry lies in our ability to deliberately be aware of what we are doing, when, and why. A very sophisticated exploration indeed—that’s contact improvisation.
Earthing is the constructive constraints that help us maximizing activity over passivity. What happens in this space we don’t know yet, but it will be an expression of who we are, which takes into account the fact that we are what we are only because we are also part of a larger dynamic system. If you like, you might still call this a ‘solo’. But the term ‘solo’ comes from music, and if we’re looking for musical terms, it’s pretty clear that what I’ve described is not the ‘cadenza’ or ‘solo’ episode in a concerto, but way more the mutual independence of each voice in a polyphonic construction. The best music for understanding this might eventually come from Bach more than from Liszt.
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