At a recent workshop in Vienna, Ralf Jaroschinski proposed to reflect and approach contact improvisation from the point of view of postmodern art and culture. I found the suggestion thought (and movement) provoking and I’d like to sketch here a few afterthoughts about this topic.
CI can easily be seen as influenced by postmodern ideas. As a form of dance improvisation that deconstructs the idea of ‘form’, but also that of ‘authorship’ and ‘expression’, it surely fits some of the major themes of postmodern thought. The early emphasis of CI as being a ‘physical’ exploration of how bodies react within a gravitational field also entails a form of ‘depersonalization’ of dance that is in line with both the Buddhist roots of CI and with the postmodern orientation that tends to deconstruct expressionist and subjectivist ways of approaching art.
At the same time, a major theme in postmodern philosophy is the that of language. For authors such as Lyotard or Derrida, we have access to the world only through language, and yet our language also keeps always apart from the world as such. We can’t approach reality without filtering it through socially and historically situated concepts and linguistic games. Hence, we’re never really in touch with ‘things in themselves’ but only with our local interpretation of them. Often interpretations are at odds with one another, and hence postmodern philosophers claimed that there is an incommensurability and ultimately a form of incommunicability that separates different groups (or even just individuals).
On this front, it seems to me that CI can be seen more as an answer to this postmodern claim than as an expression of it. Early developers of CI often phrased the practice as a form of ‘communication’ based on movement. In fact, the postmodern predicament that sees language as inevitably doomed to cut us from how things really are is predicated on the old dualistic opposition between realism and idealism. For the realist, we are simply immediately in touch with the world. For the idealist, we are in touch only with our representation of the world (as we can experience the world only as a representation in our consciousness). Postmodernism is too thin on metaphysics to advocate for a form of idealism, but it is too skeptical to accept realism. The result is that we live in the world of language, and this world has no real door or window to get us out. The dualism between subject and world is still very much in place, but the emphasis is on the side of the subject and their inability to reach out to the world.
CI is a good example of a non-dual approach that get rid of this subject-world dualism. Instead, it would be an instance of ‘enactivism’ (to use the term introduced in cognitive science by Francisco Varela and his collaborators, see The Tragedy of the Self, Lectures 1-2). In this view, cognition arises from the coupling and interplay between organisms and environment. The interaction (the relation between subject and world) is taken to be more fundamental than the relata (the subject and the world emerge as relatively distinct entities from their relation and interaction). This also means that language and communication are not something dissociated from an unreachable ‘external’ world. Communication is but another way of ‘moving’ within the world and it creates the world as much as it is constituted by it. There is no ‘thing in itself’ that awaits behind a veil of representations because each and every thing is what it is only insofar as it emerges from the play of interactions.
Using spontaneous movement and sensitivity to unintentional reflexes is just a way (one of the main ways used in CI) to create a form of communication that, before being a discrete transmission of information from A to B, is the creation of a common space of experience in which embodied cognitive subjects emerge as agents because of their mutual entanglement within the same kinesthetic field.
From this perspective, CI is an answer to the postmodern challenge of linguistic incommunicability, more than an expression of it. However, there is another hot topic on the postmodern agenda that is also worth considering, namely, the issue of power and domination that is enacted and implemented throughout socio-political and cultural structures.
Oppression arises from the fact that a given form (linguistic, social, political, metaphysical, doesn’t matter) is fixated into a rigid pattern. Forms, per se, are fluid. They arise, evolve, dissolve. Yet, it is possible to make an extra effort to keep a certain form stable, to make it endure, and to prevent it from flowing into something else. Rivers flow, but it always possible to create a dam on a river. Fixed forms require effort to be sustained over time, and always imply a certain discrimination. In order for a form to be fixed, it is essential to define what the form is in its purest instantiation, and this inevitably entails creating a proscription for certain aspects or elements that should be excluded.
Example: genders are forms. By themselves, they are fluid, they change, evolve, and transform based on circumstances. But if you fix a gender form, then being ‘male’ means having certain qualities rather than others. As Foucault studied in his History of Sexuality, for instance, being male in ancient Greece meant to be active and not passive, being free and not submitted to anything else, being in control and not being controlled. This is how a fluid form becomes fixated, and once this is done, there is a pressure exercised on anything else that is different from that form to be expelled and kept at a distance.
Oppression always arises from the oppressor towards the oppressed. The oppressed is such because they do not fit the fixed form of the oppressor, and hence they need to be kept at bay (in the best case), in order for the ‘pure fixed form’ to remain such. But oppression also induces fixation in the oppressed. For the oppressed to resist the oppression and survive it, it is necessary to fixate in another form, something that can be used to counterbalance and oppose the pressure of the oppressor. Rigidity on one side induces rigidity on the other side (and oppression works in a dualist framework). Once the ‘male’ gender is fixed, also the ‘female’ gender becomes fixed.
Now, there is some debate about the fact that CI remains largely a white practice for usually well-educated, upper class western people (this is a generalization, but it matches with what I’ve observed so far in the Netherlands, Germany, Finland and Italy at least). If this is the case, we should then ask where is the source of oppression that keeps people from other groups away from CI. The point should not be much about being ‘inclusive’ towards others, but first of all to uncover whether and where there is any ‘fixation’ in the practice that implicitly operates as an element of pressure towards exclusion. Since CI is not a world in itself, we should also take into account that any form of oppression does not operate in its own bubble but always fits an already ongoing scenario shaped by major power structures. This means that people so far ‘excluded’ from CI might not be so only because of something within CI, but just because CI appears as yet another space within which they do not ‘fit’.
I’m not going to even suggest a solution for this problem here. However, it seems to me that the ‘impersonality’ of looking at bodies as sheer masses moving in a gravitational field, which to some extent contributed to get CI started, might also turn out to reinforce a certain fixed form. The act of stripping bodies of their cultural attributes and seeking some form of universal or impersonal construction of what a body is falls well within the universalist liberal ideology that support white-male-rationalist supremacy. The alternative, instead, would be to acknowledge how the unique cultural, social, and political history of each and every body affects their way of relating and moving and defines a different way in which they enact and play with gravity.
In other words, CI could become more inclusive by taking more explicitly into account the enactivist approach, and by extending it also to consider how a ‘body’ is not just a physical mass, but also a mass of meanings, traces, images, that contribute to how that body can or will move. This would have the double advantage of contributing to eroding from within any implicit oppressive structure or ‘fixed form’ that might still lurk in the background of CI practice, while also keeping it sufficiently different from other hybridizations (with neo-tantra and similar practices) that would make it evolve into something quite different.
My experience at many jams and CI events is that often people try to introduce into CI a whole series of other approaches (from somatics to sensual) partly to address a sense of ‘touch starvation’ common in our society, and partly to acknowledge the fact that bodies are not just masses, but living embodied stories. However, there is a whole ideology that underpins neo-tantra (also something I won’t get into here), which is simply oriented towards different goals and research questions than those that gave birth to CI—more about personal healing and development, than artistic exploration. Hybridization is always possible, but it might also be one way in which CI practitioners try to compensate for a certain ‘lack’ in how CI is sometimes presented.
How to explore the way in which the socio-cultural and political conditions of our environments affect our way of relating to gravity as much as our physical mass does? How can we bring into movement our unique essence without denying its relational nature? These are distinct research questions, which I find very fitting for a CI research, and which do not necessarily verge towards other systems, but simply ask for an embodied exploration of movement that could explicitly take into account its multilayered dimensionality. Instead of thinking that we move only in the four dimensions of space and time, we should add more dimensions (social, cultural, political, existential, semantic). In this sense, the simplest way to make CI more inclusive is to expand its space of inquiry, not in the Euclidian space, but in the space of meaning-making.
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