Contact Improvisation Stories

This is my story of contact improvisation. If you have a contact improv story to tell, use the form at the bottom of the page to submit the story for possible publication on this site.

By Carol Wiley

Why do I dance? The short answer is that I dance because when I dance well, my body feels pure joy.

Within the longer answer lies issues of body image and societal expectations and the question, "If I dance, am I a dancer?"

For me, dance is a kinesthetic experience, not a mental/verbal one. I cannot sit around with other people and talk about dance. Dance has been a way to get out of my head, where I lived so much of my life, having learned at any early age to disconnect from a body not considered acceptable in our thin-obsessed society.

For many years I would never have used the words "body" and "joy" in the same sentence. At best, my body was something to be tolerated. More often, it was a source of shame, frustration, and ridicule.

Even during the brief periods of my life when my body was more "acceptable," I struggled. Even through years of martial arts training, I held the societal belief that large people cannot move easily and gracefully. Finally, this belief began to crumble in the early 1990’s with my Aikido training.

Then chance (destiny?) brought me to contact improvisation dance at a time when I was ready to explore it. Someone I knew through my Aikido practice told me about contact improvisation and how it shares many of the principles of Aikido. Principles of connection, movement, grounding, and letting go. Perhaps fueled by the occasional gracefulness I felt in my Aikido movement or by the upheavalin my life caused by my divorce becoming final and my father dying three days later, the time was right and I sought out a contact improvisation class.

My introduction to contact improvisation was in a four-hour class I took in April 1992 at the age of 33. I loved it. Because I was in the middle of training for my Aikido black belt test, I put off starting to dance until the following January, when I took a 10-week series of classes and began attending jams regularly.

I supplemented my contact improvisation practice with other movement-related classes, including Body-Mind Centering, Laban, and Continuum. They opened up a whole new way of viewing movement and my body. In my mid-thirties I was doing things with my body that I had never before considered.

I was becoming more accepting of my body but doubted that other people would be. When a somatics teacher, who had been a professional dancer, said to me "You have the soul of a dancer," I mentally added "but not the body."

I was reticent about weight sharing. Could I really expect people to support my weight? My first contact improvisation teacher was encouraging, telling me that he thought people would want to feel my weight. I was amazed to have people tell me they liked it when I gave them my weight. It became a true pleasure through the years to dance with people to whom I felt free to give my weight.

My experience with contact improvisation has been greatly enhanced by both organizing and participating in the Seattle Festival of Alternative Dance and Improvisation (SFADI). SFADI introduced me to a wide range of teachers whom I otherwise would not have experienced.

For a few years, my exuberance continued as I danced regularly. When I danced, I felt alive, I felt free, I felt my body.

Then I hit a plateau. So many of my dances were repetitive, disconnected, unfocused, or just plain boring. For several years, I might not have danced at all if I had not been running the weekly Seattle contact improv jam. After I gave up running the jam in 2001, I danced very little for nearly a year.

The 2002 SFADI got me dancing again and a newly formed jam kept me dancing. Then at the 2003 SFADI I had a breakthrough. One of the features of SFADI is an intensive class with the same teacher each day. I had always taken the contact improvisation intensive, but in 2003 felt the need for something different. I took Keith Hennessy’s "Performing Improvisation, Improvising Performance" intensive.

We did an exercise where one person asked the other, "Are you a dancer?" The second person responded, then the first said, "thank you," and asked the question again. It was a damn irritating exercise to be repeatedly asked the same question. My first response was one I had used a number of times over the years when asked if I was a dancer. "I dance." I never had a vision of myself as a dancer.

But by the end of the exercise I could only say, "Yes." Yes, I am a dancer. I have always been a dancer, even before I danced. For many years martial arts were my dance. Martial arts built a strong, supportive, disciplined foundation that made it possible for me to dance.

So, in my forties, I not only dance, I am a dancer in a body that was made to dance with joy. And the best part is that I continue to learn and develop and expand my horizons.

Do you have a personal contact improv story? Share it! Please keep it short and relevant with no commercial plugs. You can include a one or two sentence bio at the end.