Blog: Contact Improvisation - Soft Skills/ Hard Skills

I am in the process of writing my book about Holistic Dance and this process has had different phases so far and I foresee more of them to come. In the last 2-3 years I have been collecting and archiving texts that I have written myself and those texts that have inspired me. While publishing the accompanying book for my Holistic Dance cardset in 2023 (the german cardset was puplished in 2018, the english version in 2020) I could already feel that there is more that I want to share and document about the work, that I have been teaching for so many years now.

On my three month tour to Canada and the USA this year, I was thinking about what kind of time structures I need to find enough time to write, edit and publish this book, especially since it is apparent, that I will be self publishing. How can I find the time to collect and research and concentrate on such indepth information alongside my already intense teaching schedule and all the administration that goes along? I was wondering. Would it be possible to take a sabbatical (the answer is unfortunately no, due to financial restraints...), or should I hire a ghost writer (that answer didnt take very long, defintely no), should I ask AI to write the book (no, no and no)?

While I was in India, I recalled, what my friend Martin Keogh said about managing to write a book during his many years of being ill with chronic fatigue syndrome. He said:" 15 minutes a day, go a long way". One evening (I am not an evening writer at all), I sat down and timed myself and started writing for 15 minutes, which was managable. Not at all bad. Actually great because there was one more paragraph on the page than before. And the next day the threshold to write was much lower, a short paragraph seemed fairly easy to accomplish. You see, writing a book about these amazingly interconnected and interwoven processes that we call dance, can be really scary. I'd rather go dancing, then sitting down and trying to find words for all that is happending in my BodyMind. You see? But I also really, really feel like writing this book. So here we are, I am writing 15 minutes a day, which sometimes turns into 32 and sometimes into 57 minutes and then 15 again. Halleluja.

Here is an excerpts from my chapter about Contact Improvisation, I would be happy to hear from you with feedback and or questions about this content.

Soft Skills - Hard Skills in Contact Improvisation

Through the years of teaching Contact Improvisation I have explored the various approaches to teaching this form. I studied modern dance and what now is called contemporary dance, jazz dance and ballet in the 1980's and 90's in Vienna, Chicago and New York. In my early years of performing I engaged into what is called "partnering“, choreographed lifts. As a professional dancer the gap between partnering and CI didn't feel so big, so I „slipped into“ Contact Improvisation more than 30 years ago, quite easily.

I learned the fundamentals of CI as I was learning how to teach, rather than by applying them to my own movement development first. Like many beginning CI teachers I began by teaching specific lifts and tricks first and then discovered that it is actually more sustainable both for the students and the teacher to start more fundamentally.

One of my biggest learning privileges has been to co-teach with some of the master teachers of Contact Improvisation, namely Ray Chung, Eszter Gál, Alicia Grayson and Martin Keogh. I felt highly valued as a teacher and dancer by them and could immerse myself into their approaches of pedagogy through the collaborative process. As I have to come to teach teachers and develop longer curriculums, the chance to build up principles of movement in relationship and as foundations to CI, I could really see the benefits of the slow build up and how it supports dancers holistically.

At one point in my teachers training I came up with the terms „Soft Skills“ and „Hard Skills“ (borrowing the terms  from the computer world). From my perspective, any good CI teacher (and that is a very good way to spot them!) will engage with a full range of these skills, even if it’s an advanced, acrobatically oriented CI workshops. It is simply safer to teach this way.

Soft skills are the underlying principles that support the development of the dancers body in order to play in a Contact Improvisation interaction. Some of these principles are not specific to the form of Contact Improvisation, but rather important elements of any movement practice like Center, Reaching and Listening, some are very specific to CI like Weight Sharing and Leading/ Following. For me, the soft skills that I work with are influenced by the many different trainings I have expereinced over 35 years, such as my professional dance training, Systemische und Integrative Bewegunsglehre(R) (an extended Feldenkrais(R) Method), BodyMind Centering, Fascia Bodywork and in the last years Visionary Craniosacral Work(R).

On the other hand, what I call „hard skills“ are repeatable movement patterns and are equally important to the form. I find it is helpful for dancers to have practiced a basic set of hard skills after they have engaged in the fundamental principles of CI, so that their bodies have an understanding of what might happen once they are in the flow of the dance. The brain creates neuronal connections during these practices and will recognize the similarity in the movements once they happen in the improvisation. The memory of having been either the under - or overdancer in the similar situation will fire up the neuronal pathway and will recall the „I have survived this“ feeling.

Hard skills might be surfing over somebodies body, while the underdancer is rolling, or shifting weight onto a four legged position and balancing on top, or it might include being lifted up on a shoulder while you are mid-step.  What I find important with these specific movement patterns is that a teacher creates a non-judgmental, non-competitive environment. Most of us have been conditioned by schooling and parenting to „be good at what we do“, to strive and achieve in order to receive recognition and/ or self worth. So our longstanding history with receiving criticism or compliments during learning is often tied to painful and/or traumatic experiences in our childhood and adolescence.

If the teachers creates an atmosphere where ambition around achieving the perfect lift is in the foreground, it might just kill connection with Self and as a result disengage us from our dance partners. In my experience injuries might happen, when participants push over a boundary in order to „achieve“ a specific skill, without having the fundamental understanding of self-organization or listening skills in the body first. I feel that you can see and sense that in somebodies dancing, if they are mainly interested in showing off the „tricks“ of the form, i.e. just staying on top of each others shoulders or picking up the smaller person without listening if they want to be picked up. As a teacher I try to create an environment where we value each other presence, practice compassion with self and others and use non-judgmental language when sharing feedback.

In the early years of my practice, somewhere in the middle nineties of the last century, it seemed that hard skill oriented teachers had more students in their workshops than the soft skill oriented ones. I am not sure if this is due to the patriarchical conditioning in us that wants to "get" something specific or because it seemed more thrilling to go for the acrobatics. In the last 10 to 15 years, with the rise of interconnective teachings through somatics in CI, I see a lot more teachers staying with the fundamentals and diving into the somatic depth of the body first before teaching dancers how to fly (if ever).

All together I feel that the more experienced a contact dancer is the more they tend to appreciate the fundamentals, since in every movement all of them are present. It is as if the poet goes back to the drawing board and revisits the A,B and C of the alphabet in order to be able to write the most beautiful succinct poem.

Photo by (C) Mathieu Parent - Alicia Grayson and I during "Coming Home to the body" at Rhizome Springs, Canada