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Teaching Styles in Contact Improvisation: An Explicit Discourse with Implicit Meaning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2012

Gunn Engelsrud
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Extract

Since contact improvisation was “invented” in North America in the 1970s, it has gained widespread acceptance; teachers have been travelling extensively to conduct seminars and workshops. The dance form has been documented and researched from several viewpoints, but, as I see it, there is general agreement among practitioners and scholars—including United Kingdom-based Helen Thomas (2003), Norway-based Hilde Rustad (2006) and Eli Torvik (2005), and Cynthia Novack (1990), who worked in the United States—that contact improvisation is a form of nonhierarchical relations that entails an appeal to accept mutual responsibility for each other and that also implies a specific lifestyle. In her book Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture, Novack, as an anthropologist, perceives contact improvisation as embodied culture where the movements are central constitutional parts. Her position is that through the study of contact improvisation, “the history of the dancing serves as a vehicle for investigating powerful interrelationships of body, movement, dance and society” (8).

Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , Winter 2007 , pp. 58 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 2007

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