By Taina Lyons
Before I started dancing Contact Improvisation (CI) in my early 30s, arriving at parties or large social gatherings was often uncomfortable for me. I would feel an anxious, contracted energy in my chest and I’d head for the bar or seek out a social comfort zone with one person. Something started shifting when I took my first classes in CI and began attending regular Contact Improv Jams. Contact Improvisation is a social dance form done with a partner or in group constellations. It involves sharing weight and exploring touch, movement, non-verbal communication, and play. CI Jams are open dance spaces, with or without music, for participants to engage in dances, practice technique, or rest.
The focus at CI Jams on embodied listening, co-regulation, and grounding opened pathways for me to fully arrive in my body. Jam culture gave me permission to take my time “dropping in.” I would walk slowly, circling the studio, or roll across the floor, or cry. I would relish in just watching. Staring. Witnessing. I could move weirdly or sensually on my own until this weirdness or sensuality aligned with another body in a perfectly weird, sensual dance. Any anxious, contracted energy I might have been feeling would dissolve like a sugar cube in a cup of tea. I noticed something starting to happen off the dance floor too—this “blueprint” for arrival in a space was transferring into other settings in my life. I could access these states of grounding, regulation, and emotional freedom by moving my body as needed until I felt clear about how to engage in a space. This shift has improved my confidence, sense of connection to others, and ease in various social and community contexts.
Seeing this transformation in myself, I started wondering what other ways-of-being are typical in jams that could be bridged into other contexts. Through this bridging, jams have the power to initiate larger cultural transformation as dancers carry ways of being, connecting, and knowing that are cultivated there into the other spaces they inhabit. By valuing a baseline of connection, expression, and nervous system integration, CI Jam culture supports participants to inhabit external and internal space in a way that is markedly different from the embodied norms of the overculture. I’m struck by the reality that most people carry a lot of physcial and emotional tension. To be grounded, easeful, spacious, and connected moving through day-to-day contexts is counter-cultural. It’s a priviledge. But it shouldn’t be—embodied pleasure, connection, and safety are essential parts of human nature.
Jams help us to imagine—and create—a post-capitalist blueprint for community that is guided by care, connection, embodied wisdom, and magic. Here are some of the elements I have experienced at jams that are powerful alternatives to cultural norms that encourage disconnection from self/other, exhaustion, exploitation, spiritual superficiality, and material consumerism.
GENEROUS SHARING OF HUMAN RESOURCES SUCH AS TOUCH, AFFECTION, HEALING, CARE, AND LOVE
By sharing/giving/receiving nurturance that is free and deeply nourishing, individuals and communities can rely less on the promised (though not always delivered) pleasures and security of capital.
EXPRESSING AND FEELING A FULL RANGE OF EMOTIONS
People have the capacity to experience a profound range of emotional states from ecstasy to grief, peace to rage. Emotions connect a person to their spirit, their vitality, and their understanding of themselves and the human collective. Some (though not all) jams invite emotions to move freely as part of the dance.
EMBODIMENT
Bodies that can move with freedom, sovereignty, and pleasure are dangerous to a system that benefits from easily influenced, hurting bodies and souls.
SYNCHRONICITY
Finding and exchanging needed information, collaboration, and resources is a form of community self-sufficiency. It requires people to be intuitively led at times, i.e. being in the right place at the right time, running into someone by chance, etc.
INTUITION
The ability to know without knowing why, and act from this place of knowing is a form of intuitive intelligence. Direct seeing and understanding come from a connection with spirit and other-than-human guidance.
PLAY/SILLINESS
A lost inner child makes for a lost adult. A playful, childlike adult cultivates and shares joy, safety, connection and relaxation.
UNFOLDING IN PRESENCE
Releasing into the present moment is deeply pleasurable. In this state there is less energy of striving and ambition that keeps the capitalist machine running.
CONNECTION TO CREATIVE SOURCE
CI can create a trance-like state in which a person can open to their creative channel and source of energy beyond the self.
NEGOTIATING AND RESPECTING BOUNDARIES
Exploitation culture is the water we swim in, the air we breath. Consciously practicing consent, deep listening, verbal and non-verbal communication, and relationship repair is an alternative to the culture of entitlement and taking.
NERVOUS SYSTEM REGULATION AND CO-REGULATION
This includes a skillful grounding and integration of one’s energy, either alone or with another person. Many of us are taught to rely on unhealthy strategies for regulating the nervous system—strategies that lead to addiction or exploitation of others’ bodies, emotions or energy. Taking accountability for one’s own state is a form of self-empowerment that prevents harm.
DISRUPTION OF GENDER NORMS AND QUEERING OF SPACES
Men tenderly holding one another. Men wearing dresses. Men being led. Men crying. Non-sexual physical intimacy between people of all genders. Uplifting queer and non-binary bodies, voices, and experiences. Women expressing aggressive energy. Women expressing boundaries and preferences. Women leading. Women physically lifting men. Trios, quartets, and group dances.
I was recently assisting a CI retreat close to the ocean. One of the days we did some exercises at the beach, and everyone was in the water practicing a group movement structure while I sat and watched. I leaned forward, pressing my hands into the sand as the surf gently washed over them. With each wave, a bulge of sand pressed up between the diamond shape created by my thumbs and pointer fingers. The bulge slowly grew larger and rounder in my hands. “It looks like a baby crowning,” I thought, “and the waves are like contractions.” I’ve attended births as a doula, and also birthed both my children at home in water. I was struck by the feeling I get at a birth, of excited anticipation. Patience and impatience. Awe and curiosity. Connection to new beginnings. Arrival. As we hospice so many aspects of our culture, there are also new structures being born and celebrated. And there are labor pains.
As one of the spaceholders and care team members of a local CI jam, I see myself as a cultural midwife, tending to the slow emergence of a new culture of respect, creativity, connection and joy. The spirit of this new culture births through us as we open our bodies, hearts, and spirits to a new way, and release what is passing. In this emergence, there is hope and exhilaration, as well as grief and surrender. It’s essential that we acknowledge the harmful impact of current cultural norms on marginalized people, the Earth and many other non-human beings, and apply the energy of our resourced hearts and bodies to listening and acting in service.
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