CI 36 Self-Interview, Question #1

[Melinda]

Question 1: What circumstance, event, or personality trait do you think might have predisposed you to Contact Improvisation?

Please read others' responses and add your own in a comment. Thanks!




At CI36, Juniata College, Huntingdon, PA, June 2008. photo © Cathie Caraker

[ken manheimer]

i love to move.

looking back, i see that exploration of this passion deepes it. it leads to a profound enjoyment in engaging with the limits of my presence in the world: attention, adeptness, wit/creativity, and connection/warmth. there really aren't any other public activities i know of that come close to the opportunities contact improv offers to explore all these dimensions, and more.

and it's crucial that engaging this exploration with other people is essential to the practice - we help one another fulfill our presence, and discover ourselves and one another in the course of it.

[Melinda]

Leda Franklin, Chesham, UK (Intercontinental Contact at
Earthdance): Not just the desire, but the need to move. To find that
it’s your natural state, and if you don’t do it, there is a certain
sadness that starts to seep in.

[Melinda]

Names changed to protect the innocent.
Sandy Young, Duncan Hargrove, Lacey Cummings-Randolf
Sandy: You have to have ADD.
Lacey: I agree with you because I do have ADD.
Duncan: I think you have to not know how to handle touch, or I didn't know how to, touch was very manipulative. Contact made it grounding.
Lacey: Mine's different. I've been called tactiley insatiable, and it was meant as an insult. But I can’t live without it.
Sandy: But here, they don't get that it's an insult, here it's a way of life. You transformed your insult into a way of life.
Bunhead: I am more like Duncan in regards to the touch issue.
Lacey: Maybe we’re the real ADDs. ADD is often a tactile person.
Bunhead: I am a motor person.
Lacey: There was always this kinesthetic need. I was wrestling as a kid, all the time.
Sandy: Me too.
Lacey: You know what they say about compression and ADD, it helps neurologically.
Duncan: And for autistic people, too.
Bunhead: So maybe you and I are more in the autistic spectrum.
Duncan: You called it motor, I called it autistic. I don’t want to speak for you, but I totally sign on to that.

[Melinda]

Carol Swann, Albany, CA: I grew up in an alternative community/center that my parents and a small group founded in Connecticut, called Committee for Non-Violent Action Center. The focus was on political non-violent direct action and the study of non-violence. During this period, political projects focused on the Vietnam War, civil rights, and nuclear weapons. Because of the times, (from 1958–1972) my childhood experience was a lot about touch. The center was on a farm. There was a barn that we turned into a huge conference center, and chicken coops that we turned into housing, and the big farmhouse had meetings, soup boiling and draft cards burning! When I left that environment, I was in a sense “out in the world,” and when I bumped into contact in 1977, I felt like I had come home. It had such a similar quality. I had also grown up folk dancing and folk singing. Yeah, somehow contact felt like the next transition for me, related to coming home through touch.

[Melinda]

Leslie Scates, Dallas, TX: Hyperactivity and cheerleading. I was a cheerleader early on and that involved a lot of lifting and contact and yelling. Yelling and moving have always been this thing for me, which has led to text based work and contact improv. And being in a rough and tumble sort of family of six. So I think living through my body started very early on.

[Melinda]

Heidi Henderson, Wakefield, RI: A personality trait would be failing at competition, but not really knowing that yet. A predisposition would just be starting dance very late at 20, and being really hungry for any experiences, particularly experiences of community.

[Melinda]

Andrew Wass, San Francisco?, CA: Curiosity. I like the “what happens if…”

[Melinda]

Alexis Halkovic, NYC, NY: I think it's just because I'm a very tactile person. I liked to climb up my mother when I was little, grab on her arms and climb up. I'd do the same thing to my Dad, and to their friends.

[Melinda]

Nina Martin, Marfa, TX: When I was nine my sister married a wealthy man. She bought my mother and me tickets to the Bolshoi—their first U.S. tour during the Cold War. A ballerina jumped and flew sideways across the stage and was caught by a dancer. I leaned over to my mom and said, “I want to do that!” She thought I meant ballet, but what I really wanted to do was Contact, only I didn’t know to call it that yet.