CI 36 Self-Interview, Question #2

[Melinda]

Question 2: When did you first hear of, encounter, or collide with contact?

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



Stu Phillips and Sue Lauther performing at CI36, photograph from CI36 Community Website

[Melinda]

“Brando” aka Aaron Brandes, Northampton, MA: When I first heard of it I was really resistant. I have been a professional DJ now for almost 15 years. I thought, “This dance form is going to put me out of business!” I thought of contact as a dance in silence. I was like, “No music!” So I really stayed allergic to it. I was living in San Francisco, I was going to boogies and seeing people doing contact there. And I lived at Esalen and saw people doing it, but I wasn't ready. Naturally for me, I don't just like tasting, I like submerging. The way I learned to meditate was a ten day Vipassana set. My first Grateful Dead concert was the beginning of a two year tour. All or nothing!
Right before I got into contact, I was living at a yoga center for two years. I was listening deep within to find my center. That language and investigation seemed to progress quite naturally in contact. Martin Keogh was my first mentor/teacher. His story was similar. I came from this deep spiritual place, and once I found contact it was aha! This is exactly the next step. I immersed myself, I moved to Earthdance before I knew how to dance contact improvisation. I learned to dance it while I was living there. I was dancing daily, going to every single jam and every class that existed. Within 3 months I was pretty courageous on the dance floor, inhibitions were gone... I mean they are always there, but I those initial inhibitions where you sit out for a whole jam, were gone.

[Melinda]

Kristin Horrigan, Brattelboro, VT: In college, a bunch of us who were often in the studio late at night working on our choreography homework ended up trying to figure out some CI. We'd seen it on a video, and read a chapter in a book, and done a few touch-based improvisations in choreography class, but we'd never seen it live! I loved it from the beginning and I sought it out when I went to the American Dance Festival later that year.

[Melinda]

Sue Lauther, Troy, NY: I've always had the idea that everybody does Contact as newborns and that it just stays with some folks, in terms of wanting to be supported and touched. The “real” Contact—it was in grad school. I saw the dance company Pilobolus. Finally there is something that my big, muscley body can do that my willowy and graceful colleagues can't. I was into mountaineering and lifting people. I moved to Eugene, Oregon, and met Alito Alessi and Karen Nelson and started taking Contact with them.

[Melinda]

Duncan Hargrove, East Coast: I went to Bennington College and this woman Pinky Morrison taught Contact. I thought she wasn't one of the cool people, so I didn't do it much. I studied with Lisa and Steve there. But later, I went to the Putney School/Vermont Workshop. Daniel Lepkoff, Nina Martin, and Marsha Palludan were teaching. I started contact in 1981. I had this funny experience: “The founders” were editing and shooting “Fall After Newton” while I was there. I would go in while they were editing. They'd have like 18 seconds, and they'd say, “What do you think, Duncan?” And I'd go—I don't know—who knows what I said! I'd come back 48 hours later, and they'd say, “Well we started over after your reaction.” And I thought, “These people are just insane process people.”

[Melinda]

Scott Rodwin, Boulder, CO: I just graduated from architecture school, five years of living hell! I was trying to figure out what do do, where to go. There was a terrible recession in 1991 and there was no architectural work anywhere. So I went to work for a summer at the Omega Institute and I walked into the Thursday night Barefoot Boogie, never having heard of a boogie. There were all these people dancing in bare feet in all kinds of crazy ways! I'd been dancing since I was twelve, ballet and jazz, and never seen this kind of dancing. It was amazing. I just started dancing all over the place, and for four incredibly sweaty, amazing hours I fell into my community. It was the moment I found it. At the very end, we were all playing in a puppy pile on the floor covered in sweat. I remember one of the people who was laying on me, turned to me and said, “How many years have you been doing contact improv?” And I said, “What's contact improv?” and she said, “That’s what you've been doing for these last several hours!”

[Melinda]

Carol Swann, Albany, CA: I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1977. My partner at the time was visited by one of his close high school friends, Charles Campbell, who, at the time was a member of Mangrove (an all-male Contact Improvisation performance group), FROM the West coast. I was intensely involved with folk dancing then, and as we were hanging out making food in the kitchen, Charles said, “Well, Carol, maybe you would be interested in Contact!” Lo and behold, right there on the kitchen floor he started demonstrating Contact with Mark and I. And that was it! I spent that winter studying Contact with Shera Carmen and when summer came on, I went off to San Francisco to do the Mangrove six-week intensive.

[Melinda]

Leda Franklin, Chesham, UK (Intercontinental Contact at Earthdance): Over twenty years ago, when I was still doing ballet, my fiancé (who was rapidly becoming an ex-fiancé) said, “Have you ever heard of Contact Improvisation?” I was A Super Trina-head, and I said, “Oh God, yes. When those people roll on the floor and they slime all over each other, I'm not doing that shit!” Twenty years ago I was given the opportunity to do contact, and that's what I said! So now, I have a gyrotonic studio. Less than a year ago, one of my gyrotonic teacher’s—a big time contact dancer for over ten years Tim O’Donnell—and his friend Gabriel were flipping around my studio. I said, “Oh, I want to
do that!” They showed me a few things and I was off! They said, “Go to K. J.'s class!” so that’s what I did.
Melinda: Did you remember the previous incident when you’d felt so differently?
Leda: It came back to me A few months in, I thought if only I’d woken up twenty years ago, imagine where I’d be!

[Melinda]

Martin Hughes, Melbourne, Australia: In Paris, I had made the decision to give up dancing after years and years of being very unhappy as a “real” dancer. I had actually put all my dancing gear in a charity bin in Paris. It was a poetic moment. Earlier, I had applied for a grant from the Australian government to go to NYC to do some dance study. The money came through. I thought, “All right, I'll go to NY and I'll just do the things that I know I enjoy. Someone had come to my college in Australia and taught one contact class, and it had been a moment that stuck out. So I tracked down some Contact. This was in 1990.
Now I am in America and I've got to go find some dancing gear, God damn it! Cause the Contact thing just completely—I did class with Nina Martin. She was saying things I never heard a teacher say, “Acknowledge the intelligence of the body, follow its logic and its needs,” “Don't worry about being symmetrical or creative or artistic,” “This is just a warm-up and your body will do what it needs to do.” It was a revolution for me.
There was the sense in my previous dance experience that, “Oh God, it will never end. I'll never be perfect, I'll never get it right.” That was a terrible burden, a drain. It was in Nina's class I realized, “Oh fantastic this will never end!” I could see potential for wanting to learn and explore for my whole life. Make a whole life of practice full of energy.