CI 36 Self-Interview, Question #4

[Melinda]

Question 4: Imagine CI100, Contact of the future, or Contact in your future.

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


Ray Chung at CI36, photograph from CI36 Community Website.

[Melinda]

Ray Chung, San Francisco, CA: My vision would be that Contact enters the world of politics, on some level. There is a very basic Contact exercise in which the person who’s leading always follows the person whom he or she is leading. If a politician could understand that one idea, then I think big changes could happen.

[Melinda]

Aaron “Brando” Brandes, Northampton, MA: Ray Chung just celebrated his 56 birthday here yesterday. I am 33. I get to look forward to 23 years. If at 56 I can still move like that—he is close to the top of his game! It seems like the trajectory isn't linear. The dance is a three-dimensional dance, the trajectory of it seems three-dimensional too. I see how Ray’s dance continually expands. And Julyen Hamilton’s… so many people. Spirit and I see Jeff Bliss and Steven Yoshen dancing and you can just feel the history in their dance. I think about how in 20 years when Spirit and I are dancing, there’ll be all these young ones looking, and they'll be like, “They've been dancing for thirty years!”

[Melinda]

Martin Hughes, Melbourne, Australia: I am refilling the coffers! It was so wonderful to come here again and see models of older dancers, people in their 50s and 60s, still finding the investigation and enjoyment of contact. I have a page of my notebook, Martin’s next body, the next ten years. I need to find a different way of moving. There are some patterns I’ve developed that cause me some pain, and I am looking forward to exploring how that might be shifted.

[Melinda]

Sandy Young, Lacey Cummings-Randolf, Duncan Hargrove, East Coast:
Sandy: CI 100? We’ll send our dentures. My corpse is not coming!
Lacey: Wait, I might still be here!
Sandy: No! It’s 64 years from now.
Duncan: Have you seen that TV show, where the brains are in those little glass cases? We can roll them around.
Bunhead: You mean have our children roll our brains around?
Duncan: No, we’ll roll them with mental telepathy and sweat. Would you like to hear what Lacey’s worried about?
Lacey: I am panic stricken about Pass the Dance! There's a poor couple…
Bunhead: Over there now?
Sandy: They've been dancing for four hours. They're about to die.
Bunhead: Oh my God, the immediate future!

[Melinda]

Sue Lauther, Troy, NY: I think it would be great to do contact in a more 3-dimensional form. Not necessarily attached to the floor! Like in nets, or in some sort of field, in an environment where you could control the gravity.

[Melinda]

Nina Martin, Marfa, Texas: I'm working on a geriatric form of Contact Improvisation. In another 20 to 30 years, part of the training of contact will be to train young bodies to move older bodies, so the form won't be so much equal lifting and flying, but I'll be an elder and can go into a jam and there'll be four or five bodies that come and move me and touch me and give me 360s and everything, but not too much weight.

[Melinda]

Heidi Henderson, Wakefield, RI: This is my fantasy: A reality TV show where the participants, housewives from Oklahoma and teenagers from New York City, are shown Steve Paxton’s standing-on-one-foot video, and then they are to extrapolate a dance form from that information and nothing else. They’ve never heard of Contact Improvisation and so the question is: Do they come up with something completely new? Or do they actually unbury what we know as the small dance, like an archaeologist might, from only seeing that video?