Contact Improvisation's 36th Birthday Celebration

What Can a Body Do?

What Can a Body Do?
This video is a results of the process initiated by myself in 2006, when I begun to take pictures, register and expose in parties and in the web, images captured in JAM SESSIONS of contact improvisation dance, which happens in the city of Salvador/BA, since 4 years later, and that counted on professional and non-professional dancers, beyond musicians.
Contact Improvisation is a dance practice, involving two or more people which maintain physical contact between their bodies. The basic elements in contact improvisation practice are: touch, perception, reflexive reactions, motor coordination, balance, weight and support points transference, spontaneity and creativity.
The dancers Hugo Leonardo and Rossana Alves, co-ordinators of the Jam Sessions, decided to amplify and deepen the experience with Contact Improvisation, and so proposed the EM CONTATO PROJECT, which search to promote Jam Sessions in different places in the city, and also to offer weekly classes of Contact Improvisation, in the way to divulge the practice and to aggregate more projects around aesthetics, performatical and therapeutical results, among others.
In 2007, I decided to leave from the back of the photo camera and know the Contact Improvisation in the condition of a dancer partner of the EM CONTATO PROJECT. This rich experience suscitated me the desire of retaking the work with dance images, but this time using a video camera.
So, in 2007, I begun to make registers of the meetings in video, first, with the objective of producing documentaries. Afterwards, I started to make imagetical experiments, with the register, dance scene edition and the projection of images during the Jam Sessions – images of places, of other Jam Sessions and of the own dancers, at that same moment.

Since then, I have being searching to explore, aestheticaly and performaticaly, the effects of the motion pictures, lights and sounds, in the ambient of meetings, registering the movements, the meetings and the bodies possibilities in the Contact Improvisation dance experience.
This sequence of five minutes, which appears in the video “What Can a Body Do?” is composed by the selection and edition of some parts filmed in the Contact Jam that happened in August, 2007, in the Gregório de Matos Theather, Salvador, Bahia.

Name: Adrina Rocha ( Drica Rocha)