Teaching CI - Tokyo Contact Impro Festival 08
From Contactencyclopedia
Report on teaching at the Tokyo CI Festival, Japan, 3-6.5. 2008
In May 2008, I had the chance to teach at the Tokyo Contact Improvisation Festival. The event lasted for four days and took place in the Japan Women’s College of Physical Education in Tokyo. There were two teachers of contact improvisation: myself, and Vivianne Rodrigues de Brito from Brazil/Netherlands, who is a permanent teacher at the Theater School in Amsterdam.
The festival was created by an organization called Spiral, which facilitates jams and contact dancing in Tokyo region. The festival happened for the second time, and this year the organizers had received a grant and were able to invite international teachers and pay for them.
I was teaching a workshop which was intended for mixed abilities. However, there were almost no disabled people coming to the workshop – only on the first day, a woman mentally disabled could join us. I was prepared for a different situation as I arrived to the festival. This is why on the first day, I decided to spend rather much time to talk about the reasons for people taking the workshop to review my teaching plan and rework on it according to the group.
Additionally to this workshop I also taught a class for disabled children who regularly came to the Women’s College for physical training.
Before the festival began, I had not had any contact to the other teacher, Vivianne. During the event we created a relationship of supporting each other and discussing about the context of the classes together. We were both teaching 2,5 hours’ class daily, one after the other, so many of the students joined both of the classes each day. The classes were also open for drop-ins, so each day there were newcomers stepping in to both of the workshops. As I had to slightly change my plan from a mixed-ability workshop into a regular contact improvisation workshop for beginners, with new people coming in each day, I felt that my teaching stayed fresh and my plans kept evolving all the time. I still committed myself to a lot of awareness practices in the work and most of the exercises I shared were open for differently abled people to join (even if they didn’t join, maybe there was a stubborn voice inside of me telling me to keep to the plan, or maybe it was just me thinking there must have been a reason they asked me to do mixed-ability workshop and I wanted to follow the contract?). I worked a lot with gravity and touch through different explorations of bodywork and dancing, influenced from my studies in different somatic approaches as well as my approach to life in general. Instead of forcing, I wanted to encourage people to work with fluids and listening, and to work with simple details to stay grounded. As the group was non-disabled, I added in a bigger variety of basic contact exercises of supporting (offering surfaces) and giving weight on structures. With Vivianne, we were joining each other’s classes and this way getting the chance of being students ourselves and give each other feedback and help in the classes.
During the evenings there were no jams as there often are in contact festivals, but instead there were discussions. Even though sometimes slow with all the translation back and forth, the discussions stayed intense and continued late, spread to the mealtimes and certainly engaged people. There seemed to be a trend to talk about communication and community and engagement to conversations especially on these topics. -I spent many mealtimes talking to people who challenged my thinking with fascinating questions. For example, there was a group of young actors at the festival. One evening they asked me: Why are dancers always so busy with gravity? This was one of the questions that made me smile. Even though we did not have the chance to dance the nights away together, it seemed that in this culture people could really dive into discussions and be nourished by them. As, it seemed, whatever we spoke or taught, people listened to very carefully, and also integrated rather fast into their dancing. Nobody ever quit the class in the middle or seemed unwilling to do a certain exercise (–something that happens in the contact festivals in Europe pretty often to all levels of teachers). As a teacher I wished to work with understanding the cultural as well as the physical beings to see in which ways I was able to support the students without unnecessary tension arising from different cultural backgrounds, but at the same time working with beginners of contact improvisation not wanting to exhaust their physical and emotional resources.
Speaking several languages myself and having to confront the fact I could not express myself in Japanese, I was very happy to have my “own” interpreter, Minori Nagai. Most of the students did not speak English, so our connection with Minori was essential to transmit the information from me to students – and back. However, it seemed that body language was still the strongest tool in teaching and I noticed how my tone of voice, being and behavior affected the situation and the students could, with some effort from us all, even understand me without Minori. I worked on as clear and as simple speech as possible (without killing the content) for not to be lost in translation but also to make my point clear by the intention of my voice. During the days this got better and better: the students knew some of my key words in English, I knew a tiny bit of Japanese, but most important of all, we had a physical language to communicate with.
As I mentioned, I also gave one class outside of the festival to the disabled children. These children had been together since a few years coming every Saturday in a physical training with some of the students and a professor from the Women’s College. There was one student to each child. Neither the students nor the kids (or the professor!) had had any encounter with contact improvisation before. Most of the children were autistic and the class was always almost the same; for the kids, it was important to stay with the safe and known patterns.
I was asked to do this class and to prepare, had received a DVD showing their exercises. Before the class, I had meetings with the professor and the students to explain and discuss what we were going to do. The class itself was mixed in their regular training, so that they still had parts of their usual physical training.
Working with my interpreter Minori, I only had the physical language again to communicate straight with the children. We did simple exercises so that the students were dancing with the child they took care of, and later on, we all danced together. I introduced exercises created from push and pull, support and exploration of surfaces with giving weight, rolling, climbing, lying on top and resting, etc. The parents of the children would not join but were sitting the whole time at the side of the studio watching us play.
After the class was over and the kids left home with their parents, we had a feedback circle. As I could guess, it had been challenging to some as none of them had previous experience of contact improvisation. What I did not guess was how positive the reactions were, both in the children and their professor. For the first time during these years of the training, the children took contact and played with each other and not only the student taking care of them. The professor was moved by this experience and convinced how important physical touch was as a tool to engage the autistic children and wanted to integrate contact improvisation to their weekly program. Some of the children had shown surprising capabilities, as others were not able or willing to join all the exercises. However the feedback I received was very positive, both from the students and the professor as the children themselves: I received plenty of smiles, invitations to play and I had lot of gratefulness for the experience.
During the festival we had one jam. As it was already the third day, people were tired, and as I did the warm-up I suggested people to find ways in and out of the dancing, being open to take rests and witness the jam. I also encouraged that everyone could dance with anyone they liked, and that they could join a dance that was calling for them to join.
This last comment from me was a small misstep. From my five-day experience in this rather humble culture, I now thought that it was a good idea to tell people they could join a dance and form a trio or quartet and also leave when they wanted to, so that they would not feel obliged to dance for an hour. However, it turned out that everyone danced a lot: whenever I started a dance with somebody, within a minute there was another dancer joining in! And, after the next minute, another one would come and join, and quite soon I would lose the person I started the dance with. In a way, this became a great jam with a lot of dancing, but I was sad I did not experience or see much of longer dances evolving in the space.
After the jam some students came to ask me: is it normal that a jam lasts for two and a half hours? They were exhausted, as everyone had danced already the whole day in the classes and also danced in the jam without really comprehending the possibility to rest and watch. I wished I had been more able to share this aspect of jam, but maybe this will come up the at next festival and the next teachers can talk about it again..!
All in all, I felt very content with the intensive teaching. Including all its challenges, it was one of the most rewarding experiences of teaching dance that I have had. On the last day, Vivianne was next to me watching the students dance, and she said to me: “Either these people lied when they told us they were beginners in contact, or then we just did a really good job!”
Being welcomed to share my approach to contact improvisation as a dance form and as a philosophy was one of the most rewarding experiences I have ever had. Sharing this experience with another teacher with similar viewpoints in dance gave me an opportunity to exchange, support and be supported in the process of teaching. Sharing this all with a new and growing community made us all learn amazingly lot, but most important for me, it revealed me a way of being together beyond verbal, physical or cultural differences, and showed me how strong art and dance as a tool can be to reach through any kind of boundaries existing among us human beings.
