Skilled performance in Contact Improvisation: the importance of interkinaesthetic sense of agency

Abstract

In exploring skilled performance in Contact Improvisation (CI), we utilize an enactive ethnographic methodology combined with an interdisciplinary approach to examine the question of how skill develops in CI. We suggest this involves the development of subtleties of awareness of intra- and interkinaesthetic attunement, and a capacity for interkinaesthetic negative capability—an embodied interpersonal ‘not knowing yet’—including an ease with being off balance and waiting for the next shift or movement to arise, literally a ‘playing with’ balance, falling, nearly falling, momentum and gravity. We draw on insights from an interdisciplinary approach, including from a developmental perspective concerning the experience of dyadic interpersonal embodied skill development in both infancy and CI. Building on Ravn and Høffding’s (2021) definition of expertise in improvisation as an “oscillatory process of assuming and relinquishing agency” we propose that a key aspect of expertise in CI involves oscillation between levels and processes of interkinaesthetic sense of agency. These interdisciplinary insights also elucidate limitations within current conceptualisations of sense of agency, including the relationship between sense of agency and sense of control.

Cognitive Ecologies of Presence(S) in Three Different Dance Forms

“…This special CI event was danced simultaneously and streamed live across all the GUS jams that took place in 55 countries around the globe. privileging the sense of touch over vision (Bull 1997), challenging habits of movement (Pini, McIlwain, and Sutton 2016), kinaesthetic interdependency and multiperspectivity (Behnke 2003), and the cultivation of an interkinaesthetic sense of agency (Deans and Pini 2022). During CI jams, the 'stage', the space of the performance, is the entire space occupied by all attendees of the jam.…”

“…To provide a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of stage presence in its complexity, I extend the investigation to other performative traditions and consider its experiential situatedness in a specific environment and cultural context. Through a cognitive ecological and ethnographic approach, in this paper I present an investigation of variations of presence (Noë 2012) in three different dance practices and choreographic contexts: I briefly address the case of the Ballet National de Marseille during the transmission of presence and kinaesthetic knowledge in the staging of Emio Greco's piece Passione (Pini and Sutton 2021), Contact Improvisation (Deans and Pini 2022) in the case of independent groups of contacters in Italy (Bologna, Ferrara, and Arezzo) and Australia (Sydney, NSW), and Body Weather, a radical movement ideology developed by Japanese choreographer Min Tanaka in the context of the company Tess de Quincey and Co. in Sydney and Bellambi, Australia (Pini 2022;Pini and Deans 2021).…”

Flexibility Training Improves Elegance in Ice Ballet

“…The practice time is generally about 20 minutes. 13 Although stretching exercises for relaxation can also promote the development of flexibility, long-term muscle work will cause fatigue. Decreased elasticity, stretchability, and excitability result in imperfect muscle contraction and relaxation.…”