Humorous, touching, surprising contact

An Informal Evening of Contact Improvisations
Contact Festival Kuala Lumpur
Saturday 30 July 2011
The Annexe Central Market

The best dance performances often have the smallest audience.

Granted, the idea of the informal showing last Saturday at the Annexe Central Market, by the participants of Contact Festival Kuala Lumpur, did not initially seem promising. How much can you expect from a bunch of people who had met only a few days previously, especially when they had spent their whole time together practising contact improvisation, a form of dance usually more social than performative?

And yet the informal showing was nuanced, varied, both humorous and touching by turns, and possessed of an effective dramatic arc, even more remarkable considering the sequence of its sections had only been worked out that afternoon, in the car between Rimbun Dahan and the Annexe!

Contact improvisation, to get the necessary explanation out of the way, is a movement technique developed in the 1970s in the USA. It usually involves a pair of people improvising with each other, exploring the sharing of weight through leaning, lifting, supporting and rolling. Its techniques – how to give your partner your weight using different parts of your body, for example, or how to be alert to your partner’s cues — are taught in classes, but its main activity is informal jams, in which anyone at any time can go into the centre and interact with anyone else.

In Malaysia, contact is mostly used by choreographers during rehearsal, to create movement material for group sections. Contact Festival Kuala Lumpur was an attempt, and a successful one at that, by David Lim of Contact Improv KL, to generate local interest in contact improvisation as its own practice and to energise a regional contact improv network. The six-day event, held at Rimbun Dahan, involved over 20 participants and 5 international teachers. The informal showing was only one of the festival’s many components, most involving classes and jams, and, for many of its participants, hardly the most memorable.

And yet for the lucky few in the audience, it was a memorable experience indeed. The overall structure of the informal showing, as well as the score for its opening and closing sections, can be attributed to Finnish dancer Ulla Makinen. Ulla provided the score (the rough framework for improvisation) for the first big group section, in which all the participants entered and walked around the space, warming it up as they warmed themselves up.

After a few surprisingly synchronised group hops, the group settled down into a shifting mass of pairs in contact, scattered throughout with people standing immobile, just watching, and others improvising by themselves. This range of positions, from people standing upright and still next to the walls, to the clumped masses of pairs in contact, created an interesting visual effect. The eye’s focus could widen and contract, narrowing in upon two people concentrating upon the meeting of their elbows, or opening out to encompass the mountain-and-valleys shape of the entire group. The combination of stillness and movement was also very effective. The eye tires of constant movement; it requires stillness to shape the space just as much as movement.

In the next section, a solemn-faced Christopher Liew carefully placed his iPad and speakers in the centre of the stage. A group of dancers then drew on the iPad with different body parts to change the sound of the accompanying music.

Humour always seems to emerge more easily from the split-second decision-making of improvisation, rather than from carefully premeditated choreography. If humour is the ability to differentiate what is expected and appropriate — in this case, the score, which was to use different body parts to touch the iPad and change the music — from what is surprising or inappropriate — for example, one dancer manipulating another dancer’s toes on the iPad to change the music — then our collective sensitivity to inappropriateness was turned up high.

Ulla and Australian instructor Joey Lehrer then presented an improvised duet, using as their set a large white plywood screen they found in the room at the Annexe. This improvised set was an inspiration — it lent a very touching human scenario to their performance. Two people are separated by a wall. They are unnable to communicate. They seem lonely and perplexed, vulnerable and blind. When they finally meet, their capacity to communicate is phenomenal, culminating in acrobatic lifting and rolling.

This duet was like a paean to contact improvisation itself, to the importance of being face to face, skin to skin. It is underlined by Joey and Ulla’s evident joy in the playful productivity of their contact. They showed a contact style I had not seen before, a bouncy repetitive sharing of weight when things did not go exactly as planned, as if boosting each other into place, a feeling of common goal and trying again.

Next, Japanese instructors Shoko Kashima and Chico Katsube showed a more structured and more musical duet. Shoko started with large rhythmic movements to the beat of the music, her long limbs tossed out into space, while Chico began with movements in slow-motion, all curled into herself. Gradually the two movement styles, one extroverted and one introverted, became more and more like each other, before drawing apart once more, only for the dancers to end precisely with the last beat of the music, back to back, one with arms raised, the other with arms dropped. Same same but different.

The next group section was inspired by Singaporean participant Chan Sze-Wei’s memories of her grandmother’s horror at the filthiness of other people’s bodies. Why would you want to get near these people, let alone touch them? The group began by scrubbing repetitively at their hands, Lady Macbeth-like, before moving on to other parts of their bodies. Pretty soon they started on each other’s bodies, and the unorthodox places they found to scratch each other became hilarious. At one point there was a conga-line of head-scratching. At another point one of the dancers started rubbing the wall as if it too was alive, and might respond like a dog having its belly rubbed, with eyes scrunched up and back leg convulsively kicking.

Taiwanese instructor Ming-Shen Ku, described by one of the participants as a ‘force of nature’, then performed a solo. It started with her standing mid-stage, clad in nothing but nude underwear. She puffed out her belly, and jiggled the fat under her arms and around her thighs. This shock tactic — this is my body, take it or leave it — was rather undermined by the fact that her body was the usual (or rather the unusual) dancer’s body, all long and lean and toned. There was not much fat to jiggle. She then suited up in protective gear — braces for her knees, shoulder and abdomen — before putting on more clothes, and starting to dance.

I found myself unable to concentrate on the rest of her solo, it seemed so detached from its beginning. Were we supposed to be imagining the movements of her unseen body, underneath her clothes and armour? The addition of clothing made it seem like something had been taken away rather than added — the voyeuristic desire, I suppose to see that extraordinary body, its skin and sinews, that had been briefly displayed and then concealed.

The entire group gathered again for the final section. Its beautiful score involved the group lined up on one side wall, then walking in a line together to the other side wall, turning, pausing, and repeating. In the beginning, when the entire group was walking, the sense of the group breathing together and stepping out together, linked by sixth sense and peripheral vision, was pungent. As the score developed, each pass of the line left people in its wake, who met each other in contact or moved alone in the space, before being sucked back into line by the next pass. The dominant form of the line slowly dissolved — at one point it was hard to see if the line still existed at all, so many people had left it to improvise in the centre — and then slowly reassembled.

Yet again, the touches of humour were most evident: festival participant Maru shuffles a seated girl towards the wall and into the line. Later Maru stands in the centre, ostentatiously fixing his hair; someone else pushes him back into line. Then, for a while, there was just the line again, moving back and forth like a wave on a beach, before the dancers stopped all together on a silent cue.

I wish I had known what a fascinating show it was going to be — I would have forced more people to come watch it with me. But that, I suppose, is the two-edged sword of improvisation: you never know what to expect. I think the performers themselves were as surprised and delighted as anyone in the audience by what they were showing us.

Images of Contact Festival Kuala Lumpur sessions at Rimbun Dahan by Yuen Kin-leung Maru. Images of the performance by Chen Jiexiao. Many thanks to the photographers.

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