February 15–22, 2001

critic pick | dance

Contact Improvisation Festival

If you practice Contact Improv, you probably know that a host of people will descend on West Philly this weekend to participate in classes and performances at the 3rd Annual Philadelphia Contact Improvisation Festival. If you don’t, you might not even know what Contact Improv is. Well, it’s a dance form that’s notoriously hard to define. Maybe a historical perspective will do it justice.

Around 1962, a group of modern dancers in Greenwich Village began experimenting in a collective known as Judson Dance Theater. They explored movement that was not only outside the ballet tradition, but also outside the established norms of modern dance. One of the dancers, Steve Paxton, developed his ideas into Contact Improvisation, and went on to popularize it through a now-famous workshop at Oberlin College. The form he created involved physical contact between two or more people (there’s your Contact) and was unchoreographed (there’s your Improv). People doing Contact lifted up, rolled over, leaned on and fell down on one another, not knowing exactly where they would end up until they were there. Stodgy observers wondered if this approach to movement was dance at all; but others found the practice enormously liberating, and reveled in Contact’s nonhierarchical approach to partnering.

Now, 30 years later, Contact is still going strong, and has become a common compositional tool even for choreographers whose finished work is non-improvisational. Moreover, it’s become a social phenomenon: Contact jams are regular events in every sizable town, and draw many participants who otherwise have no connection to modern dance.

Contact usually exists more as a participatory form than a viewing spectacle. Like jazz, it is perhaps more fun to produce than consume. But the upcoming festival offers the public an opportunity to see some of Contact’s biggest names in action — Nancy Stark Smith, who has been involved in Contact since the beginning, and Ray Chung and Karen Nelson, a duo that’s been collaborating with Contact Improv gurus for more than 20 years.

—Lucien Crowder

Sat., Feb. 17, 8 p.m., $15, Community Education Center, 3500 Lancaster Ave., 215-887-1216.