fordevelopment Contact Improv(CI) is a form of partner dance highly related to fusion. If fusion is the idea of making no assumptions of a partner’s technique and building shared understandings up in each dance to connect with each individual partner. Then Contact Improv is the idea of resetting to 0 assumptions and playing in that space.
Contact Improv is a partner dance but drops many of the common elements of Partner dance:
- Music
- Music is considered a constraint and unnecessary though much contact is done with unconstrained music(chaotic sound, meditative sound, piano explorations, beatless music)
- Investment in the connection
- The connection could at any moment roll away.
- Frame
- Holding onto a partner removes their ability to express or drop connection
- Figures or Basic Steps
This is not an all encompassing list but seeing as how fundamental some of these principles are it sets the tone of the rest.
Fusion and contact thus start at the same place in theory but quickly move in a differing direction.