Workshop with Elise Malafosse (FR)
In this inaugural article “Solo dancing” (L’Attico Gallery, Roma, 7 july 1973), Steve Paxton says: “solo dancing doesn’t exist, the dancer dances with the floor, add another dancer and you have a quartet, each dancer with the other and each with the floor”. I would add to this: dance with the floor before the partner, dance with the space before the partner… because in CI we can easily be overwhelmed by the connection with the partner, to get stuck in a duet bubble! And if I want to touch and to feel you, I need to be touched and to feel myself (as a biological human being as you = MWE): bonding with the earth, grounding into the space, diving under the skin into the “skinesphere”, our home body, sensing the grounding and clarity of the bones, the strength and sensuality of the muscles, the vitality and empathy of the organs, the relational envelop of the skin-fascia, the flow of the liquids and collective bath, the atmosphere through the glands and nervous system… and from all of this dancing with you!
Today, I can observe a somatic subculture into the CI community: the somatic contact improvisers have a specific common language and for me what somatic brings is mainly about undoing CI and letting the form emerge from the content, from the sensing, to let birth and grow the motion from its origin. And in that sense, the original practices of CI could have been qualified as somatic practices: the small dance (release and sensing the micro, pre-movement) and falling/collision (natural reflexes of the body organization).
I will adjust the proposition according to what is alive in time and space during the festival!
