My introduction to Contact Improvisation, or something like it, came as part of my theater training, at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts in the early 80s. My movement teacher paired us up, and led through an exercise where moved with our partner, keeping a point of physical contact at all times. Shoulder-to-shoulder became shoulder-to-elbow, became elbow-to-waist…you get the idea. That class introduced me to a new kind awareness of my own body.
Later, say, fifteen years or so, I would study Contact Improvisation, a dance form based loosely on this point of contact practice. At least for beginners—experienced contact dancers break and remake contact all the time. The contact becomes something that doesn’t require physical touch. Experienced contact dancers moving together with high energy resemble two birds in flight, kittens pouncing, or snails making love. Here’s what it often looks like: A tall, muscled guy lifts a sinewy girl onto his shoulder and she flies, floats up, then rolls down his body. Her feet touch the floor, she lifts his weight on her back for a moment, he comes down onto his hands, lowers his head, then somersaults away, and leaps back, over her into a cartwheel. She leaps, wrapping herself around his waist, then slides down one of his legs.
Yes, contact can get very intimate.
I started going to dance jams here in the Bay Area in 1992. I still see people there I’ve danced with for over a decade. Witnessed at many levels of exhaustion. Watched their bodies and dance styles evolve over time. I may know their first names. I may know the smell of their sweat, and how the weight of them feels on top of me or underneath me, how stiff, how pliable they may become on a wooden floor with music pounding. But for many of these folks, I still don’t know the neighborhood they go home to, who if anyone they lie down with at night, what kind of life they wake up to. Their last names.
A straight girl I once sort of almost loved, taught a weekend class and I became hooked. On Contact, that is. I would go to dance jams and get into contact grooves with other dancers, and sometimes with myself and the floor, or a mirror. I loved watching her demonstrate the moves we paeans aped like cadets on their first day out. Twisting, turning, falling, rolling, through the liquid space she opened for us. A point of history: Straightgirl’s and my first point of contact was at a party where my boy drag fooled everyone, even friends. And captivated her. Perhaps that’s why she leaned a little to queer side of things for a while. The gender you are when you meet someone, matters. In trying to describe said girl, a mutual friend said neither butch nor femme even comes close: She’s feral.
Another class I took sometime in the last decade or so was called Bone Sex. Taught by partners Stephanie Maher and Jess Curtis, it was all about how our bodies contact each other. I learned three levels: skin, muscle and bone. Skin contact moves over the surface, engages our nerves. It may tickle. Muscle goes a bit deeper, to where we feel a certain level of pressure or resistance. We may allow, or push back. Bone, of course, involves the skeleton.
Through years of Contact, I learned that with my bones, or rather, skeletal structure, I, and even people much smaller than me, can carry people much larger than we could by the use of our muscles alone. I have hung a 200-+ # man by his hips, off my feet, while lying on my back, and smiling all the while. I can hoist someone of a similar size up on one hip with little effort, or back my body up against their front, grab their hands, bend over and let them drape face-down over the back of my body. I love these moments, feeling myself find the precise position in which my body can exceed what it appears to be capable of.
I used the Bone Sex insights in my Contact practice. One night, I did Contact with a very muscular dancer who, through my allowing him to lead, took me beyond my own Contact repertoire of moves. My body somehow learned something through our physical conversation. During certain moments of the dance I remember closing my eyes and surrendering to what was happening, not certain whether I was upside down, or how my body would wind up. He had me completely under control, and through trust and release of control, I ensured my safety, and had a great ride besides.
After we danced, I talked to him, verbally, using my voice this time, about how I found myself in Contact with walls and chairs, and noticing points, types and levels of contact with people I hugged, snuggled or had sex with.
“Ah,” he said.
“You’re in that stage.”
The stage in which Contact is everything and everything is Contact. Contact became the metaphor for whatever my body was doing. I started to notice my lovers’ range of physical and energetic vocabulary: the breadth and depth of conversations our bodies could have. Over time, without words, I began to be able to speak—and understand—volumes, with my body.
A baby in the womb has 100% contact with her mother. As she grows, she’s squeezed tighter and tighter. The other day, when I held Cainan, I felt how good it felt to him to be close to me, how he gravitated toward my arms. As I often do, I whispered to him,
“It’s good, it’s good to be close to Mama.” Then I took it further.
“When you were inside me, I held you soooo close, all wrapped up in my belly! Then you came out, and we held you close to our bodies. Close, close, close!” He listens and continues to hug me.
No wonder we love the nuances of points of contact—the primacy, and primalness of touch stay in our bodies throughout our lives. Contact says, it’s good…life is good. Everything is perfect right now.
A few Sundays ago, years after my first exposure to Contact, and months since I’d been dancing regularly, I got out on the floor and felt my stiffness, my resistance to becoming supple. What would it take?
It had been a while since I’d danced. I mean, really danced. Dropped into that place inside myself where the dance dances me, and I lose self-consciousness to that Thing that takes hold and moves my limbs in ways I never could have predicted.
I had in mind to go to Barefoot Boogie after Kahtya’s birthday dinner party. Yes, she’s only two but her parents, our friends Christopher and Natasha, threw a dinner party for her. The four toddlers, all around two-ish, sat peacefully at a toddler table while I mused quietly on the implications of segregation but meanwhile enjoyed the baby-free dinner. Alex arrived late, detained on the site of his recent house project. When he sat down next to me I noticed the familiar splotchiness on his shirt.
“You’ve got baby shoulder,” I told him.
We spent the evening watching the babes negotiate a tiny motorcycle about 4 mousepower. After pushing the “MOHH-da-cycle” around with his feet, Cainan squeezed the handle making it dart forward on its own juice. He started screaming and trying to get off, all the while continuing to squeeze the handle. I told him to let go, but he didn’t get it—just kept giving more gas and screaming while it moseyed away from little him. I finally was able to pry his mini-fingers off the handle after which he tumbled into my arms and scampered into his “I scared” position, head on my shoulder, arms around my neck, feet curled up in my lap.
I feel such a deep sense of peace when he retreats to my body as a source of safety and support. Those moments renew, and “update” my field of consciousness and presence in the world. I understand why I am here in a way I never have. Someone needs me; someone truly needs me. I am his point of contact with the rest of the world. His springboard. From here he can go anywhere, do anything, and know he always has my arms, my lap to crawl back into. Until he’s too cool.
- - - - -
Gabrielle and I sat at the edge of the stage, having just arrived at the dance jam. Euni bounded toward us from the dance floor. When she leapt up to join us, her long hair covered her breasts, and her clingy bodysuit blended into her caramel-colored skin.
“I thought you were naked,” I said. “Doesn’t she look naked?” I asked Gabrielle
Euni swept her hair away, revealing the bodysuit, and her firm, generous breasts.
“Oh,” I said, getting my bearings.
I honestly can’t remember what led up to this, but somehow the conversation, and all our attention, was centered around Euni’s breasts. I asked if I could touch them. She said yes, and wiggled her chest toward me. I tentatively brushed my hand across her breasts, a bit off center. When she let out a little squirmy moan, giggled and stuck her breasts toward me again, I got a little bolder, and spent a moment massaging them in a way I knew I would enjoy.
“Mmmm!” she confirmed.
“Wow,” I said.
Both to break what could have been quite an intense response on my part, and also because it was true, I said,
“This is the first time in a long time I’ve touched a woman’s breasts without a lot of complicated feelings involved.”
“Ahh,” said Gabrielle.
“Hey, free breasts!” I said.
“Yeah, get ‘em while they’re hot,” Euni added.
We talked more about breasts, how mine hadn’t changed too much, just gotten a little bit floppier after breastfeeding. Euni’s, we noted were firm and dense. I managed to liberate mine from my bra to share with the little group. I remembered with Gabrielle a night when a friend of ours from the “sex community” (that group of Bay Area folk who write about, engage publicly or filmicly in, or produce any kind of media explicitly or implicitly involving, SEX), Juliet Anderson, famous for turning out Nina Hartley into the porn, came in and greeted us with,
“I just turned sixty, and LOOK!”
She pulled up her shirt, revealing a pair of round, firm, perky breasts. Remarkable at any age, I thought.
And here we were again, Gabrielle and I, getting breasty.
Dance jams foments moments like that—women taking off their shirts and dancing topless, or forming a line or circle and gyrating our hips, sometimes chanting, or some boogie-esque combination of moaning and growling to the music. Fending off the occasional clueless man who fancies he belongs. Or welcoming him and going with the flow.
So many opportunities to choose points of contact.
Once stretched and ready on the dance floor, I made eye contact with a tall, dark, young, handsome man, the kind who lately have been catching my eye. We danced toward one another, and I met him with my back. Back to back, we moved, until we were side to side. I twirled around and went upside down, almost liberating my breast from my bra and tank top. Vertical again, we passed each other in space a few times.
When things really get going in Contact, the point of contact sort of forms its own trajectory, and we, the dancers, follow.
On a subsequent visit to Boogie, I joined Gabrielle, Pat and Shannon, who were all—surprise, surprise—showing their cleavage to one another. Shannon was just about to give us a peek at her substantial breasts, and I decided I didn’t feel a special pull to join that little club at that moment, until Pat piped up,
“Shannon’s planning to become a lesbian.”
“Really?” I whirled around, apparently a little too enthusiastically, because the whole group cracked up laughing.
“Are you attracted to women?” I asked
“Because that helps if you want to be a lesbian.
“Oh yeah,” she said,
“I’ve always been attracted to women.”
Later, Shannon and I danced, sharing points of contact, and letting our breasts say hello, squishing them into a four-leaf clover joining our chests, playing strippers, Two Girl Show, and lazy cats who want only to rub.
Shannon’s tall, dark and beautiful, and I pondered the paradox of finding feminine women beautiful and sexy, while butch women tend to be the ones who make my knees weak, who contact my innermost yearnings and just pull, pull, pull me toward them until I tumble helpless into a prone puddle of pleading permission.
For any two people, I’ve always maintained, there’s an optimal level of closeness, or perhaps, ideal Point of Contact for any given moment. It’s that level and proximity of connection that best meets everyone’s needs.
Sometimes, for me, that connection feels like it wants to be physical rather than mental, or verbal. Talk only goes so far. A good snuggle helps me feel safe and connected. I had a roommate once upon a time with whom I could never really get off the ground verbally. Our conversations left me feeling rather disconnected from her. Yet I felt very close to her when we would curl up and watch a video together. Nothing needed to be said. The contact was the point.
I’ve been thinking about those people in my life who for a brief or extended period, including myself, have requested no contact with someone else. How privacy gets privileged above all other needs and requests. If I say I don’t want contact with you, friends, colleagues, and the legal system will bend over backwards to defend my right to stay away from you. Yet no law, no custom, and as far as I’ve seen, no practice exists to address the needs of the left alone. What about desires for closure, for validation, for answers, for connection, for…contact? Why does privacy command more energy, defense and support than connection?
In this culture, people in elevators or on beaches move as far away from each other as possible. I’ve heard in Mediterranean countries, a lone sun-worshipper will soon get flanked by others so they don’t have to sun alone. Here, more money buys more privacy, until you have your own island, walled-off mansions or locked-up penthouse suite. Privacy, isolation and barriers are what we aspire to in lieu of real connection, with all its skin, bone and muscle.
The tragic irony of no contact is that it can sit in the body like a very palpable point of contact: a spiny, prickly bur reminding you of the soft spot where skin, muscle and bone wants warmth, closeness, pressure, and the message of I’m Here. Everything’s perfect, just as it is, right now.
