Iris & Columbine: Contact Improv as Complement to Modernity, Harbin, Counterculture

I think contact improv dance jams are remarkable complements to modernity. (Modernity, for anthropologist James Clifford in "The Predicament of Culture" {Harvard 1988: 3-4}, is characterized by rootlessness, mobility, alienation, scattered traditions, craziness, and disorder, and entails historical uncertainty and undermines concepts of cultural ‘essence.’ See also scottmacleod.com/2003Feb03PolyphonyClifford.htm).

The physical touch, movement, interaction, community and friendships that develop can balance these 'modernity' processes which may significantly influence our daily lives, in a variety of ways.


Here are some great contact videos:

Making Contact: Atlanta Contact Improv Jam 2006
www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUNfM-n_Soo

Contact Improvisation in performance
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7p2Tof2y1yQ

Creative Contact:

Pilobolus: A performance merging dance and biology
www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOZ6KnVPvIU

(also posted here: scottmacleod.com/contact.htm)



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... just returned from Harbin, which is also a wonderful complement to modernity...


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Both contact improv and Harbin emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, out of counterculture, in so many ways.

I see counterculture and the freedom-seeking movements of those years, as they take form in the present, also as responses to modernity.