Circle: Contact Improv as 'Crazy,' Labrador Personalities, Counterculture

If you look at folks doing contact improv from a slight distance, you might think they're all crazy, that a contact jam could be an insane asylum, {a little like in the film "The King of Hearts"}, or a very curious circus {or a troop of Bonobos?:}, or something that would happen at the Rainbow Gathering, or children in a family playing roly-poly bears.

Making Contact:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUNfM-n_Soo

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I think contact improv makes the people who do it very happy. It creates a space for our lab personalities {labrador retriever - coded-for genetically - as a breed, - like a species}, in a loose sense. Dance, exploration of freedom, good will, physical contact, the 'now,' and the benefits of movement and intimacy all merge and come together to shape something ongoingly new. {Is this a form of troopbonding? viz. John Money's "Concepts of Determinism" 1988}.


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And contact improv took form in the early 1970s (with Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith, et al., starting at Oberlin College), in the milieu of the 196os.


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And people keep doing contact improv because they like it {even though contact improv isn't that widespread, - due to 'culture'? - although dance in general has always engaged the body, and dancers, in the west, have seemed to me to be more open physically than many other people, over centuries ...}.


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{Someone brought pop-bubble wrap to a jam I recently went to :)}