Resistance and Support: Contact Improvisation @ 50

Resistance and Support: Contact Improvisation @ 50 is a ground-breaking anthology that collects twenty original writings that elucidate critically important somatic and political perspectives on Contact Improvisation (CI). This form of partner dancing that was started in the United States in 1972, has spread into a vibrant global community in the twenty-first century. Resistance and Support is edited and includes an introduction by veteran CI practitioner and dance studies scholar Ann Cooper Albright.

For much of its existence in the twentieth century, Contact Improvisation prided itself on its democratic and egalitarian roots. Jams are open to newcomers, women learned to lift men, and dancing roles were not conventionally gendered in the traditional sense of partnered dancing such as tango or ballroom. These conventions meant that questions of social power were often ignored within the jams and festivals where Contact Improvisation thrives. This thoughtful collection engages issues of inclusion and access through insightful essays written by people whose life experiences are shaped by this extraordinary form of kinaesthetic communication.

Chapters trace the stories of CI in China and Taiwan, India, Mexico, Brazil, as well as those in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Some discuss the somatic training that provides a movement basis for the improvisational exchanges between dancers. Others foreground the feminist and queer perspectives on the evolving twenty-first century practice of the form. Several elaborate on the healing, spiritual, or therapeutic aspects of CI, while others explore the mixed ability approaches to the form popularized by Alito Alessi’s Dance Ability pedagogy. Like Critical Mass: CI @ 50, the international conference and festival honoring CI’s 50th anniversary from which these writings emerged, these essays both celebrate the expansive possibilities and critique some of the exclusionary conventions of this ever-evolving form of communal dance.

A veteran practitioner of Contact Improvisation, Ann Cooper Albright is Professor of Dance at Oberlin College. Combining her interests in dancing and cultural theory, Albright teaches a variety of courses that seek to engage students in both practices and theories of the body. She is the author of Simone Forti: Improvising a Life (2024), as well as How to Land: Finding ground in an Unstable World which offers ways of thinking about and dealing with the uncertainty of our contemporary lives. She has also authored the following: Engaging Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality; Modern Gestures: Abraham Walkowitz Draws Isadora Duncan Dancing; Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loïe Fuller; and Choreographing Difference: the Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance. She facilitated Critical Mass: CI @ 50 which brought 300 dancers from across the world to learn, talk, and dance together in celebration of the 50th anniversary of this extraordinary form. The book Encounters with Contact Improvisation is the product of one of her adventures in writing and dancing and dancing and writing with others. Her work has been supported by the NEA, NEH, ACLS, The Guggenheim Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council.