page_title: Contact improvisation
section_title: Similar simultaneous explorations
hierarchical_section_title: Contact improvisation / Contact improvisation and contemporary dance / Similar simultaneous explorations
caption_attribution_description: Documenta 12 Kassel 2007. Documenta 12 Kassel 2007 inside Fridericianum Trisha Brown, Floor Of The Forest, 2007
context_page_description: Contact improvisation is a form of improvised dancing that has been developing internationally since 1972. It involves the exploration of one's body in relationship to others by using the fundamentals of sharing weight, touch, and movement awareness.
  American dancer and choreographer Steve Paxton originated contact improvisation, drawing from his past training in aikido, a martial art form, to explore and push boundaries with his colleagues and students to develop this new practice. Contact improvisation plays with the artistry of falling off balance, counterbalance, finding the shelves of the body, learning the mechanics of the body in order to handle someone else's weight or be lifted, breathing techniques, and can involve the art of getting to know your partner past the physical point through the physicality.
  Steve Paxton, along with other pioneers Nancy Stark Smith, Danny Lepkoff, Lisa Nelson, Karen Nelson, Nita Little, Andrew Harwood, and Ray Chung, thus participated in creating an "art-sport," oscillating between different emphases depending on the moments and personalities who practice it:
  experimental dance
  theatrical form
  educational tool
  social dancing
  awareness practice
context_section_description: The explorations envisaged in the first moments of contact improvisation are not specific to the collective led by Steve Paxton. Many other forms of dance had also experimented with weight, touch and improvisation and examples abound in the 1960s of dancers who practice something similar, but not as systematic as contact improvisation, including Trisha Brown, Grand Union, Daniel Nagrin's Workgroup, Anna Halprin 's San Francisco Dancers' Workshop, Julian Beck and Judith Malina's Living Theater or Carolee Schneeman's Meat Joy (1964).
  Simone Forti, for instance, developed Huddle in the 1960s.  It was a dance in which six to seven dancers were invited to form together an agglutinated mass of which one by one they detached themselves to gradually reintegrate it, thus testing the tactile, olfactory and weight sensations.
caption: Trisha Brown's Floor of the Forest (1964).
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