Getting the Contact culture moving...

One thought that keeps humming in my head (not necessarily related to the choral dance piece in December) is about the development of Contact improv in HK. Basically I went to a body-voice workshop a couple of weeks ago and heard a lot of interest in Contact; but the thing is in HK there is not really enough leadership or expertise to really keep it humming. There's a group that meets twice every month (which I went to on Sunday), but the group is really inexperienced and the form cannot grow just by jams at their level.


So I think one of the things I am interested in doing is to devote some time get Contact moving in HK; we basically need a critical mass of people with enough expertise and interest to keep it going; which means that I will have to get enough expertise to teach it and train this group.

Part of this journey will be to find a improv movement form that makes sense for HK; through the movement awareness classes I teach / jams I have been to here I suspect that there is a great potential for HK to develop its own contact vocabulary/flavour; one that comes from tai chi's "pushing hands"... (it is a sort of combat-testing form)...

This may mean going to the States (good excuse to visit my friends on the West coast) and getting back in touch with a community of good Contact dancers; take some intensives and then figure out a way to teach Contact... I know how to play/jam but I need to figure out how to teach it. The last time I took a Contact class was, um, way back in Swarthmore with Leah Stein

Something also culturally specific here is the hesitancy the average person has in physical contact. We're not a very touchy culture, particularly towards the opposite sex. Most of our dance forms are visual more than kinaesthetic (think fan dance, ribbon dance, etc). Put in another way, this hesitancy can be articulated as a sacredness of touch- that the moment of first touch is much more significant. So I would like to explore a form that respects the importance of contact... and at the same time is able to access the universal exhilaration of falling and tumbling in movement.


> regular jams in HK are organised by Kongtact Square