Making contact

In 1972, a New York dance company led by choreographer Steve Paxton created a dance form that became known as contact improvisation. It is a kind of dancing that relies on sensed communication with other dancers, on balancing with partners and working with their momentum.

Contact improvisation engages the senses at each moment in an intensified awareness of where you and others are in space. Nancy Stark Smith, a member of the original company, has said, "It can turn people on to their own bodies."

Monday night at Parker Dance Studio, contact improvisation expert E.E. Balcos taught a class in the form to nine Southeast Missouri State University students and two community members. Balcos, an assistant professor at Southwest Missouri State University, is an artist-in-residence this week at Southeast.

During his residency, Balcos will choreograph a dance that will become part of the Site Works Dance Concert to be performed by Southeast dancers May 7 through 10. The concert will be performed on the Southeast campus, in Old Town Cape, at the site of the River Campus, at Scott City and in Malden, Mo.

'Floor surfing'

Balcos showed the dancers one exercise he described as a meandering walk. They walked in spirals going in no particular direction but taking care not to bump into each other, going faster and faster until the result became a whirl. He called it "playing in a negative space."

In another exercise called "floor surfing," the dancers languorously rolled across the floor with their eyes closed, not speaking when they met other bodies but acknowledging the encounter through touch.

"This is the scary part," Balcos told them.

Paul and Josephine Zmolek, both members of the dance faculty at Southeast, played percussion instruments while the dancers experimented with the movements.

The dancers learned to counterbalance partners and to "graze" the energy around their body, the area Balcos called "the kinesphere," to play off the partner without touching them.

Ultimately, as in yoga, the alacrity of expanded awareness is the point.

"Be very conscious of the communication with the bottoms of your feet," Balcos told the students. By the end of the class he had them paying attention to one of the most minuscule of movements, "the tiniest little dance of your head on top of your spine."

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182