Desenho: Dayse Cardoso
To be fully present is to open possibilities of
breaking through habits; the ones which benefit us in our daily (and dancing!) cognitive
lives and behavior towards adaptation-survival in the environment, as the same
the ones which prevent us of exploring new realms of perception, behavior and experience.
And like those that the training and practice of CI offers to our body,
movement and perception. The paradox would be: we train to have habits to
better dis-habituate; we aim to take ride in a flux of movement and
communication as soft and reliable, as alert and able to surprise ourselves. In
this class, the proposition is to dance mindfully in order to safely and adventurously
destabilize the habits in our dancing, perception and subjective lives.
This class is a direct application out of a research
in mind, movement and Contact Improvisation I have been developing in the
context of a dance and academic career. My
interest has been to look at Contact Improvisation under the perspective of
studies of cognition in order to point out my teacher and dancer practice to an
exploration of the subjective and imaginary landscape of the one who dances.
In such a context, I assume Contact Improvisation as a
“play of dance” related to the vertigo of falling and its metaphors and
cognitive inferences. In this context, I propose that dancing could be as safe
as we could be over a “world without ground” either in our technical abilities
in movement-dance or in our usual ways of percept and have an experience of
that, the world and ourselves.
In this class the invitation is to dissect exercises
and propose a CI training focused on how body itself and Contact Improvisation
dancing benefits from habits (the survival instincts and the reflexes action,
for example), and at the same time, keeps the idearium of freedom, discovery and surprise.
And, considering that the biggest of our habits is the
“mind” that gives the sense of being who we are, we dance to adventure beyond
such a limited experience of ourselves.