12/8/2023 0 Comments Jazz dance moves names![]() I was skeptical, but my colleague, an esteemed member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority’s Zeta Pi Omega Chapter, was insistent and determined: the debutantes, their fathers, and their male escorts were to dance the waltz. And moreover, I thought, “why the waltz?” Of all the social dances, I didn’t see how the waltz would work for these young African-American women it seemed too old, too stilted, and too European for this millennial generation. Cotillions drew criticism and scorn from feminists decades ago who claimed that they were sexist and highly exclusive. I thought these occasions, where debutantes are presented to the public by their family to be decorated and accepted by society, were strictly for the White upper class, particularly in the South. When one of my colleagues asked me to teach the waltz to a handful of debutantes for their cotillion, I was a bit surprised. It describes the diversity of experiences and approaches to dance contact improvisation, a practice which explicitly welcomes a wide range of possibilities. Overall, the research shows how the summer festivals are a meeting point in which the dance is transmitted body-to-body, renewing the interest and enjoyment of the practitioners. ![]() The practitioners have been through personal exploration in unfamiliar settings, they have found in contact improvisation a space to explore their creativity and feel challenged by the unknown. As results, it is possible to identify how relationships and communication through touch are the requirements of a dance that accepts a wide range of decision making. From the first-person experience in the fieldwork, I focused on the habits and affinities of the interviewees, while realizations from jams were analysed based on the relationships from the Labanotation structural system. It consisted in active participation as a dancer, observation, video recording of jams and biographic inspired interviews with practitioners who I encountered in such events. This inquiry is guided by the following question: in the transnational and egalitarian context of contact improvisation summer festivals, how do practitioners with different movement backgrounds manifest the continuity of their parallel movement practices in the pre-reflective decisions that they take during improvisation? The research was designed as a multi-sited ethnography in two summer festivals. It approaches contact improvisation spontaneity and relation to gravity as pre-reflective decisions, and proposes the importance of the natural bodily attitude through the lived experience of alternative movement practices. The aim consists in revisiting contact improvisation as a dance form which has been previously framed in a nationalist context, in order to address on its current practice in a transnational network. ![]() ![]() In this case, the study focuses on European summer intensive festivals. The following research addresses contact improvisation as a low regulated dance which allows diverse practitioners to take part in different modalities. ![]()
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