ATTENDING TO TEACHING

In my decade of learning and practicing Contact Improvisation, I’ve become a little obsessed with developing a teaching method that attempts to more clearly and tangibly communicate the elusive principles of CI. 

This piece explores what is currently meaningful to me in my teaching practice. My hope is that it gives teachers permission and courage to speak about their own practice, and gives students an insight into a teacher's process. 

It's important to me that the people I teach really get it in their bodies, and that they walk away with more clarity and less confusion about CI. 

I try to hold three things in my attention while I'm teaching: the room, myself and the material. 

How I Hold the Room

This is my practice of creating an environment that supports enquiry. By this, I mean holding a space in which people have the best chance at learning something new. 

A friend once said to me that learning is dying; it's letting information in and letting it reorganise your understanding. That means allowing things to die off, remain, and be re-understood. So it's safe to say learning is a difficult process. It gets interrupted by self-doubt, the feeling that we should already know, or the belief that we already do.

Part of my teaching is to lead in a way that dials down these tendencies so learning can be accessed more easily. To do this, I have needed to develop my ability to bring a relaxed and engaged attention to the room.

This quality of attention allows those who arrive with an overactive mind or body to settle, and those whose attention has become diffuse to become more awake and available to the practice. The aim is not to bring everyone into the same state, but to support a quality of attention where learning can occur.

Creating this kind of attention starts before the class: saying hello, bringing people into the community and the space, introducing newcomers to regulars, and asking them how their day was.

Inside the class – just like in the dance – I am always trying to meet the room, sensing how people are receiving the material, and adjusting accordingly. This happens through the choices I make in how I offer the material, beginning with the accessibility of my language, and the amount of information I offer. CI can often become an immaterial, conceptual, intellectual exercise, and my goal with language choice is to compassionately return us to the body, helping people stay in a state of physical enquiry. We all know the feeling when a teacher gives way too much information too quickly, it can leave you overwhelmed or drifting off cause you have given up on understanding, or too little where you like what are we actually doing? Both leave students disengaged.  

Meeting the room is also about the intentional use of participation, how I pace the class, and using demonstrations that guide people towards what to focus on rather than impressing them with mad skills.

Lastly, I have discovered that different material requires different kinds of attention, some more taxing than others. Some material asks people to attend to one very specific aspect of their experience for an extended period, and that level of concentration has a limit. I am learning when to sense the room's capacity for deeper attention and when to let the room breathe with something less demanding.

All of this is in service of helping people spend more time in a learning state.

How I Hold Myself

As a teacher, I’m holding a container for people to learn in. An important part of my teaching practice is minimising my self-commentary and preparing myself to show up as a holder of this container.

Of course, I bring myself to the class – I love me a joke – but I don't want the class to become organised around my internal process, emotional state, or needs. I return to the room and to attending to others’ learning, while also attending to what is happening inside of me.

I do share my own explorations and questions about CI, because enquiry and openness to not knowing are central to the form itself.

I love when someone asks a question and I get to say, “I don’t know,” “I’m not sure,” or “I’m a little lost, let me feel that out.”

A note on voice: It took me a while to let my voice land in the room. I went through a phase of using a more “facilitator” voice, trying to find the right way to hold the space. Over time, I have found my way back to my own voice.

I think there can sometimes be a tendency in CI towards a softer, more abstract, or overly “feely” way of communicating. For me, it’s important that the practice stays anchored in the physicality of the dance. I want to bring the clarity, precision, and presence of a dance teacher while still holding the sense of openness, and sensitivity that’s central to CI.

How I Hold the Material

As a beginner teacher, I wrote down lead-ins, explorations, exercises, and the order in which experienced teachers presented their material.

I was enamoured by it all.

“Wow, that was such a great exploration.”

“Holy hell, he just led a whole room into great dancing in the first twenty minutes without teaching any ‘technique’, how?”

“I never would have thought to place people’s attention on that part of the exercise.”

I was swimming in great teaching, material, and insight.

Then it came time for me to teach, and I felt lost at sea.

Where do I start?

I had all of this material and ways of teaching it, but what I realise now is that I had not yet begun my own thinking about the form.

I needed to enquire into my experience of Contact Improvisation and begin developing material through my own body and in my own words.

I had to learn CI all over again, but this time from the inside out.

Doing this has given my classes much more clarity. I have become more intentional in the material I choose and the way I teach it; each exercise, exploration, lead-in, and the order in which they are offered have become more refined, allowing me to articulate the form more clearly.

As I teach and continue my own learning of CI, I am constantly discovering what feels important within the form and what material can best express that understanding so others can access it.

In this way, the material is never fixed. It continues to evolve alongside my understanding of the practice 

These three areas – the room, myself and the material – are all in service of bringing more clarity to the physicality of CI.