Please enjoy browsing the list I've compiled of books on Contact Improvisation and related subjects. By purchasing books in this booklist through the Amazon links, a percentage of the sale goes to supporting this site. For other products including music, kneepads, dance pants, and T-shirts go to the CI Store
Sharing the Dance - Contact Improvisation and American CultureCynthia Novak
In Sharing the Dance, Cynthia Novack considers the development
of contact improvisation within its web of historical, social, and
cultural contexts. This book examines the ways contact improvisers
(and their surrounding communities) encode sexuality, spontaneity, and
gender roles, as well as concepts of the self and society in their
dancing. While focusing on the changing practice of contact
improvisation through two decades of social transformation, Novack’s
work incorporates the history of rock dancing and disco, the modern and
experimental dance movements of Merce Cunningham, Anna Halprin, and
Judson Church, among others, and a variety of other physical
activities, such as martial arts, aerobics, and wrestling.
Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation ReaderCollaboratively compiled and ably co-edited by Ann Cooper Albright and
David Gere, Taken By Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader collects
together under one cover some twenty-one essays by well-known dancers,
scholars, and historians. Discussing improvisation in dance within
contexts and traditions ranging from Yoruban masked dance to Indian
Bharatanatyam, flamenco, and more, Taken By Surprise offers an informed
and insightful exploration into the art of impromptu dance, as well as
the changing emotions expressed within its many forms.
Contact Improvisation: Moving, Dancing, InteractionThomas Kaltenbrunner
Contact Improvisation: An Introduction to a Vitalizing Dance FormIn this book the author draws upon her own experience and research to
explain the art of contact improvisation, in which dance partners
propel movement by physical contact. They roll, fall, spiral, leap, and
slip along the contours and momentum of moving bodies. The text begins
with a history, then describes the elements that define this form of
dance. Subsequent chapters explore how contact improvisation relates to
self and identity; how class, race, gender, culture and physiology
influence dance; how dance promotes connection in a culture of
isolation; and how it relates to the concept of community. The final
chapter is a collection of exercises explained in the words of teachers
from across the United States and abroad. Appendix A describes how to
set up and maintain a weekly jam; Appendix B details recommended
reading, videos and Web sites.
Contact Improvisation & Body-Mind Centering; A Manual for Teaching & Learning Movement
Author: Annie Brook
In this manual for both teaching and learning contact movement skills,
readers learn to find creative approaches to awakening the body.
Playful exercises for solos, pairs, and groups of dancers offer the
physical support that allows emotional distress to sequence out of the
body. Dancers learn to enhance their own sense of flow through the
movement of an improvisational mind.
Action Theater: The Improvisation of PresenceAuthor - Ruth Zaporah
Dance ImprovisationsJoyce Morganroth
This book has wonderful exercises to explore with friends, a class, and
workshops of all kinds. Morgenroth starts with the planning of a
session and brings you all the way through time, space, weight
dependency, rhythm and breathing to the closure of a session. She
details preparation, procedure, variations and observations in a
straight forward, to the point maner. The exercises are interesting and
stimulate movement in creative ways. I recommend this book to anyone
exploring improvisational movement.
BodystoriesAndrea Olsen
An innovative guide to anatomy that uses techniques from yoga and dance to increase awareness of the body. BodyStories presents a much needed approach to
human anatomy, one that is enlightening to beginning and graduate
students alike. This is a book to be done, not merely read; as you
engage in Olsen's programmed sequence of lessons, you become the text
and the illustrations. This is experiential anatomy at its best. - review by Dean Juhan
Body and Earth: An Experiential Guideby Andrea Olsen
A comprehensive guide to the basic philosophy and key elements of Body-Mind
Centering®, with concrete and poetic explorations, clear exercises, and extensive
photos and drawings.
Sensing, Feeling, and Action: The Experiential Anatomy of Body-Mind Centering
Author: Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen
Movement educator Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen describes her innovative approach to movement
analysis and reeducation through her collected articles and interviews from Contact
Quarterly, 1980-1992.
The Wisdom of the Body Moving: An Introduction to Body-Mind Centering
Author: Linda Hartley
Body-Mind Centering, developed by physical therapist and dancer Bonnie
Bainbridge Cohen, systematically explores the complex relationships
between bodily experience and science. Hartley puts forth BMC's
philosophy and its key components of investigating the "minds" of our
skeletal systems, digestive organs, etc., through breath and imagery.
"A specific `mind,'" she says, "can be experienced and witnessed when
we direct our attention to a particular body system or part of the
body, or when we move with a certain focus and identifiable quality."
Starting with basic cellular structure, she takes readers through in
utero development, birth, patterns of growth, and the body's many
systems. The book's many photographs illustrating various exercises
combine with anatomical drawings and generous endnotes and bibliography
to make it a thorough grounding for further study. Whitney Scott
Job's Body: A Handbook for BodyworkAuthor: Deane Juhan
This fascinating text offers everything a
health practitioner, massage therapist, exercise instructor, or student
of human potential could hope for: an information-packed reference on
the workings of the body and mind; a broad assortment of strategies for
releasing tension, freeing energy, and enhancing health through
"hands-on" bodywork; an eloquent exploration of the most mysterious and
powerful of all human interactions--touch. - Dr. Ken Dychtwald
Handbook in Motionby Simone Forti
An Account of an Ongoing Personal Discourse and its manifestations in
Dance. Simone Forti is a dancer who has always forged her own path. She
arrived in New York in the early 60's from California. She brought with
her a series of pieces that proved to be of serious influence on the
development of "post modern" dance and sculpture in years to come. Her
"dance-constructions" were based on a concern with bodies in action,
the movement not being stylized or presented for its visual line but
rather as a physical fact. The artist traces the development of her
work intuitively rather than chronologically, including narratives
about a time of participation in the drug culture that sheds light on
the changes in her dancing. The book includes drawings, "dance reports"
(short descriptions of events whose movement made a deep impression on
the author's memory), and documentary materials such as scores,
descriptions, and photographic records of performances.
My Body, The Buddhistby Deborah Hay
Through a series of imaginative approaches to movement and performance,
choreographer Deborah Hay presents a profound reflection on the
ephemeral nature of the self and the body as the locus of artistic
consciousness. Using the same uniquely playful poetics of her
revolutionary choreography, she delivers one of the most revealing
accounts of what art creation entails and the ways in which the body,
the center of our aesthetic knowledge of the world, can be regarded as
our most informed teacher.
My
Body, The Buddhist becomes a way into Hay's choreographic techniques, a
gloss on her philosophy of the body (which shares much with Buddhism),
and an extraordinary artist's primer. The book is composed of nineteen
short chapters ("my body likes to rest," "my body finds energy in
surrender," "my body is bored by answers"), each an example of what
Susan Foster calls Hay's "daily attentiveness to the body's
articulateness."
Lamb at the Altar: The Story of a Danceby Deborah Hay
"The intention of my work is to dislodge assumptions about the fixity of the three-dimensional body."—Deborah Hay
Her
movements are uncharacteristic, her words subversive, her dances unlike
anything done before—and this is the story of how it all works. A
founding member of the famed Judson Dance Theater and a past performer
in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Deborah Hay is well known for
choreographing works using large groups of trained and untrained
dancers whose surprising combinations test the limits of the art. Lamb at the Altar
is Hay’s account of a four-month seminar on movement and performance
held in Austin, Texas, in 1991. There, forty-four trained and untrained
dancers became the human laboratory for Hay’s creation of the dance Lamb, lamb, lamb . . . , a work that she later distilled into an evening-length solo piece, Lamb at the Altar.
In her book, in part a reflection on her life as a dancer and
choreographer, Hay tells how this dance came to be. She includes a
movement libretto (a prose dance score) and numerous photographs by
Phyllis Liedeker documenting the dance’s four-month emergence. In an
original style that has marked her teaching and writing, Hay describes
her thoughts as the dance progresses, commenting on the process and on
the work itself, and ultimately creating a remarkable document on the
movements—precise and mysterious, mental and physical—that go into the
making of a dance. Having replaced traditional movement technique with
a form she calls a performance meditation practice, Hay describes how
dance is enlivened, as is each living moment, by the perception of
dying and then involves a freeing of this perception from emotional,
psychological, clinical, and cultural attitudes into movement. Lamb at the Altar tells the story of this process as specifically practiced in the creation of a single piece.
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