CI36 in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, June 2008
By Bunhead

Mavis couldn't make it due to her public service Twirls 34–40 Tour of the Southeast for Pottery Barrel (see Contact Quarterly Volume 33 2) so I caravanned to CI36 in somewhere Western Pennsylvania to cover it. Out there! Rural America at its loveliest and lushliest. Just when you thought there couldn't be another bend in the road without some kind of strip mall/gas station complex (this IS America, right?). Were we making some kind of point to all the internationals in attendance? Anyway, the small campus proved to be big enough (and a bit too widespread for some tastes)—there were big gym spaces galore, a happy black box, and even a small dance studio. The high school gym was also called into service, split into thirds a la the Freiberg Fest (I know from the CQ Newsletter), and used for classes. For those who couldn't decide what to do with so many options at any given hour, the high school gym was a good choice: THREE for one! Attending Robert Anderson's (London) class on Falling I also felt like I partook of the Teacher's Track classes (Paul Langland (NYC) and Nina Galea (Montreal) were teaching that morning on the other side of the dividing curtain) and in the far space music wafted over from Sylvain Biquand's (France) Contact and Music class. Usually being concerned with falling off pointe, I was happy to discover a dance form where falling was encouraged with verve, and by a handsome Brit in this case. Being Bunhead, the gym floors scared me, hard and with variable surface viscosities that ranged from frictionless to flypaper so I was happy to take Cristina Turdo's (Buenos Aires) class on finding space between you and your partner in the one small actual dance studio space. The intimacy and Cristina's soothing voice conjured a feeling of security and ability to let go and experiment in the moment that I hadn't found myself able to do in the other spaces. I might have stayed in that studio the whole celebration! But curiosity killed the cat. Being Bunhead, I am generally skittish about Contact so the array of classes (vs jams) was very appealing to me as were the performances and talks, not to mention the goodies in the STORE and a cool off in the reference room with the funky retro scrapbooks and posters. And of course, I LOVED the writer's salon by Karen Schaffman (San Diego) and Melinda Buckwalter (Northampton) where I got to float around the Doric columns of the Ellis building in a fluffy dress (provided) to some Doris Day tunes while making up fictional accounts of my prior Contact experience for the page. Something for every Contact taste. I was a happy onlooker for most of the jams but did mix it up once or twice, and am inspired to join my local Contact lab upon returning home.

OK, the performances were my scene. I thoroughly enjoyed seeing all the variations on what people thought to do for performance, and specifically, how they thought to include Contact in their performance works. Or include performance in their Contact! There were two duets, which especially caught my fancy out of many wonderful and informative permutations on the form. The first was KJ Holmes and Jordan Fuchs. Well at first I thought it was a solo. Jordan started with small twitches, which gradually grew into larger twitches tho he remained confined in the upstage right space near the back wall, dark and edgy. From where I was sitting in the "partial view" balcony I couldn't see KJ's entrance. By the time I realized she was there, I had to lean way over to see her. Her limbs seemed to flash out from under the balcony floor like lightening strikes. Eventually they came together and their partnerings were very curious--like the experimental (jazz?) music that accompanied the piece—unusual, unexpected sometimes still or repetitious in a way that allowed me that second look I needed to make out quite how she was able to cantilever in a precarious position, satisfying my curiosity. Toward the end there was a somewhat "standard" improvisation moment where the couple moved to the back wall and acknowledged the stage space by sitting on a speaker and making a pyramid of their bodies. Standard, and yet ever knew! Once they had stacked themselves, she on top of he on top of speaker, one foot on his head like a rakish beret, their odd chortling vocalizations became triumphant calls, "Here we are in improvisation land, we've come and conquered, and we'll do it all over again next time round." Ain't that the point. That night there was among many other lovelies, a rendition of Barbara Dilley's Mandala Score by Roger Neece and his pick up improvisation group, tossing a completely different flavor into the mix, group listening often cooperating, but also agreeing not to cooperate. The evening finished up with a sometimes edgily dangerous trio of Mirva Makinen (Finland), Joerg Hassman (Berlin), and Andrew Harwood (Canada). This Bunhead found it "classic" Contact despite the trio part —which actually showed up the duet-iness form in how the odd wo/man out made his/her way back in. Classic in its edge of surprise danger reflex grace phew.

The other duet that struck my fancy was perhaps actually a trio with John Oswald on saxophone and with Steve Homsher and Cyrus Khambatta in their bodies. It followed the edgy soap box solo/duet of Roger Neece and Gretchen Dunn. Roger expounded from a stool in a spotlight on the Contact Nation and the inability of performance to capture the orgiastic joy of the jam. Gretchen provided a cartoon talk bubble and herself as a contact/tango/dance partner, as needed. They got the crowd on the edge of their seats, annoyed, riled up, and in some cases out of them! Even some hecklers calling him a Contact Supremacist. Next up, Oswald entered and sat with his sax in the spotlight, with the duet still in the dark. For a while. Finally some breath into the instrument, duet still still. What? Are we in for another in-your-face performance? They got our attention. Made us wait. Finally more noises from sax, the duet begins to move… minimally too as I remember. Contact but staying rather orner-arily with the point of Contact. Something about this presence to the task helped me to see and follow the logic of their bodies as they found themselves in one strange and delightfully complicated permutation after another… I remember a fist in a mouth and how it persisted, long after the fainter of heart would have given it up. Contact for sure, but not "classic"! The flow knob was turned down and the stick to it knob way up. Mad scientists.

Other treats: Esther Gal (Hungary) and Benno Voorham (Sweden) do a duet score in which they never face each other, with the flavor of a tango. When one turned to face the other the other immediately changed direction, and yet they still maintained the Contact duet! There was the late night performance's NYC score investigating humor in a large group improvisation. There we found the guffaw, enjoyed, and let it slip away, wondering when it might return and marveling on how in its own sweet way and time it did. From the slapstick—a toe in someone's unzipped fly, and the comic—Heidi's limbs flailing in commentary to a dead pan Charlie, to the physical comedy of a zany satisfyingly athletic men's duel duet that ended with one of them flat out on the floor. And on the flip side there was Keith Hennessy's audience score—"your going to want to laugh but I want you to consider why"—and laugh the audience did. While I admired the sequined cuffs, I also admired the ingenious questioning of knee jerk audience laughter even more. Keith's athletic leaps and dives in a sexy cross backed leotard with the glittering aforementioned cuffs and masked after the painting "The Scream," were an uncomfortable mixture that sent some into hysterical laughing and made others uneasy, admonished by a second reiteration of our audience score. Uneasy, but intellectually provoked, even moved. Yes, this is how it all begins and where does it end? Calling to memory the video stills from Abu Graib perhaps. That a "simple" set up and improvisation score could accomplish that in 10 minutes! Powerful stuff.

Sign me up for CI72!