I attended a movement and dance workshop with Nita Little teaching at Wainsgate Chapel, Yorkshire on Friday 3 June – Sunday 5 June. We practiced falling and catching a partner in continuos contact. I named this kinetic sculpture: Waterfall.
Nita Little: a contact improvisation legend!
Contact improvisation is a movement practice. No one can own a movement but historians like to find the links and declare it, THE definitive evolution of a dance and movement practice. Movement is an embodied practice: follow the bodies, and the pathways of learning and cultural transmission will emerge?!
To some extent – for contact improvisation, it’s easy – and arguably this is a simplistic and lazy research methodology: look for the dancers at the Contact Improvisation performance in the Webber Gallery, New York, USA in 1972. Nita Little along with others like Steve Paxton and Nancy Stark-Smith, was there. So fifty years later, here she is in a chapel in Yorkshire teaching, and I am attending as a participant.
Falling is floating
Nita Little is a great teacher. Partly because she looks at the skills of the participants and then adapts her teaching and material to needs of her students. Seeing a lack of fundamental skills in dancing in contact then Nita introduced a number of exercises. People weren’t keeping in contact; perhaps hesitant in maintaining or even being in physical contact with other bodies.
I named this exercise Waterfall. It is a continuous movement as water falling to earth. Nita Little loves the idea of earth: touch the earth is a often repeated phrase of hers. The earth our mother.
Waterfall: a kinetic sculpture
To start, take the weight of you partner on your back from standing back to back. At that point, they are horizontal and the roles are transferred, increasing the weight-giving as you proceed to the floor.
Two people stand back to back and give 10% weight. One leads and the other follows. In each iteration they swap roles.
The idea is to fall your partner a quarter way to the floor from standing. Then when flat on the floor, rise up with them.
Using this swapping arrangement of roles, the partner must keep in contact, adjusting their stance to maintain the touch between bodies. For example, fall them in into horizontal and then it’s their turn so they must turn into vertical to allow falling (other person follows); at this point other person ‘catches’ their falling partner.’
From my dance notebook for Sunday 4 June 2023
Notes
Featured image above Ingleton Waterfalls: Pecca Falls (Yorkshire, UK), June 2009 by James Stringer (https://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesstringer/) Used under a Creative Commons License- CC BY 2.0 Deed Attribution 2.0 Generic . See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/) (Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesstringer/3685784265/in/photolist-6BGBfz-axvA8V-axvzKk-PNJrZK-DKMy6w-4VMMAj-pfkAm-bpfEkV-9NY7mo-pb5UhW-vwW2Kc-fGefo7-4y4PFW-LHFCh-npubPn-axvyMH-r4fWRG-b2QNNz-H3XKh3-oQde1i-oWvSFe-cc2ERs-6BGBm2-285fAMY-q5zGK-6L2KT4-be5R5Z-H3Xc5Y-fM1UGn-oRTG8C-p7rccF-ngYjrA-KzQdsA-qoFs1W-6BGBCP-oQdjUo-qtEmZd-5gxVry-2akUsti-6BLLrS-neYHjF-pfiRA-w7a4Ts-LzZjdB-pfjRF-rxi8Up-dppLbH-5cT5kz-dmhT6k-puK9hh)