Claire Vionnet

A touch to relate to

Perched on my mother’s back as she danced with other women in a village in Cameroon[1], dance has always been present in my life. It was only at the age of 17 that I formally attended my first modern jazz class, and at 24, my first contemporary dance class. I was so intrigued by the dance form that it became my area of study, even within my chosen discipline of anthropology. To this day, these first impressions of encounters with contemporary dance and contact improvisation still remain vividly inscribed in my memories.

For instance, I remember my first contact improvisation jam ten years ago at the Judson Church in New York City. Driven by a mobile energy, I arrived at the dance space with great expectations. However, instead of dancing, I remained at the edge, observing the unstable mass of dancers moving intensely in a chaotic hodgepodge— more than twenty bodies entangled with one another. From time to time, an arm, a leg or a head would soar above the mass. Whom did these bodily fragments belong to? Actually, I really felt like dancing. But I didn’t dare to join the moving mass. How should I approach another mover? And could I merge myself with so many strangers at the same time?

"CONTACT IMPROVISATION is a movement form, improvisational by nature, involving two bodies in contact. Impulses, weight, and momentum are communicated through a point of physical contact that continually rolls across and around the bodies of the dancers (…) fluid and eccentrically weighted, the dancing bodies swing, bounce, roll, and fly through and with a common center" (Siddall 54)[2].

Contact improvisation emerged in the 1970s in the US[3]. If I draw on the above definition suggested by dancer Curt Siddall in 1975, dancers find their harmony in a moving point of connection. Therefore, I just needed to look for a common centre with my partner. How could our bodies find points of physical connection while constantly moving? 

Two weeks later, in Montreal, I shared a dance with an older man. When we started rolling on the floor, I remember being cautious about the way my body was embracing him— which spots could I touch respectfully with my head, my forearm or my knee? I was careful not to touch his genitals. I can still remember his smell, and the dark hair on his forearm. But I forgot his name and don’t remember the colour of his eyes or his face. I was awed, being physically so close to someone from another sex and another generation. He could have been my father. When do we, in ordinary life, experience such a bodily closeness with strangers? Today, this proximity doesn’t challenge me anymore. It has become a pleasure to share physical closeness with strangers in the time of a duet, no matter which gender, age, morphology or culture (although I note repulsive and attractive mechanisms that make us dance more or less with some people). 

Touch is a beautiful act of sharing. In dance, touch is experienced differently than in sexuality. There are probably as many versions of touch as dance forms. The contact improvisation touch has its own features. Touch happens less with hands and fingers, and more with the forearms or other bodily surfaces. It is a dance caress, rather than an erotic one. There is a difference in the pressure and texture of the physical contact. The intention of the dancer is also felt in the touch (dancing versus seduction). When touch is given respectfully (with integrity), it affects a deep dimension of the body. I don’t know what it touches exactly, but I know how powerful it is. I know that I couldn’t live without touching and being touched anymore. I presume it even bears a healing power. 

Talking about the ethics of care, Sandra Laugier writes “that we need others in order to satisfy our primordial needs even (and even more) when we display obvious autonomy”, and that “we are often unable to acknowledge that we need care constantly, not only when we are infants, ill or elderly. Precariousness and vulnerability are features of the human life form” (Laugier 208). Touch in contact improvisation is a touch of care. Through my dance practice, I relate touch with respect, attention and carefulness. There were only a few instances where I didn’t feel comfortable with the touch of my partner, perhaps sensing another intention beyond the dance. It has happened with male dancers who had a more sensual quality of touch, or often with newcomers in the dance community, people who don’t know the ‘touching code’ yet. A newcomer learns to de-eroticise their touch. If I don’t feel comfortable with the touch, I would leave the duet, saying “thank you” to my partner. But most of the time, touch is experienced respectfully, between two dancers who want to become children again and play together in a familial atmosphere.

Arriving in Montreal to conduct research on intimacy in dance, I was surprised by several things, including a blog on consent and harassment within the contact improvisation community. For the first time, I heard voices (mainly female) talking openly about violating limits and intentionally abusive behaviours. I haven’t heard of anything similar in Switzerland, France or the UK, where I have worked earlier. I was shocked to read accounts of transgressive and disrespectful acts in partnered dances. I was also surprised to sign consent forms— a discharge of responsibilities— each time I was attending a jam or a workshop. Exchanging notes with colleagues at Concordia University, where I currently work, I heard scholars’ precautions, such as keeping the office door open during meetings with students and jokes about touching students. I’ve been told about a policy of no touch in education that changed local politics on education a few years ago. These trivial events were embedded in daily life and it was mainly to me, as an outsider, that they looked surprising.

On one side, I was in the middle of an environment that was fearful of too much proximity and suspicious about touch. On the other side, I met several choreographers working specifically on touch: performative installations like Antichambres d’Aurélie Pedron in which audience members were invited to experience touch differently or close interactions between performers and the public in works like Ecoute pour voir. I also attended a workshop specifically addressing the issue of touch in dance education. The workshop invited dance teachers to discuss their understanding of touch (more on a metaphorical level) in their dance practice.

I wonder if these issues with bodily proximity are related to the #MeToo movement’s emergence in 2006. While I recognize the necessity for public visibility of sexual harassment and the urgency of legal recognition of acts of violation, I also note a negative consequence of it: the fear of bodily proximity that I sometimes felt here in Montreal in my conversations with dancers, choreographers and scholars. For instance, a contact improv friend confessed how careful he was while dancing with a woman for the first time. He was meticulous with his gestures, trying not to become too intimate (in the fluidity and rapidity of the movement, it can happen that one unintentionally touches or brushes past private parts). The more he was dancing with the same woman, the more he relaxed, becoming free in his dance and trusting his body without controlling all his gestures. His apprehension about being inappropriate disappeared over the duration of the dance. 

In contact improvisation, I experience touch as a gesture of care. It is a touch that invites a dance partner to respond with weight transfer, playful lifts and rolls. In that sense, touch is more than just a skin feeling. It is skinship, or “intimacy through touch” (Adis Tahhan 217). A relationship emerges out of the touch, ephemeral, lasting for the duration of the duet. Philosopher Erin Manning writes that “to touch is to share” (Manning 13), and that touch is “an act of reaching toward—[that] enables the creation of worlds” (Manning xv). I also experience touch as a way of sharing more than just the skin— it is a portal to intimacy with others. Touch comes with smell, with a movement aesthetic, and a sense of grounding and anchoring, because “I touch not by accident, but with a determination to feel you, to reach you, to be affected by you” (Manning 12). Here, the philosopher points out that there is a shared world that springs out of the tactile encounter. As a decisive act, touch is a choice and an act of engagement. Touch is an invitation, an openness, an opportunity transformation by and through others. 

Edouard Glissant differentiates two modes of encounter. “Thought of the Other” just recognises the principle of alterity; it is an act of acknowledgement of the other’s presence, but without being deeply transformed. On the contrary, “the Other of Thought” is an encounter that allows for a real transformative process through another’s presence (Glissant, 154). Here, Glissant talks about two ways of encountering: in the first case, it is just a recognition of the other in their difference. In the latter, it is accepting the possibility of being transformed by the other’s presence. And I believe “the Other of Thought” is what happens in contact improvisation. If I stick to my dance pattern without listening to the energy of my partner, our dance will be hectic and febrile. It is only by accepting how one is being affected by the other’s presence that harmony will occur. It is about losing control of my dance and looking for something new that emerges from the body. In contact improvisation, touch is first the art of listening.

A naked dance

In spring 2018, I attended a dance workshop facilitated by the Austrian choreographer Doris Uhlrich in Basel, Switzerland. Doris led us into a very dynamic warm-up to different popular music tunes. We started moving in all directions, accelerating our runs, spinning faster, making bigger jumps. At some point, our shirts were so wet that it felt obvious to take some layers off. Layer by layer, we ended up dancing naked.

Doris explained to us the reason she chose to work with nudity. While nudity wasn’t the original intention, she wanted to explore the movement of the flesh. Her performance More than naked was her response to journalists criticising her body as not having the right proportions for contemporary dance. Through her work, then, Doris was asking— how does the excess of flesh move?

After three hours of dancing naked— observing our bodies, playing with our fat— we concluded that the workshop hasn’t challenged our intimate limits. Exposing ourselves to each other without clothes was less a matter of intimacy than what we actually expected. We realised that intimacy was more a question of socialisation, since it is not a situation that occurs often in daily life. Here, in the dance studio, conventions were the reverse of those followed in public spaces— the naked state was the norm. It would have been bizarre to remain the only fully clothed person in the room, although Doris told us we didn’t have to undress if we didn’t feel like it.

For non-dancers, nakedness can be experienced as an intimate act. Some people don’t feel comfortable exhibiting their naked body in front of others. On the contrary, intimacy’s limits, as experienced by dancers, go beyond the experience of intimacy in everyday life, since bodily closeness, touch and nakedness are part of the habitus (Bourdieu 1980). In a dance studio, space between bodies is reduced, compared to a public space. Interactions enclose touch, embrace and exchange of sweat. Bodies spontaneously know how to adapt to the contextual conventions as soon as they enter a new space. Several dancers I met in my fieldwork even compare nudity to a costume. Also, they don’t necessarily feel that they unfold their intimacy while dancing naked in front of an audience. 

Philosopher Alexandre Jollien, who has lived with cerebral palsy since childhood, writes about the way space creates bodily conventions. Stepping out of the institution in which he lived for 17 years, he relates how he had to relearn daily interactive gestures. After several faux pas performed in public spaces (gestural actions that were considered too intrusive), Jollien confesses that he started to repress himself. He had to learn a new habitus, changing his way of inhabiting public space, reconsidering distance between bodies, and his role in acts of encounter. Jollien had to unlearn/relearn new conventions and taboos, since the codes were different to the ones he embodied since childhood within the institution (Jollien 44). Norms and conventions regulate life into its intimate details; they allow “people to breathe, to desire, to love, and to live” (Butler 8), but also have negative consequences. Conventions “restrict or eviscerate the conditions of life itself” (Butler 8). Judith Butler stresses the schizophrenic role of conventions, which, at the same time, allow and forbid our intimate lives (the way we touch one another, the way we desire, the way we feel). 

We think of ourselves as our own agents, making decisions about our intimate lives— what we desire, how we desire, what we touch, and how we touch. Michel Foucault writes that bodies are dressed, manipulated, transformed and perfected in detail— movements, gestures, and behaviours are disciplined with very fine precision, with what he calls ‘bio-power’ (Foucault 138-139). Although Foucault’s investigations refer to total institutions (prison, psychiatry), I also see contemporary dance, contact improvisation and other dance forms as bearing constraints that shape intimacy between dancing bodies. As Brian Massumi writes on the question of agency, "What I have is only the power to activate certain constraints and forces that are embedded in the relational field. When I act I am more of a catalyst for the reactivation of those forces than a direct commander or autonomous willer." (Massumi 158)

The two situations I described in the introduction to this paper underline the idea that our intimate gestures simultaneously belong and don’t belong to us. To use Butler’s expression, they are at the same time ours and others’. Butler writes that “constituted  as  a  social  phenomenon  in  the  public sphere,  my  body  is  and  is  not  mine (…) Given  over  from  the  start  to  the world  of  others,  bearing  their  imprint,  formed  within  the  crucible  of social  life,  the  body  is  only  later,  and  with  some  uncertainty,  that  to which  I  lay  claim  as  my  own” (Butler 21). Butler mentions that when a child comes to the world, it arrives within a social environment that (s)he didn’t choose. And these others leave traces on him/her. Our bodies are made of and by others, while we attempt to shape them according to our wishes. Sandra Laugier recognizes “the possibility of subjectivity defined not by agency, self-assertion or autonomy, but by dependence and vulnerability” (Laugier 208). And Erin Manning reminds us that "it’s not about the agency of the subject, but the agencement of the event in its speculatively pragmatic unfolding” (Manning 157). The agency lies in the event rather than the subject. Intimacies are produced by the event.

I am often impressed by my body’s adaptive capacities. Moving from one context to another, my body always attunes itself to the local ecology, without me being conscious of changes in convention. Our bodies can travel and automatically know how to respond ‘correctly’ to new systems and conventions. They know how to regulate the space between bodies, and perform gestural interactions. Since each ecology is contextually regulated, how many versions of bodily intimacy can emerge? And what constitutes an experience of intimacy? The notion of intimacy is so commonly used in ordinary language that its signification seems to be obvious. Social scientists L. Register and T. Henley acknowledge the polysemy of its significations. Intimacy refers to different domains like sexual activity, friendship, family (Register & Henley 467-468), erotic lingerie or scenic performances (Marar).

Etymologically, intimacy comes from the Latin term intimus that means “inmost, most profound, most hidden and secret” (Marar 20). Nevertherless, intimus is not only made of the prefix intus, “within”, but also of inter, “in the midst of” (Marar 20). The term simultaneously carries out meanings of hidden depth and relationality. Therefore, intimacy bears the double signification of autonomy and intersubjectivity (Gauthier & Mercier 61); on one hand, it is used to qualify interpersonal relationships (Laurenceau, Rivera, Schaffer, & Pietromonaco). In that case, it refers to an intimate relationship between two people (or more) and emphasises its intense quality. On the other hand, intimacy is used to indicate the most ‘private sphere’ of the individual. For instance, we talk about the violation of the ‘private sphere’. In this other case, intimacy refers to the individual (Plummer). It is “the part of the experience or the identity of individuals which is not visible, nor perceptible by someone from outside, and therefore, which belongs to individual subjectivity” (Latzko-toth & Pastinelli 156). Since intimacy conveys ideas about both subjectivity and intersubjectivity, my assumption is that it is in the encounter with others that intimacy reveals itself. When we feel something triggering us, then we note the nature of our limits of the so-called ‘intimate zone’.

An exchange of gaze

Currently conducting fieldwork on contemporary dance and contact improvisation in Montreal, Canada, I invited Catherine, a young dancer I had a beautiful conversation with at a café, for a session of improvisation in a dance studio. I played quiet electronic music and we started walking in circles through the space. Catherine led our warm-up, inviting us to center ourselves. We particularly looked at the way we were unfolding our feet on the floor. We gradually accentuated waves of energy penetrating our bodies: always more movement, more flow, more dynamic. Walking faster, challenging our balance playing with gravity, Catherine suddenly proposed that we stop and look at each other. Still, facing one another at a distance of approximately ten metres, we had an intense exchange of gaze. I was impressed by her sharp, grounded and assured gaze. It nearly gave me shivers. We continued our walk and stopped again. Closer this time. At that moment, I felt something being triggered in me.

It was our first duet. We didn’t know our respective ways of moving, our physicality, gestural aesthetic, our manner of inhabiting the space. We didn’t know how our bodies would interact. Would we be able to extend the intimate conversation we had in the café into the dance studio? Would we find a common dance language? What happened in this gaze exchange was a feeling of exposure. Facing her without words to fill up the space, we were penetrating each other’s lives. The gaze was a visual touch. At that moment, I felt very vulnerable: it was an act of opening myself up to her. “The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency:  the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others but also to touch and to violence” (Butler 21). 

Drawing on Butler’s comment, I need to acknowledge that dance studios are spaces of trust. Based on the assumption that people won’t harm us, we find ourselves in a secure context. The degree of protection is lower than what might be assumed or expected under other circumstances. In other contexts (harassment, violence, war), bodily proximity can be experienced as aggression. Philosopher François Jullien writes about intimate gesture as a soft collusion, which is at first an intrusion, a penetration into another’s life. He argues that the intimate gesture challenges the barrier between oneself and the other, between inside and outside. It is first an act of daring, adds Jullien— daring to touch what other people don’t touch. It is a step towards the other’s intimacy (Jullien 49-50). 

Butler’s notion of vulnerability might illustrate the feeling I had in the exchange of gaze. The philosopher calls vulnerability the common ground between humans— the interdependency with others. Humans are entangled in relations, some of which they haven’t actively choose since they were born. Anthropologist Clara Han, who reviews the notion of precarity, furthers Butler’s reading as an exposure towards others that is contingent on the interdependent condition of humans. It is the ontological condition of life (Han 332). Facing my dance partner, I don’t know why I suddenly felt so vulnerable. But in exposing myself to another dancer, I felt as if I was naked. I felt vulnerable while her gaze was penetrating me. Looking into her eyes made me shake. I was exposed. At that moment, I was feeling my vulnerable condition as a human being because of my engagement with the sentience of another being. 

If we come back to the question “what is an intimate experience?”, we would fail to answer it if we try to enumerate objective criteria in an attempt to define intimacy. What is experienced as intimacy by one person might not be viewed as intimacy by another. Proximate space and limits are experienced subjectively. But what is common to all these experiences, in my opinion, is the feeling of vulnerability. Some people might feel vulnerable when they are naked in front of others. Others, in a caress. Therefore, instead of talking about intimacy in terms of objective criteria (as states of nakedness or measurable physical space), I assume that intimacy starts with the feeling of vulnerability. For non-dancers, it might arrive with touch and nakedness— not used to such proximity with strangers, touch and nakedness could be felt as intimate (mostly if the only person who is usually touched is the life partner). For dancers, intimacy will be challenged in other situations, such as the one that I described in the exchange of gaze. The objective criteria of intimacy might vary. But intimacy happens with the feeling of vulnerability when there is a sense of exposure. 

[1] Dressed in traditional clothes, women danced in circles, making repetitive movements and singing.

[2]  As Nancy Stark Smith acknowledges, there are multiple ways of defining Contact Improvisation. For other definitions, see Smith’s paper in (Koteen & Stark Smith, 2008, p. xi).

[3] The formalization of the dance form is attributed to postmodern dancer Steve Paxton. One of his students, Nancy Stark Smith explains her practice and pedagogy as follows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6Pt0OXK7es, seen Sept 2, 2019.

WORKS CITED

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Glissant, Edouard. “Poetics of Relation.” The University of Michigan Press, (2010 [1990]).

Jollien, Alexandre. “Éloge de la faiblesse.” Les Editions du Cerf, 1999. 

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Laugier, Sandra. "Politics of vulnerability and responsibility for ordinary others." Critical Horizons 17.2 (2016): 207-223.

Laurenceau, Jean-Philippe, et al. "Intimacy as an interpersonal process: Current status and future directions." Handbook of closeness and intimacy. Psychology Press, 2004. 71-88. 

Manning, Erin. “Politics of touch: sense, movement, sovereignty.” University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Marar, Ziyad. “Intimacy.” Acumen, 2012.

Massumi, Brian. “Politics of Affect.” Polity Press, 2015.

Plummer, Ken. “Intimate citizenship. Private decisions and public dialogues.” University of Washington Press, 2003.

Register, Lisa M., and Tracy B. Henley. "The phenomenology of intimacy." Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 9.4 (1992): 467-481. 

Siddall, Curt. “Contact Improvisation Sourcebook.” Contact Quarterly, 1979-1980. 

Claire Vionnet studied Social Sciences at the University of Lausanne and wrote a PhD on the gesture in contemporary dance, combining Dance Studies, Anthropology and Dance Practice. Currently, she is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Concordia.