Summary: Documentation of my teaching experiment; teaching to dancers inexperienced in the contemporary form of contact improvisation; dealing with an unfamiliar/ uncomfortable base of support.  Finding how to properly pour weight into different surface areas of the body, as well as unfamiliar supporting objects, in order to find suspension and extension within varied body angles and levels higher than the floor.

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Context: Finding a strong distinction between downward and upward force, despite a lack of familiarity and comfort with the supporting platform (body part and surface beneath the body part), proved to be a difficult feat to accomplish in my students new to contact improvisation, inversions, and contemporary movement.  I found that switching the supporting surface from the floor, to chairs, to the floor again and finally back to the chairs, allowed them to form a preference and strong sense of confidence with the floor as opposed to the insecure base, leading them into more confidence for the second round of floor improvisation, making more discoveries to bring back to the chairs. This technique provided a certain degree of freedom from fear, recovery and ambition to take their new confidence "to the next level" on the chairs.

I had previously taught these students a few classes of contact improvisation within contemporary movement, including a basic introduction to inverting using bases of support besides hands, feet and the floor and an introduction to contact improvisation concepts: namely weight sharing techniques, listen and respond, and flowing and/or intentional transitioning.

For this class, I began with a breif warm up, combining the lessons above. I watched them carefully and timidly navigate these concepts, especially as I placed the main focus on contact improvisation.  There was very little weight being exchanged.  Every time I noticed "near grasps", I stopped them and showed what they had achieved, then explained how to experience the full expression of that point of contact.  Once they had established a few basic weight sharing exchanges of suspension, I led them to the chairs. (Quick succession of layered concepts proved to keep them focused and fully engaged).

After spending some time on their own determining the safety and reliability of this new platform, they began attempting contact.  They were able to find the same expressions of contact on the chairs as they had previously found on the floor.  

We left the chairs at that point, commensing further exploration of new points of contacts on the floor.  This time, they rapidly discovered and flowed through weight sharing points.  I determined that an enormous amount of trust was being found with each other on the floor, as they confidently pursued new inversions and points of contact; since they knew the floor wasn't going to slide out from under them as they had feared with the chairs.  After some exciting new discoveries had been made, I had them end with a final improvisation on the chairs, working their newfound strategies into this final exploration.

Sure enough, they thrived on the chairs as they approached their movement with new confidence, trust and connection in each other.  Without the chairs, it would have taken much longer to establish the connection with the floor, and without the floor, it would have taken much longer to gain trust in their new body angles/ body parts to support them.  They were able to decifer which poses would not be accessible on the sliding chairs, due to the varied senses of stability they found within each point of contact on the floor.  This comparison was crucial to the rate of progression in relation to ability and confidence/ knowledge of what will be safe and what won't on the chairs.

Attatched is a picture of two of these students engaging in the full expression of a point of contact they found on the floor, during the final round on the chairs.