How to move through a crowded contact improv jam without breaking a dance

Where the blind spots are, where the gaps open, and what to do after a bump

*Image: Contact Improvisation Trio Dojo Florence by Koyaanisqatsi12, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.*

A busy jam puts more bodies on the floor than the floor comfortably holds, and when the space between two duets closes, nobody in either duet is watching. The contact point holds your hands and your eyes. Traffic is a skill the dancers carry themselves, and it comes down to three habits: check the space you are about to fall into before you commit weight, keep a foot available to steer with, and leave a wider gap around a moving duet than feels necessary.

In contact improvisation the contact point stays singular by design. Your hands are on someone's back or ribs, your eyes follow the same place, and your partner's body occupies most of the rest of your view. The person behind you is in the same condition, so neither of you is watching the room. Contact Quarterly's description of the form builds the practice on that state: alertness, it says, is developed "in order to work in an energetic state of physical disorientation, trusting in one's basic survival instincts" (Contact Quarterly).

Why nobody is directing traffic

Contact Quarterly describes jams as leaderless practice environments where dancers work with whoever gathers, whether friends or strangers, experienced or new. That is how the form began. Steve Paxton set a piece called Magnesium for twelve young men at Oberlin during its winter term in 1972, on wrestling mats in an old gymnasium, and the weight-and-falling research around it became the seed of the practice (Oberlin College). The form was first presented publicly that June, in a two-week project Paxton directed at the John Weber Gallery in New York (Contact Quarterly). A San Francisco history of the period records that early practitioners resisted a suggestion to codify the form and certify its teachers (FoundSF), so the form has no body that decides who may teach it.

What a jam usually has is the opening circle. The first-jam guide describes most jams opening with two or three minutes in a circle, and lists what gets stated there: consent is continuous, anyone may decline, the edge is for resting, nobody teaches unasked, nobody films without asking. Spacing between dances is not among those items, which leaves it with the people in the middle of it.

Three habits that keep the floor workable

Look at the landing space before you leave the ground. A roll, a fall or a lift costs you your eyes for a second or two. Take the half-second before it to see what is behind you, and choose a direction where a body is not already arriving.

Keep a foot free. The safety page puts it plainly: keep your own feet available to land on. A foot on the floor is also a brake and a steering wheel. A dancer with both feet committed can only continue in the direction the weight is already going.

Leave more gap than you think you need. Two people at speed cover ground you cannot predict from where you are standing, so the gap worth leaving is roughly the width of another dancer, taken on the outside of the pair.

Passing a duet that is already moving

Read the direction a pair is travelling before you enter their part of the room. From outside you can see the drift even when you cannot read the dance: bodies lean, the shared weight heads somewhere, and the pair follows it. Cross behind the drift, at walking pace, with your hands low and your eyes on the floor beside them. If a dance is happening low, step around the outside instead of over it.

Touching a duet to get past changes what they are doing. The glossary defines the contact point as the single place where two bodies touch, and keeping it singular is what stops a dance becoming a grapple. A third hand arriving from a passer-by breaks that, however briefly.

When you are the one being passed

Hold your contact point and keep your weight where it is. Sudden adjustments from one dancer are what the other dancer cannot see coming. A hand placed flat on the floor reads clearly from across the room, and so does a low, slow shape; both tell nearby dancers that there is a body on the ground and roughly where its edges are.

After a bump

Stop the dance you are in. Check the person you made contact with, and let them finish standing before you say anything else. Then decide whether to resume, and either answer is ordinary. If the bump came in the middle of a fall, wait for them to come up rather than putting a hand on them while they are still moving.

Repeated near-misses in the same corner are worth mentioning to whoever holds the session. The safety page makes acting on problems the organiser's job, and a room that keeps producing collisions in one spot has a layout problem.

Tired dancers and the edge

The same page names dancing tired as one of the three ordinary sources of trouble, alongside bracing against a fall and taking weight you are not placed to take. It also gives the instruction that belongs with it: stop before you are exhausted.

The edge is where you can stop without leaving the room. The glossary is direct about it, describing the edge as the perimeter where people rest, watch and re-enter, and calling watching from it participation. Twenty minutes at the wall, tracking where the gaps open and which corner fills up, teaches more about a specific room than any general rule.

The risks that stay in the room

Contact improvisation carries the risks of a partnered physical practice: falls, collisions, strained joints and the occasional bruise, as the safety page sets out. The habits above are about reading a room, and a room can still produce any of them. This is a dance form, and the site is explicit that it is not clinical treatment. If you have an injury or a condition that affects how you can be moved, tell your partner before the dance starts rather than in the middle of it.

The first busy floor is easier to learn while standing next to it. Come to a Friday, watch from the edge for the first ten minutes, and notice which side of the room the duets travel toward. The first-jam guide covers the rest of the evening, and the jam page has what you need before you arrive.