What progress looks like.

No belts, so look at qualities

Contact improvisation has no ranks. A dancer who can lift and spin is not further along than one who can stand still and listen. To see progress you have to look at how someone dances. Martin Keogh judges his teaching by whether dancers can take in more sensation and more risk, and whether they dance "less with their 'ideal' and more with their partner".

What seasoned dancing tends to look like

Keogh posted a minute of a twenty-minute duet and listed what he noticed in it, at Terminus Stations. Here are the same qualities in our words, with one of our own at the end.

• Soft tone. The body is firm enough to carry weight and loose enough to answer.
• No terminus stations. Every movement flows into the next, and nothing comes to a full stop at the end of a phrase.
• Hands that map. Hands read the partner's shape and do not steer it.
• Receiving impulses. The dance comes from the exchange between two people, with nobody pushing a plan into it.
• Honest sound. A breath, a hum or a word reports what is happening. A sound that performs adds nothing.
• Easy stillness. Pausing is as comfortable as moving.

What your own progress feels like

It rarely looks like a new move. It feels like falling without tensing, like saying no earlier and with less drama, like staying with a clumsy moment until it turns into something, and like hearing a no without flinching. Some weeks you will go backwards. That happens to everyone, including people who have danced for decades.

Why tricks mislead

A lift or a fast spiral is easy to see, so people mistake it for skill. A dancer can pull off the move and stop listening to their partner in the process. When a dance is going well, an observer often cannot tell who started what, because the impulse came from the exchange and not from either person.

For an honest check, ask two questions after a dance. Could my partner have said no easily at any point? Could I have? If the answer to either is unclear, the dance had a problem however it looked from outside. If both answers are yes, the dance was probably better than it felt, even if it was slow and small.

Try this: three notes after a jam

Within an hour of leaving, write three short notes. One thing you noticed in your body. One moment you said yes or no and it went well. One question you want to carry into next time. Keep them in a notebook. After a month, read the pages in order. The change is usually clearer on paper than in memory.

Try this: watch and note

Choose any clip in the video room and watch two minutes. Write down what you notice about weight, hands, pauses and endings. Then watch it again and look for one quality from the list above. You are training your eye, and your eye teaches your body.

Where to go next

The keep practising page covers what to do between jams, including the weeks when nothing is running. Fundamentals is a taught series that starts from the ground, and classes and workshops explains how to judge any class. Come back to this guide whenever a chapter stops feeling obvious. They are written to be read again.