page_title: Contact improvisation
section_title: Development of art-sport
hierarchical_section_title: Contact improvisation / History of contact improvisation / In North America / Development of art-sport
caption_attribution_description: English: Earthdance artist-run residency center in western Massachussets
context_page_description: Contact improvisation is a form of improvised dancing that has been developing internationally since 1972. It involves the exploration of one's body in relationship to others by using the fundamentals of sharing weight, touch, and movement awareness.
  American dancer and choreographer Steve Paxton originated contact improvisation, drawing from his past training in aikido, a martial art form, to explore and push boundaries with his colleagues and students to develop this new practice. Contact improvisation plays with the artistry of falling off balance, counterbalance, finding the shelves of the body, learning the mechanics of the body in order to handle someone else's weight or be lifted, breathing techniques, and can involve the art of getting to know your partner past the physical point through the physicality.
  Steve Paxton, along with other pioneers Nancy Stark Smith, Danny Lepkoff, Lisa Nelson, Karen Nelson, Nita Little, Andrew Harwood, and Ray Chung, thus participated in creating an "art-sport," oscillating between different emphases depending on the moments and personalities who practice it:
  experimental dance
  theatrical form
  educational tool
  social dancing
  awareness practice
context_section_description: Since the mid-1970s, regular jams are present in most major cities in North America (New York City, Boston, San Francisco, and Montreal). Other multi-day residential spaces (such as the Breitenbush Jam, which has existed since 1981) have been in existence since the late 1970s. Remembers dancer Mark Pritchard,
  The 1979 Country Jam was a first of its kind in the Contact world: over fifty people from the western United States and Canada came together for twelve days of non-structured existence, life and dance: neither a workshop, a conference or a seminar, but an improvisational gathering, with the sole aim of creating a space for dancing and living in flux... Our days were without structure, except for meals: at the beginning, we planned to keep 90-minute slots for the courses, but the idea was quickly abandoned thanks to a system based on Supply and demand, in which each could suggest a topic to be dealt with and offer to lead a class.
  These residential events (workshops, festivals, long jams) represent a parallel economy that invited the creation of dedicated spaces of practice, the model of which was provided very early by Earthdance, a residential center built in 1986 by a Boston community of dancers.
caption: Earthdance artist-run residency center in western Massachusetts
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