Dance improvisation: why warm up at all?

This article looks at a particular moment in the practice of improvisation when the individual is still attending to unique or specific needs.? In time, it comes before preparations that involve others, or the doing of something that is organised into an ‘exercise’.? A practice rarely begins at zero moment with a group of improvisers arriving together with everyone ready to start.? An allowance is made for a transition, and what the improviser chooses to do during this time is left up to them.? This is the moment I am calling - ‘warming up’ or ‘to warm up’.? Taken literally the expression ‘to warm up’ indicates actions a dance improviser can do to prepare their body to improvise; a body-based preparation to attend to particular bodily needs in order to be physically ready to do dance improvisation.? Dancers incorporate all manner of somatic practices into training as observed by artist Miguel Gutierrez:

“…dancers are doing pilates, yoga, ballet, [K]lein, [A]lexander, [S}kinner, [G]raham, Cunningham, Taylor, white cloud, Feldengrais, core movement, tai chi, capoeira, aidido, ablab, running, cycling, [L]aban, [B]artenieff, [S]imonson, hip hop, African, [T]risha, improv, release.” (Guiterrez 2001)

When these somatic practices are adopted into this moment of warming up, the dancer’s body becomes the primary site of attention.? A preparation to improvise might involve a familiar combination of yoga poses, or movement sequences or the adoption of Feldenkrais principles such as applying a form of ‘gravitational scanning’ or a narrowing of attention to a specific perceived area of the body to observe shifts in the pelvis in relation to the floor (Bardet, & Ginot 2012) or warming up might involve a variation on one of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s contrasting fluid explorations? (Cohen et al 2008, pp. 82-83).? While a dancer’s attention might be bodily based during warm-up, the subject matter or themes of dance improvisation reach past the body to questions such as doubt (Rudstrom 2001), trust (Paxton, & Hougee 1995), transition (Martorell 2008), and surrender (Hay, & Brown 1995) in ones improvising as dancing.? The warm up can be a practice of something and as Deborah Hay points out the thinking is one of “stretching the practice” rather then “the practice of stretching.”? (Hay, & Brown 1995) What is being stretched or warmed up is a preparation that allows for bodily and non-bodily possibilities, to allow questioning and noticing by the improviser so they can enter territory to practice and perform dance improvisation and this leaves open the question: what is warming up? What is required so that one can do this practice?

??

If I were to compile a list of the real things that make up my own improvising – that which I need or want in order to do the activity itself, I would begin by jotting down the most common things: studio or performance space (I need a place to improvise), the clothes I choose to wear (as I rarely practice in my everyday things), music or sound. But, are the latter things? ?I may not be able to pick up sound and hold it in my hands but I can view it in this list as a thing, like clothing.? If I choose to work with music I am as discerning as to what it will be as to the appropriateness of what I wear.? Music, as thing, is as real to me as the floor under my feet and in its absence (which is more common in my improvisational practice) I am not improvising in a cone of silence. I work in the world of sound and noise.? These things - the sound of an air conditioning system, the whine of a ceiling fan, the birds singing nearby and the occasional siren from an emergency vehicle – all make up my environment, whether I am listening explicitly for them or not.

Warming up is another thing or some-thing else I would add to this list of my improvising stuff.? It falls closer to music, conceptually, than the tactile realness of clothing or the place I choose to improvise, but, it is no less necessary to being able to improvise.

I always take a moment to do something to prepare for improvisational practice regardless of my state of mind/body, or if I happen to be late to a practice and miss the moment set aside to warm up.? So far, one characteristic common to every thing on this list is that all these things can take different forms and this is especially true of warming up.? One manifestation of warming up is the ‘exercise’.? Contact Quarterly – a journal that covers all aspects of contact dance improvisation – makes space in its pages for regular contributions by improvisers to share warm up or preparatory exercises in the section ‘Essentials - Basic CI Principles and Practices’. For example Ray Chung in “Listening” identifies how when doing Contact Improvisation it is important to be present and available to “your partner’s – and your own – intentions as they manifest physically” . He offers pragmatic examples for practicing this “essential” skill (Chung 2006, p. 54).? Exercises such as these offer a formalised way of preparing for dance improvisation.? As concrete examples they provide options for an improviser looking for ways to practice different improvisational skills.

When I am asked to join a practice it is understood that I have the know how not just to prepare myself to improvise but that I can also manage this preparation in order to be ready to do so.? To do this and be able to join others who are also doing this, what I grasp immediately is what is happening and what is not and I make appropriate choices depending on the situation.? If I enter a space to find others quietly attending to their ‘warm up’, then I take up my warm up by falling into, what Heidegger would identify as the ‘mood’ in the room, and I do something that is in keeping with what is already established. ? To do something incongruent such as, in this case, jumping up and down or vocalising (like a singer might) would be not just unnecessarily disruptive, it would push out of reach my ability to be in relation to the ‘mood’ of the room and then be involved in this thing called warming up as I understand it.

One characteristic of this period of preparation is its transitional qualities as I move from my life lived in the everyday and begin to do whatever it is I am asked to do in the jam, rehearsal, practice or performance. ? For this to be a transition I must view it as such, it is not a preparation to do nothing but rather a warming up to do something (even if that something turns out to be nothing), and what I choose to do, or not do, as a warm up will set up the way in which I am able to participate and how I fit with the ‘mood’ in the room.? Implicit questions, pertinent to this moment, are what will satisfy the needs of this transitional moment? or what am I warming up to do?? In the world of structured dancing where I am asked to take part in a process of ‘choreographic’ development, what I do to prepare can be easier to discern.? I know that my body needs to be available to the unique needs of the choreographer and I attend to my body in order to do this - and this is true regardless of what stage in the process we are in.? I always include something bodily to prepare for dancing, be it stretching, moving, massaging, relaxing, and/or (and possibly always) breathing.? In this instance the warm up becomes primarily a preparation of my body to dance.? In contrast, making a transition from everyday being to dance improvisation is not as straightforward, as I discuss below.? This is especially true if what I am warming up to do is improvisation that adheres philosophically to principles associated with Authentic Movement.

Mary Starks Whitehouse who first devised and named what was initially a studio based, dance therapy practice, explains what she meant by authentic. “Authentic was the only word I could think of that meant truth – truth of a kind unlearned but there to be seen at moments.”? (Whitehouse et al 1999, p. 81) Whitehouse argues that for the “student/client/patient” to be seen as moving truthfully, an experience of what she refers to as “I am moved”, a “moment of unpremeditated surrender,” will occur that “cannot be explained, repeated exactly, sought for or tried out”? (Whitehouse et al 1999, p. 82).? Whitehouse viewed the relationship between “I am moved” and “I move” as two ends of the same polarity (Whitehouse et al 1999, p. 82).? They exist together in a state she referred to as “both/and” so that being involved with one did not dissolve the existence of the other.? Instead, being in one of these states resulted in the other being momentarily, what she terms “invisible”, which incidentally was the word she used to describe the opposite of authentic (Whitehouse et al 1999, pp. 79,81,82) The therapy of Authentic Movement happened in that moment when the authentic was visible, for Whitehouse, and the “I move” was invisible.? The significance of what became visible and what became invisible set up this “both/and” polarity, instead of the view that it is an “either/or” possibility (Whitehouse et al 1999, p. 82).? How does one ‘warm up’ for dance improvisation based on this set of principles?? The language or terms might be different but improvisation also investigates honesty and truth in movement that fuel questions about the meaning or significance of performing authenticity.? Where or if Authentic Movement influenced contemporary thinking in dance improvisation or which influenced the other is a topic for another article, but the principles inherent in each, the thinking behind the idea of ‘I am moved’ or ‘I moved’ continues to have relevance.? To prepare to do truthful movement is potentially a fraught exercise for someone practiced in the doing of improvisation and also trained to dance in a particular style, approach or technique, especially if one considers the significance in dance improvisation attributed to the acknowledgement and/or questioning of moving habits and habitual movement.? Steve Paxton explained that “an important part of improvisation [for him] is finding new solutions.” (Paxton, & Hougee 1995, p. 2) If I attend to my body when warming up with familiar movements such as a series of stretches that I rarely question or have done for years, am I not just initiating predetermined habitual solutions or ‘I move’ moments in my regular warm-up? Am I falling into a somatic engagement that maintains, or keeps visible as Whitehouse describes, a “clear knowledge, that I, personally, am moving” ? (Whitehouse et al 1999, p. 82) while pushing further away the possibility of what Paxton calls ‘finding new solutions’, or the way Hay emphasises stretching the practice over a practice of stretching?? Are the familiar routines within our warming up detrimental to improvising itself?? If I put on what I perceive as appropriate clothes for improvising am I not already covering up what Whitehouse classifies as ‘the truth of a kind unlearned’ by inserting my knowledge of how to warm up in what I choose to wear?? These questions begin to eat at the very question of why warm-up at all.? Why take the time to do it?? Is it counter-productive?

Taking the time to warm up

Preparing to improvise is fundamentally a transition in time conceived as a moving on from what came before to what is about to be done.? Merleau-Ponty describes this view of time as one that “passes or flows by”? (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 477).? Time is slippery.? We cannot perceive exactly when one moment actually ends and another begins as it is often overshadowed by an individual’s complete involvement in whatever it is they are doing.? Warming-up is something one does and it usually happens within an understood amount of time.? It is timed to end when the process, the practice you are engaged in, begins – that is when the time to do this activity is set aside for the individual.? This can be understood in different ways by members of a group who are preparing to practise improvisation.? There can be a defined moment of time when the warming up period will end.? This can be communicated by letting the participants know when the next phase will begin such as ‘at 10:15 let’s start’. Or time can be used as a loose parameter: ‘in 15 minutes let’s start’.? In both these versions the warm up never ceases – it is interrupted so those present can attend to the reason they are in the room, understood as being ‘there to improvise’ with all the attention-to that this implies.? Alternatively, warming-up can come to an end not by a defined or loosely defined set of minutes in time but rather by an understanding, where-by all agree that they are ready to begin, an informal agreement to move on from one moment of preparation to the moment set a side for improvisation.

When time is conceived of as having a past, a present and a future, warming up becomes an activity that one does that deals with change.? Within this context, individuals prepare themselves by warming up with the intention to improvise – to change into that-who-is-ready-to improvise.? If I am coming from home to an improvisational practice, all the activity I need to do to get to the practice defines the past moments of my preparation to improvise.? I might need to drop off my daughter at childcare, or feel the need for a coffee, and then I will travel to wherever it is the practice is taking place.? All these activities might happen as a result of my commitment to be at the practice, and all this pre-preparation becomes my immediate past once I arrive at the practice.? Whatever this pre-preparation is, when time is conceived as a series of present moments that endlessly pass along into past moments and move toward an endless future of present moments, my pre-preparation anchors the change or transition that I require from warming up, as my present moments move toward an immediate future that will involve improvising.? The result of this view of time is that what I do when I am warming up is a “consequence of my past” and what I will do in the near future when I am improvising is a consequence of what (and how) I do when I warm up? (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 477).? This view of time sets up the importance that is given to the earlier questions about what to do and what to wear when warming up to do an improvisational practice that share principles significant to Authentic Movement. ? Merleau-Ponty points out that this view of time – made up of a past, present and a future – “is in reality extremely confused” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 477).? ?

Yes, these events happened to me.? I am able through reflection to provide a perspective where by what I did can be ordered into a linear series of moments that I consider my past.? But this construction dissolves when one considers that it depends on the existence in some form (real or conceptual) of an objective outside observer situated out of time in a “finite perspective” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 477).? I can only reflect on this past if I “artificially” detach myself from it, if I sit back and consider what happened and think about it? (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 326).? The confusion emerges when I view this moment of detachment as time itself.? ? ?

Unless I make the conceptual choice to do so there is no time to observe myself in these moments, and even that does not solve the problem that is presented.? To be living in a moment where I make the choice to notice what I am doing, this itself requires that the above view of time holds an additional observer, or the ability for myself to observe me noticing my observation of myself doing whatever it is I am doing.? I have the capacity to reflect on what I did.? I can view it as something that happened to me and think of it as my past.? This kind of reflection on time, as something I do afterwards, differs considerably from when I am driving the car to child care, saying goodbye to my child, or ordering that coffee.? There is nothing temporally there that is lived in the ‘driving’, ‘saying’ or ‘ordering’.? I am not standing outside myself observing or reflecting in those moments.? I am ordering a coffee and as Merleau-Ponty pointed out: “Time is, therefore, not a real process, not an actual succession that I am content to record. It arises from my relation to things”? (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 478).? If this is right, then warming-up, as a thing, and the things that make it up are the relation that I need to grasp in order to have an understanding of the question of warming up for dance improvisation.? Time then becomes one more thing to consider as crucial to understanding warming up.? It can be both real to me as an ‘I move’ through a method of detached reflection, and time can exist like an ‘I am moved’ in the sense of warming up as something that involves me.

If I return to the list of things that make up my improvising, that which I need or need to do in order to involve myself when I am warming up, I find there is nothing unknown about the things on this list.? They are all familiar to me as an improviser who has warmed up before.? When I enter the place where the practice is held the situation is immediately understood.? I take my shoes off at the right place. I place my bags down where they go.? I change my clothes and place what I was wearing in a specific spot; all these actions involving these things reveal what is understood as the norms of the situation I am in.? It also reveals the limitations of what I do with those things.? For instance, it would be inappropriate to put my shoes in the place where I warm up, not as a right and wrong choice but as something I understand is not done.? The same can be said of where I put my clothes or my bag and the other items that I might have with me. All these things have a place that is determined by a set of established norms and what I do with them is based on the boundaries of where they go, which is something that is understood.? My actions with these things are due to the familiarity of the situation which involve me at every practice over and over again.? When I am involved with them, when I am doing these actions and the object-ness of these things moves away, becoming invisible in the same way ‘I move’ becomes invisible by an Authentic ‘I am moved’.? The warming up I do becomes a relation to all these things that enter into my preparation.? This includes the floor that I warm up on.? Sally Gardner proposes that a wood floor:

“can ‘survive as the core of experience’: it can be an instrument or equipment for a dancer as well as possessing its own independent qualities that exceed or resist being merely an instrument.” (Gardner 2012, p. 146)

In every place I improvise I encounter a floor that allows me to warm-up and my ability to warm up depends on the possibility that this floor can recede into the background as something that is suitable toward warming up.? There are many types of floors – carpeted floors, tile floors, concrete floors – but for a floor to be usable for warming up it needs to be suitable. For instance, wood floors have the properties that are suitable for warming up while a concrete floor is less suitable.? Secondly, my ability to warm-up and be involved with all these things, such as a floor, is due to their appropriateness for the activity of warming up.? I could choose to warm-up on a staircase, or a tiled roof on top of a building (there are more than enough examples of these places being used in the history of dance and improvisation – Trisha Brown’s 1971 ‘Roof Piece’ for example), but these types of surfaces are not floors for warming up.? They are staircases, and tiled roofs.? The floor I warm up on needs to be understood in an everyday sense as a floor for warming up and improvising – such as the rehearsal floors at Dancehouse in Melbourne, Australia.? A floor in a supermarket, even if it is made of the same material, would not be suitable and appropriate because in our culture that is not what you do on that floor.? ?

None of the things on my list that I consider essential to warming up (the floor, my clothes, the place, the sounds) can exist alone, one without the other, in order for me to be in this particular moment. ? All these ‘things’ contribute to and make up the same involvement that I am calling warming up, so even if each of them can be viewed separately (objectively) or if these things can happen in different contexts (for example I also take my shoes off when I am home) it is not the individual interaction with these things as objects by themselves that situate me in warming up but how they work together within the same paradigm situated in the culture of dance improvisation.

Recapitulation

I have asked the following questions about warming up: What am I warming up to do? Why do I warm up at all? Then I have analysed a list of things that make up my involvement in warming up, including time and things.? But, this quick summary lists what was done, and as I write this I am covering up the very things that were pointed out.? What I did and what I am pointing out are not the same.? I can describe these things that make up ‘warming up’ and at the same time be distancing myself from my involvement with them.? ?

The question of when I am reflecting or learning and when I am in the grasp of what I am doing also emerges in these moments of warming up.? Suppose I am doing a stretch of my body that I do all the time.? A movement that is so close to me that I usually notice that I am doing it after I am already in it.? Is this what in everyday common language is pointed out as a habitual movement, a habit, one amongst many that I have accumulated.? Is what I am pointing out mindless, a meaningless patterning of my body – something I have absorbed from my past?? Is it what Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus – a construction that allows but also restricts my possible actions in the world (Bourdieu 1990)?? Is this movement something I have learned to do, something I have inadvertently practiced, something that I am now so skilled at doing that I rarely direct myself into it?? Or, can what one might point out and call a ‘habit’ or a ‘habitual movement’ only exist in that same conception of detachment that enables me to view time as a series of successive endless present moments?? I can point out my movements except in those moments before it dawns on me that I am doing them.? At some point I learned to be involved in the stretch and if it is a habit, even a habitus, it is a skilled one, not a mindless or meaningless rote movement.? I am in the stretch to be in the stretch, in my warming up.? It is in this sense that these movements emerge and continue to modulate, to change, to adapt to the situation due to my constant involvement with them.? We need these things.? We are situated in them and without them it would be hard, if not impossible to exist, to do anything – let alone warm up before improvising.? If every action is either something I am learning to do or a ‘habit’ that makes up the restrictions as well as the possibilities of my habitus then there would be nothing for me to grasp in my world.? My world would be replete with meaninglessness and mindlessness as I continually spend my time re-producing habits from my past.? No things would exist, as I would not understand or know what they were if what I learned to do transforms into an empty action.? I would not be able to view or grasp things at all.? It is hard to be in relation to any thing temporally without already having the know-how to function in the world; a know how that is never static.? We are in the world thanks, in part, to being in the grasp of things, forever involved, situated in our body, in the world.? This is the back and forth, the both/and of our existence where we are lived and living in the unfamiliarity of the moment.? I warm up to improvise both here in space and there in time, in a temporality that is always in some way unfamiliar to me.? What is unfamiliar emerges by way of my involvement in the situation both in those moments of ‘artificial’ detachment from the world and by way of my connection in the world.? I am in the grasp of warming up when I can fall into whatever it is so that improvising takes over.? It is no more mystical or a mystery than the ‘driving’, ‘saying’, or ‘ordering’ that I do on my way to the place where I will practice dance improvisation. ? My ability to view the thing and be in relation to the thing is always available to me and this is true with a thing such as warming up.? I begin practice in this present ambiguity as I move to be situated in ‘warming’, while what I am doing falls further away from view.? This ‘warming’ involves me with another thing that I know as ‘dance improvisation’ and my relation to it as ‘improvising’ – two more things to add to my list.

References

Bardet, M. & Ginot, I., 2012, Habit and change:? Discovering the present, Writings on Dance(25), pp. 10-29.

Bourdieu, P., 1990, The logic of practice, Polity Press : Oxford, UK : B. Blackwell, Cambridge, UK.

Chung, R., 2006, BASIC CI PRINCIPLES & PRACTICES, Contact Quarterly, 31(1), p. 54.

Cohen, B.B., Nelson, L. & Smith, N.S., 2008, Sensing, feeling, and action: The experiential anatomy of body-mind centering, Contact Editions,.

Gardner, 2012, Practising Research, Researching Practice, Cultural Studies Review, 18(1), pp. 138-52.

Guiterrez, M., 2001, Subject: Calling you, this now moment? Movement Research Journal(23), p. 14.

Hay, D. & Brown, T., 1995, Deborah Hay and Trisha Brown: Paths from the 1960s to the 1990s, Movement Research Journal(11), pp. 5, 17.

Heidegger, 2008, Being and Time, Translated by Macquarrie & E. Robinson. Harper & Row, New York.

Martorell, A., 2008, Profile K.J. Holmes, Movement Research Journal(32), p. 8.

Merleau-Ponty, M., 1962, Phenomenology of perception, Routledge, London ; New York.

Paxton, S. & Hougee, A., 1995, Choas and Order: Improvisation Taken to the Limit, Movement Research Journal(11), pp. 2,21.

Rudstrom, S., 2001, This is an Improvisation, Movement Research Journal(23), p. 9.

Whitehouse, M.S., Adler, J., Chodorow, J. & Pallaro, P., 1999, Authentic movement, J. Kingsley Publishers, London ; Philadelphia.

This article first appeared in the December 2015 issue of Brolga - An Australian journal about dance - #40, published by the Australian Dance Council Ausdance Inc.? It is reprinted with permission by the author.