Appendices

A. Playlists & the art of music

Music in CI is a weather system, not a soundtrack. It sets the room's nervous-system state and cues the arc, but should never dictate the dance's rhythm (CI is not danced to the beat). Favor instrumental, textural, spacious music with dynamic range.

By session phase:

Principles: keep the volume conversational (people must hear "you okay?"); avoid lyrics in a language the room speaks (words pull dancers into their heads); pre-build the arc so you're not fumbling mid-session; and try one session in silence — it's revelatory, and it teaches dancers to listen to bodies, not beats.

B. Troubleshooting guide

C. Glossary

• Authentic Relating (AR) — a body of structured relational practice (noticing, eye-gazing, honest sharing) used here to build the trust CI requires; see Chapter 5.
• Base — in a lift, the dancer supporting the other's weight.
• C-tactile afferents — nerve fibers, densest in hairy skin, that fire hardest to slow (about 3 cm/s), skin-temperature stroking and route to the posterior insula rather than the brain's touch map; part of the physiology behind why caring touch feels good.
• Container — the felt sense of safety and agreement that lets a group take risks.
• Counterbalance — two bodies balanced against each other's weight, each dependent on the other.
• Flyer — in a lift, the dancer who is supported off the floor.
• Give / take weight — actively offering your body weight to a partner / actively receiving theirs.
• Jam — an open, unstructured improvised session; CI's native social form.
• Misattribution of arousal — the mind reading physiological activation (from exertion, novelty, or touch) as attraction to whoever is present; a common CI dynamic, see Chapter 2.
• Skin hunger (touch starvation) — the popular name for what researchers call touch deprivation: the felt, self-reported deficit caused by a lack of affectionate touch, consistently associated with loneliness and distress; see Chapter 2.
• The point (of contact) — the place where two bodies touch and through which the dance is negotiated.
• Rolling point of contact — the point of contact traveling continuously across the bodies' surfaces; the core skill of CI.
• Score — the set of rules/constraints defining a game or improvisation.
• Self-responsibility — CI's oldest ethic, that each dancer looks after their own body and boundaries. Never to be taught alone: it is paired with responsibility toward others, weighted by experience and power. See Chapter 4.
• Small dance — Paxton's foundational meditation on the tiny adjustments of standing still; he also called it "the Stand."
• Spotter — a required third person in any lift, positioned to protect the flyer's head and neck above all else, and free to decline any lift they can't safely catch.
• Surfing — traveling with one's weight across a partner's supportive surface.
• The table — a hands-and-knees body offered as a stable supporting surface.
• Tuning / attunement — sensing a partner's intention and state through touch and weight.
• Witnessing — actively watching from the edge of a jam; considered part of dancing. Inherited from Authentic Movement (Whitehouse; Janet Adler's mover/witness practice) and built formally into Nancy Stark Smith's Underscore.

D. Further reading & lineage

The one to read first

• Cynthia J. Novack, Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture (University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). An anthropologist's ethnography of the form: traces CI's roots to 1950s–60s social dance, the New York and San Francisco avant-garde, gender and sexual liberation, somatics and body therapies, aikido and tai chi — then analyses how the dancing itself encodes American ideas about gender, spontaneity and sexuality. Freely readable at the Internet Archive.

From the founders

• Steve Paxton (1939–2024) — named the form in 1972. His essays are collected in Gravity (Contredanse, 2018). Material for the Spine — his post-1986 study of spinal movement, grown out of CI but distinct from it — is not a book: it exists as a four-hour interactive DVD-ROM (Contredanse, 2008) and as a web app at materialforthespine.com.
• Nancy Stark Smith (1952–2020) — founding participant in the 1972 group and the form's defining voice; founder and co-editor (with Lisa Nelson) of Contact Quarterly; author of the Underscore, a long-form improvisation score she developed from 1990 with twenty-plus named phases and its own graphic notation, typically run over about three hours. With David Koteen, Caught Falling (Contact Editions, 2008) — the closest thing to a teaching text from inside the form.

The archive

• Contact Quarterly — founded by Nancy Stark Smith in 1975 as the Contact Newsletter, and for forty-five years the journal of record. Print publication ended in January 2020; the archive is being made available online at contactquarterly.com, and remains the deep archive of CI thought.

On consent, power, and who the form is for

• Michele Beaulieux, "How the First Rule Brought #MeToo to Contact Improvisation," Contact Quarterly 44.1 (2019) — the essay that reframed CI's self-responsibility ethic. Essential for anyone facilitating.
• Kristin Horrigan, "Risky dancing and consent practices," Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices 16 (2024) — the academic treatment of identity, privilege and power in CI.
• DanceAbility International (Alito Alessi, Karen Nelson, from 1987) — mixed-abilities practice grown directly out of CI, and the place to start on adaptive facilitation.

The relational lineage

• Authentic Relating Games Manual — compiled by Sara Ness and the team at Authentic Revolution, with contributions from dozens of AR facilitators. This book's card format and its whole approach to relational games are modelled on it, and the debt is gladly acknowledged. The Five Practices quoted in Chapter 5 are ART International's framework, not this book's. AR itself descends from Circling (Authentic World, The Circling Institute and others).

The real curriculum

• Local jams. Find your nearest jam; dance in it before and while you facilitate. You cannot host a terrain you haven't walked.

E. A one-page facilitator's cheat sheet

Before: floor clear · kit located · referral numbers in your pocket · playlist queued · consent script ready · rotation plan · a drop-back game in your pocket.

Open with the three agreements: (1) take care of yourself and each other — more experience means more of the looking-after; (2) every touch is a yes, exit any dance anytime, and "stop" stops everything; (3) weight and play, not agenda. Name who to come to if something goes wrong.

The arc: Arrive → Warm → Play → Integrate → Close. Never skip the warm-up (dynamic, not static stretching). Never end on the peak.

The load ladder: own weight → rolling → lean → counterbalance → partial weight → full/lifts. Never skip rungs. Nobody past the lean who can't roll. Raise one variable at a time — load, speed, height, or unpredictability.

Lifts: base, flyer, spotter. Exit agreed out loud before entry. "Down" aborts, called by anyone.

If someone's head takes a hit: they're done for the day. No same-day return, no exceptions.

Reading the room: stiff/jokey = drop a tier. Flat/mechanical = raise or rest. Charged = name it. Checked-out = offer the edge.

The mantra: Set the frame. Feed the game. Guard the edges. Then get out of the way.

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