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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Feb. 12, 1981)
This aint no sprout dance Joint Forces improvises free-style movement “I guess you might call it 'new-age folk dancing'.” Karen Nelson, a member of the Joint Forces dance collective in Eugene, throws her arms in the air when trying to "nail down” a definition of the style of dance she and the rest of the group teach and perform. Contact Improvisa tion is the formal name for their dance form. What those two words might mean is understandably ambiguous. Contact Improvisation is a well, here / go trying to nail down a definition. How about this: Contact Improvisation is sort of a new brand of modern dance. Started only nine years ago, it has grown into something of a "latest craze,” not only in the Eugene area but across the United States and Europe as well. As its name implies, Contact Improvi sation is a free-style affair; the dancers rely entirely on their senses and intui tions to guide them through their movements. Nothing is set or choreo graphed, and the dancers focus on an element of contact — contact with those one is dancing with as well as contact with oneself. Joint Forces is currently a four member collective, having had six members in earlier days. Alito Alessi, Heidi Timm , Andrew Harwood and Ka ren Nelson became Joint Forces on a winter’s eve last February, when the notion of combining their Contact skills and ideas struck home. Timm and Harwood had just come into town to prepare for a workshop they were to teach on campus in the summer; then they met Alessi and Nelson, and the four of them took a walk to Skinner’s Butte. Things happened on that lofty peak, and Joint Forces was born. Such a dramatic event was the genesis of the group’s name, as well. The history of Contact is much like the history of Joint Forces: Steve Paxton and Nancy Stark Smith started Contact when they “just got together and started throwing bodies around," Nelson says, adding, "I started doing it about four years ago." A gymnast during her high school years, Nelson drifted away from the body movement scene altogether in col lege."They didn’t have a gymnastics program where I went to college, and I never got involved with modern dance because it just wasn’t my way of doing things. It was hard to follow somebody else’s rigid thing." She met some people who introduced her to the free-form movement of Contact Improvisation, and she found what she was looking for. Alito Alessi has been dancing, teach ing and healing in Eugene for nine years. In year's past, he belonged to the Eugene Dance Collective, and also studied T’ai Chi. "A friend and I started doing Contact about five years ago, before either one of us knew anything about ‘Contact’ itself,” he says. For Alessi, as with Nelson, the motivation was the same — a dissatisfaction with the limits that structured modern dance im posed on his free-flowing desires. In high school Alessi was a long-dis tance runner; and this, along with his martial arts and modern dance back ground helps define his interpretation of Contact. "All these things have sort of evolved into Contact for me," he says. “But it’s different things for different people, depending on a person’s back ground and what they want to get out of it.” So, what does Joint Forces look like when they’re Contact Improvising? One observer thinks they resemble the con tinuous motion of light-sensitive brine shrimp at the Exploratorium: “These dancers are as dependably sensitive to momentum as the shrimp to light.” (This is hardly definitive — especially if, like myself, you’ve never seen brine shrimp before. But we can use our imagina tions.) Group member Harwood feels the group “weaves and displays a tapestry of movement”. And I? What does it all look like to my unfamiliar eye? In a word, watching the Joint Forces do its thing is mesmerizing. The dancers sort of roll around with each other — not always on the floor, but while they're on their feet, in the air and some times apart. Like swimming through space, they move as if gravity is nonexistent. One of the keys to Contact is to work with gravity and other natural forces. Alessi says that most other forms of dance constantly battle against gravity. But Contact is not some kind of spaced-out sprout-dance. “This is a lot of pedestrian stuff — real natural movement, real people movement,” Alessi says. And this “pedestrian stuff” can have its roots all the way back in childhood. “A lot of our personal and physical development has been hampered by the way we’ve been brought up,” Alessi says. “Children who are made to walk too soon don't develop a proper crawling ability, which in turn affects motor development. In Contact you go through crawling and rolling and other phases of movement — it has all sorts of beneficial side effects, like improving your sight and hearing. A lot of people have never really moved in their entire lives; they take our classes because it feels good to their bodies. It loosens you up.” Joint Forces performs as well as teaches. The group danced at the recent People’s Inauguration in front of the biggest crowd they’ve ever had, and the group feels it gets "real good” support from the Eugene area. Joint Forces is in residence at Dance Works, 1231 Olive St., through this June. They will be teaching another intensive workshop on campus the last two weeks in June. An improvisational performance is scheduled this Sunday at 7:30 p.m. at the Community Center for Performing Arts (WOW Hall). Tickets are $3.00 in ad vance, $3.50 the day of thte show. Joint Forces will be teaching a two-day work shop the following weekend. Feb.21 and 22, $25 for both days. 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