Xiao Zhang

In this chapter, the authors explore Contact Improvisation (CI) from the point of view of teaching. They assume for purposes of argument that classes and jams are different kinds of things. Their interest is in the insights that CI classes provide about teaching and teaching improvisation in particular, and in turn what teaching CI reveals about CI as a particular kind of collective-focused research into body/mind curiosity. Their thematic conclusions are: (1) CI teaching is a continual balancing between showing and telling and instigating; (2) CI can be teaching “practice as research” together, including teaching collective research and researching togetherness; (3) CI teachers are often able to explore their own curiosity through teaching, through sharing the edge of their curiosity, and they often improvise teaching in order to teach improvisation; and (4) CI uses words to push practice and practice to push language. Not only is reflection time critical in teaching CI, words are a necessary part of this “practice as research.”

This chapter proposes an approach to the concept of Contact Improvisation through Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology. Starting from the suggested dialogue between bodies and objects, in which the spatial and the social are intertwined, this chapter explores the term queer and the collective practice of improvisation as an experience of disorientation, co-perception, and inclination. Instead of the table invoked by Ahmed, one delights in the wheelchair, an iconic object in the history of Contact Improvisation, whose artistic experimentation allows one to imagine other directions in dance and other contact policies.Se propone un acercamiento al concepto de Contact Improvisation a través de la Fenomenología Queer de Sara Ahmed. Partiendo del diálogo sugerido entre cuerpos y objetos, en el que se entrelazan lo espacial y lo social, este capítulo explora el término queer y la práctica colectiva de la improvisación como una experiencia de desorientación, co-percepción e inclinación. En lugar de la mesa invocada por Ahmed nos deleitamos en la silla de ruedas, un objeto icónico en la historia de la improvisación de contacto, cuya experimentación artística nos permite imaginar otras direcciones en la danza y otras políticas de contacto.

This chapter aims to discuss the practice of Contact Improvisation in Brazil from the experience of disabled bodies in Brazilian dance companies and through the legacies of choreographers such as Maria Duschenes, Steve Paxton, and Alito Alesi, among others. This text is also guided by the author’s experience of Contact Improvisation in dance companies and in their solo career as a disabled artist and educator. It proposes a critical effort on how perceptions of disability are still denied in Contact Improvisation practices, since the insertion of these bodies remains from a laboratory perspective of movement research. The phenomenon of improvisation is expanded in this chapter beyond the fields of dance and problematizes the Brazilian body, its social and political contexts (exclusion culture, violence, poverty, social deviances), versus the discussion about an inclusive model that is still hostage to a productive logic, especially in the performing arts.

This roundtable discusses the presence and evolution of Contact Improvisation (CI) in mainland China and Taiwan. The participants come from various backgrounds from Beijing, Hangzhou, and Taiwan and share their personal journeys with CI, highlighting its introduction, development, and significance in their dance communities. They reflect on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on CI activities and the role of CI in fostering connections, trust, and spirituality in their local communities. In terms of CI’s future in these regions, they express optimism and emphasize its inclusive and open nature. They also stress the importance of overcoming language barriers to facilitate international exchange and understanding within the global CI community. This conversation sheds light on the unique perspectives and contributions of mainland China and Taiwan to the world of Contact Improvisation.

This chapter provides an overview of the practice of Contact Improvisation (CI) in India. Starting from tracing the introduction of the form by international teachers, it follows the emergence of local facilitators and their adaptation of the CI practice to the context of India, in order to discuss the potential of the form to challenge established norms of social interactions. The chapter briefly addresses aspects of living in India, including casteism, colonial influence on regulating the power dynamics related to gender, and social and economic status. Based on this, the chapter outlines the process of developing a community of independent Indian facilitators and touches on the issues of colonialism in the arts and power dynamics between international and Indian teachers. The chapter then discusses in more detail the adaptation of teaching and organizing of CI events according to the constraints of social norms in India. Through practical examples, the chapter describes the principles around which the teaching of CI is centered—emphasizing the autonomy, self-authority of an individual while fostering collaboration and collective attention of a group. It concludes with a reflection on the practice of CI as providing a more expansive understanding of human experience and therefore becoming a potentially revolutionary practice of inclusion and diversity that can challenge and expand the structures of the society.

In this chapter, members of EPIICO collective, through collaborative writing, describe the path they have taken over the course of eight years of practicing, searching, holding encounters, and creating together around the practice of Contact Improvisation in Mexico City. The approach is built from embedded experiences, not from academic knowledge. The current members of the collective describe the struggles within the practice: their economic context, patriarchal attitudes in the dance, extractive practices in festivals organized in Mexico, and social changes brought by COVID-19. So the environment in which the dance happens is part of their dance, too; they dance with it and even despite it. Over time, EPIICO collective has enriched their CI practice with ideas and philosophies from communitarian-territorial feminism and Zapatismo, as they continue to develop a politics of their own.

While Contact Improvisation developed within a secular framework, its practice can give rise to profound religious insight. This chapter examines some of the ways that the process of experiencing CI facilitates a dancer’s capacity to perceive a connection with a larger mystery. It also explores parallels with explicitly religious traditions such as Aikido, Quakerism, and Zen Buddhism. These forms have the intention to transform their practitioners in fundamental ways which are beneficial to themselves and the wider world. Some of the potential pitfalls that can inhibit this transformation are held up in an attempt to modify how one understands religious practice, allowing it to include both the visceral body and metaphoric spirit.

Using a framework of neuroplasticity and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, this chapter explores a beginner’s experience of Contact Improvisation (CI) and how it affects the mind and body over time. It makes use of personal anecdotes, data around perceptual systems, and an intersectional history of CI to hash out how this dance form affects dancers and how an informed use of these trends can contribute to an overall practice. The chapter includes the experience of writing the chapter in real time and how the process was complicated by a myopic exposure to the history of CI, participation in residency at Oberlin College, as well as attending the CI @ 50 festival in 2022.

This chapter explores how Contact Improvisation and other embodied ephemeral forms endure through time. It foregrounds the physical action of rolling as it is often done in Contact Improvisation as an act of knowing, in contrast to a conventional static image of knowledge described by Tim Ingold as a logic of inversion. It develops this form of knowing in two ways, both drawing on the thinking of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. First it shows how rolling establishes a dynamic intensive system and then how it works between smooth and striated space. Throughout, the concepts are illustrated with examples from the author’s reflections on a year of intensive dancing.

XCI (‘X’ Contact Improvisation) is proposed as an ongoing practice as research process in the interstices of contact improvisation and queer sexuality practices. This article narrates the author's practice as research process with XCI, explaining why they are committed to this approach to CI, reporting some results, and offering a theoretical background. XCI researches how sexual intimacy is embedded in CI practice. It can offer some practices to acknowledge the occurrence of the sexual in CI spaces, making it present and accountable. XCI is proposed as a practice of non-violent queer sexuality that can foster sexual cosensing and somatic communication and relationality, and that could eventually destabilize performative, symbolic practices. XCI intends to help articulate a politically transformative language of flesh.

In this chapter, the authors articulate how elements of Contact Improvisation can be adapted for a broader audience who may have limited access to the kind of interpersonal contact that humans need to thrive. Research on the therapeutic benefits of touch is interwoven with the authors’ personal and professional experiences: Brandes is a licensed psychotherapist who infuses body-based modalities and somatic education into his Body&Being sessions; Revlock is a professional dancer, educator, and the creator of Restorative Contact, a partner mindfulness practice. Their holistic perspective bridges the gap between the body and mind, offering a connection between individuals and the transformative potential of touch. Specific aspects of Contact Improvisation that are explored in the chapter include compression, reciprocal touch, bonding with the earth, spherical space, attunement, and weight-sharing.

This chapter investigates foundational practices of listening touch, used in Contact Improvisation, and proposes new touch techniques where space brought into awareness to enhance empathic modes of being with and among Others. Informed by new materialist scholarship concerning the entangled nature of relationships, the author explores touch as a way of being in the world and examines listening as a haptic practice that can make possible encounters with Otherness. Building upon foundational somatic listening practices, the new touch techniques proposed include hovering, accompanying, and listening in action. In these techniques, space is proposed to enhance an individual’s ability to stay with disturbing sensations, strong emotions, arousal, and encounters with the unknown or an Otherness within. Taking from Leah Basel’s essay “The Politics of Listening,” space is considered to enhance empathy and compassion and in this research is applied in touch and embodied in dance to support ethical and sustainable ways of co-becoming with diverse cultures and differences. The author draws from lab group research with CI colleagues that form part of her community in Berlin, and she reflects also on an extended CI practice that involves dancing outdoors with environmental matter. These varied contexts and sources support reflections on how receptively humans can relate with other material life forms, and assist her in developing techniques of listening that suggest deeply embedded, environmental ways of attending with Others on micro and macro terms.

The Stand, also known as the small dance, is a form of meditation described by Steve Paxton in the early 1970s as a means of mitigating physical dangers that Contact Improvisation (CI) dancers navigate. It is now being recognized within the global CI community that the challenges being navigated are not simply physical. The ability to stabilize attention and the skills of staying awake within disorientation are increasingly challenged, yet remain critical foundations in CI. Aside from the obvious physical risks CI dancers navigate, the potential for enmeshed, harmful, and fraught interactions in CI is massive. Through concepts of interpersonal neurobiology, osteopathic philosophy, and CI practice research, the Stand is explored as a listening practice, as a means of training awareness, of stabilizing attention, of developing trust in one’s own rapidly self-organizing system in gravity, and as a pragmatic way of establishing connection with oneself before making contact with another.

This chapter explores the undercurrents of the Underscore, a group framework for dance improvisation originated by Contact Improvisation (CI) pioneer, Nancy Stark Smith (1952–2020). The author describes three experiences, including an influential encounter with Nancy Stark Smith at a weekly Underscore practice in Northampton, Massachusetts; an Underscore with 150+ participants during a 50th anniversary celebration of CI; and an Underscore posthumously honoring Nancy Stark Smith at her alma mater, Oberlin College. In sourcing personal stories, as well as Caught Falling (Smith and Koteen, 2008) and terminology and pictorial “glyphs” from the written outline of the Underscore, this chapter reflects on the far-reaching contributions of the Underscore as part of Nancy Stark Smith’s legacy and considers how the form will expand and evolve in the years to come.

Through the legacies of somatics and modern dance, Contact Improvisation (CI) has adopted eurocentric assumptions about a presumed natural body, and these concepts have negatively impacted inclusion and equity in CI. In this chapter, the author traces the concept of the natural body through the developments of modern dance and somatics to illuminate how the natural body transmits ideas of race, gender, class, and liberation. The chapter then demonstrates how the natural body transforms into the neutral body and continues to assert influence on CI. The author identifies ways in which current CI practices reinforce or repudiate conceptions of the natural/neutral body, leading to the question: how can the exclusion and inequity that are caused by conceptions of the natural body be attenuated, negotiated, and ultimately changed? Thus, the author argues that through analyzing and challenging the natural body, CI can address its past to make equitable and inclusive choices for the future.

Taken to task and inspired by the generative intervention of Ishmael Houston-Jones and Fred Holland’s Wrong Contact Manifesto, this conversation investigates the (lost/erased/fugitive) legacies of the aesthetics of the Black radical tradition in Contact Improvisation’s history. From the contemporary cultural currency of racial optics and their effect on some Contact Improvisation communities, to deeper historical strata going back to the invention of jazz and to Fred Moten’s philosophy of blackness and improvisation, this conversation asks: What kind of gestures are made possible, and what kind of gestures are hindered when the haptics of race come to the foreground?

Contact Improvisation (CI) is often touted as an egalitarian, improvisational dance form in which neutral practitioners explore fundamental physical principles such as gravity, weight, and momentum. Perhaps this is why it looks and feels oddly similar no matter where on the planet or by whom it is being practiced. This chapter looks at the practice from a non-white, queer, nonconforming view, revealing the imprint of the ontologically expansive white culture in which CI arose (and for the most part remains embedded). This chapter activates the reader with questions, scores, methods, and exercises to participate in the evolution of CI pedagogies; infusing them with strategies of consent and accountability. Delving into their lived experience, the author argues that CI will become truly improvisational and inclusive when practitioners make space for the weight and gravity of diverse cultures, histories, genders, sexualities, racialized identities, abilities, and other invisible but impactful forces.

This chapter argues that gendered power dynamics in Contact Improvisation (CI) negatively impact the experience of some dancers more than others, inequitably limiting access to full participation. While in its core principles, CI rejects gender roles, in practice, ideas about gender influence CI dancing in many ways. A significant number of dancers find their access to CI impeded by the effort it takes to protect themselves from gender-based power dynamics on the dance floor—including misgendering, objectification, stereotyping, sexual misconduct, and bias. This chapter lays out many of the ways that gender and gendered power dynamics show up in Contact Improvisation dancing and identifies aspects of CI that can lead us to replicate oppressive patterns from society. Additionally, it highlights aspects of CI that help dancers resist repeating daily social hierarchies in their dancing and proposes a series of practices to work toward a more equitable and inclusive CI.

This memoir, manifesto, and manual provide a road map for Contact Improvisation jams wanting to create “safer brave spaces”—spaces that consciously support consent culture, making being brave safer, especially for marginalized people. The author uses her experience of sexual violence in an open jam and its aftermath to contrast groups supporting rape culture and those creating consent culture. The Beaulieu Test measures whether jam guidelines prioritize looking after each other and the group and listening for “yes,” or taking care of oneself, setting boundaries, and saying “no.” Community accountability, democratic governance, and sensitive response processes grounded in restorative, transformative, and transitional justice can operationalize consent culture values. A precipitating event often mobilizes outside pressure and committed insiders to transition to safer brave space. Past harm may be embodied in the jam, so it is best addressed. The chapter applies to other voluntary groups in which participants risk vulnerability, especially with touch.

This auto-ethnographic memoir of a North American dancer’s immersion into the postmodern artworld of Contact Improvisation (CI) in the 1970s and 1980s seeks to balance past and present perspectives of how and why we danced then. Now in her seventies, she brings to consciousness past sensations and beliefs by way of an archive of notes, posters, interviews, reviews, and photos and through the lens of second wave feminism. This chapter recreates events of that period in Minnesota in which the practice and pedagogy of Contact Improvisation was in its formative years, and how after immigrating to Canada, she introduced initial classes and jams to Montrealers, taught CI in the Dance Department at the University of Québec, formed the Catpoto Dance Collective, and created the gender role-reversing performance Each Man for Herself. Instigated by challenging and illuminating lived experiences during the CI @ 50 gathering at Oberlin College in March 2022, the author interweaves the original narrative of her all-consuming passion for CI as a young “artivist” dancer with powerful and necessary critiques reframing and changing the nature and meaning of its practice today.

Resistance and Support: Contact Improvisation @ 50 is a ground-breaking anthology of twenty original writings that elucidate vitally important somatic and political perspectives on Contact Improvisation (CI), a form of partner dancing initiated in the United States in 1972 which has now spread into a vibrant global community. It is edited and includes an introduction by veteran CI practitioner and dance studies scholar Ann Cooper Albright, professor of dance at Oberlin College. For much of its existence in the twentieth century, CI prided itself on its “democratic and egalitarian” roots. Jams were open to all, women learned to lift men, and dancing roles were not conventionally gendered. These operating assumptions meant that questions of social power were often ignored in CI spaces. Resistance and Support critically engages issues of inclusion and access through insightful essays by people whose experiences are shaped by this extraordinary form of kinesthetic communication. The chapters trace the stories of CI in China, Taiwan, India, Mexico, Brazil, the United States, Canada, and Europe. Some chapters discuss the somatic training that provides a movement basis for improvisational exchanges between dancers. Other essays foreground feminist and queer perspectives on the form. Several pieces elaborate on the healing, spiritual, or therapeutic aspects of CI, while others explore mixed-ability approaches. Like Critical Mass: CI @ 50, the international conference honoring CI’s 50th anniversary from which these writings emerged, these essays both celebrate the expansive possibilities and critique some of the exclusionary conventions of this ever-evolving form of communal dance.

DNA base pairing has been used for many years to direct the arrangement of inorganic nanocrystals into small groupings and arrays with tailored optical and electrical properties. The control of DNA-mediated assembly depends crucially on a better understanding of three-dimensional structure of DNA-nanocrystal-hybridized building blocks. Existing techniques do not allow for structural determination of these flexible and heterogeneous samples. Here we report cryo-electron microscopy and negative-staining electron tomography approaches to image, and three-dimensionally reconstruct a single DNA-nanogold conjugate, an 84-bp double-stranded DNA with two 5-nm nanogold particles for potential substrates in plasmon-coupling experiments. By individual-particle electron tomography reconstruction, we obtain 14 density maps at ~ 2-nm resolution. Using these maps as constraints, we derive 14 conformations of dsDNA by molecular dynamics simulations. The conformational variation is consistent with that from liquid solution, suggesting that individual-particle electron tomography could be an expected approach to study DNA-assembling and flexible protein structure and dynamics.

Cholesteryl ester transfer protein mediates cholesteryl ester transfer from the atheroprotective high density lipoprotein cholesterol to the atherogenic low density lipoprotein cholesterol. In the past decade, this property has driven the development of CETP inhibitors, which have been evaluated in large scale clinical trials for treating cardiovascular diseases. Despite the pharmacological interest, little is known about the fundamental mechanism of CETP in CE transfer. Recent electron microscopy experiments have suggested a tunnel mechanism, and molecular dynamics simulations have shown that the flexible N-terminal distal end of CETP penetrates into the HDL surface and takes up a CE molecule through an open pore. However, it is not known whether a CE molecule can completely transfer through an entire CETP molecule. Here, we used all-atom molecular dynamics simulations to evaluate this possibility. The results showed that a hydrophobic tunnel inside CETP is sufficient to allow a CE molecule to completely transfer through the entire CETP within a predicted transfer time and at a rate comparable with those obtained through physiological measurements. Analyses of the detailed interactions revealed several residues that might be critical for CETP function, which may provide important clues for the effective development of CETP inhibitors and treatment of cardiovascular diseases.

Commonly used methods for determining protein structure, including X-ray crystallography and single-particle reconstruction, often provide a single and unique three-dimensional structure. However, in these methods, the protein dynamics and flexibility/fluctuation remain mostly unknown. Here, we utilized advances in electron tomography to study the antibody flexibility and fluctuation through structural determination of individual antibody particles rather than averaging multiple antibody particles together. Through individual-particle electron tomography 3D reconstruction from negatively-stained ET images, we obtained 120 ab-initio 3D density maps at an intermediate resolution from 120 individual IgG1 antibody particles. Using these maps as a constraint, we derived 120 conformations of the antibody via structural flexible docking of the crystal structure to these maps by targeted molecular dynamics simulations. Statistical analysis of the various conformations disclosed the antibody 3D conformational flexibility through the distribution of its domain distances and orientations. This blueprint approach, if extended to other flexible proteins, may serve as a useful methodology towards understanding protein dynamics and functions.

Objectives: The aim of the current study was to differentiate between neural activity that represents neural anomalies that are responsible for persistent developmental stuttering from the activity that is a result of compensating for stuttering. This was done by investigating alterations to the intrinsic functional architecture of speech-language processes of patients with PDS before and after a short-term intervention. Methods: The resting-state functional connectivity and cortical thickness were examined before and after the intervention. The structural data were used to validate the functional results. Fifteen stuttering patients who received intervention, 13 stuttering patients who did not receive intervention, and 13 fluent controls participated. Results: Before the intervention, both groups of PDS patients showed significant RSFC and cortical thickness reductions in the left pars-opercularis and RSFC increases in the cerebellum, as compared to fluent controls. The intervention was effective in reducing stuttering in PDS- patients and lowering their RSFC in the cerebellum to the level of fluent controls. The intervention effect was specific to the PDS-group. The intervention did not change RSFC and cortical thickness in the left PO, which remained at its preintervention level. Conclusions: The results suggest that the left PO is a locus where the intrinsic functional architecture of speech-language processes is altered in PDS patients, suggesting an etiologic role of this region in PDS. The cerebellum showed intervention-induced neural reorganization, suggesting a compensatory response when stuttering occurs. Copyright © 2012 by AAN Enterprises, Inc.

© 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserved. Genome-wide gene expression measurements have enabled comprehensive studies that integrate the changes of gene expression and phenotypic information to uncover their novel associations. Here we reported the association analysis between psychophysical phenotypes and genome-wide gene expression changes in human adaptation to one of the most extreme climates on Earth, the Antarctic Dome Argus. Dome A is the highest ice feature in Antarctica, and may be the coldest, driest and windiest location on earth. It is considered unapproachable due to its hostile environment. In 2007, a Chinese team of 17 male explorers made the expedition to Dome A for scientific investigation. Overall, 133 psychophysical phenotypes were recorded, and genome-wide gene expression profiles from the blood samples of the explorers were measured before their departure and upon their arrival at Dome A. We found that mood disturbances, including tension, depression, anger and fatigue, had a strong, positive, linear relationship with the level of a male sex hormone, testosterone, using the Pearson correlation coefficient analysis. We also demonstrated that significantly lowest-level Gene Ontology groups in changes of gene expression in blood cells with erythrocyte removal were consistent with the adaptation of the psychophysical characteristics. Interestingly, we discovered a list of genes that were strongly related to significant phenotypes using phenotype and gene expression PCC analysis. Importantly, among the 70 genes that were identified, most were significantly related to mood disturbances, where 42 genes have been reported in the literature mining, suggesting that the other 28 genes were likely novel genes involved in the mood disturbance mechanism. Taken together, our association analysis provides a reliable method to uncover novel genes and mechanisms related to phenotypes, although further studies are needed.

© 2015 Taylor & Francis. This analysis compares the climate impacts over North America during winter associated with various El Niño-Southern Oscillation indices, including the Niño 3.4 index, the leading tropical Pacific outgoing longwave radiation and sea surface temperature covariability, and the eastern Pacific and central Pacific types of ENSO identified from both partial-regression-empirical orthogonal function and regression-EOF approaches. The traditional Niño 3.4 SST index is found to be optimal for monitoring the tropical Pacific OLR-SST covariability and for the tropical SST impact on North America. The circulation anomalies associated with the Niño 3.4 index project on both the Pacific/North American and Tropical/Northern Hemisphere patterns. The ENSO associated with the PNA tends to come from both the EP and CP ENSOs, whereas that associated with the TNH comes more from the EP ENSO. The variability of ENSO significantly affects North American temperature and precipitation, as well as temperature and precipitation extremes. For either the EP or CP types of ENSO, qualitatively similar patterns of climate and climate extreme anomalies are apparent associated with the indices identified by the two EOF approaches, with differences mainly in the anomalous amplitude. The anomalous patterns are generally field significant over North America for the EP ENSO but not field significant for the CP ENSO. The circulation anomalies associated with ENSO are reinforced and maintained by synoptic vorticity fluxes in the upper troposphere. The anomalous surface temperature is mainly determined by the anomalies in surface radiative heating in the face of upward surface longwave radiative damping. The precipitation anomalies are supported by the vertically integrated moisture transport. The differences in atmospheric circulation, surface temperature, and precipitation among the various ENSO indices, including the intensity and spatial structure of the fields, can be attributed to the corresponding differences in synoptic eddy vorticity forcing, surface radiative heating, and vertically integrated moisture transport.

Aneuploidy with chromosome instability is a cancer hallmark. We studied chromosome 7 copy number variation in gliomas and in primary cultures derived from them. We found tumor heterogeneity with cells having Chr7-CNV commonly occurs in gliomas, with a higher percentage of cells in high-grade gliomas carrying more than 2 copies of Chr7, as compared to low-grade gliomas. Interestingly, all Chr7-aneuploid cell types in the parental culture of established glioma cell lines reappeared in single-cell-derived subcultures. We then characterized the biology of three syngeneic glioma cultures dominated by different Chr7-aneuploid cell types. We found phenotypic divergence for cells following Chr7 missegregation, which benefited overall tumor growth in vitro and in vivo. Mathematical modeling suggested the involvement of chromosome instability and interactions among cell subpopulations in restoring the optimal equilibrium of tumor cell types. Both our experimental data and mathematical modeling demonstrated that the complexity of tumor heterogeneity could be enhanced by the existence of chromosomes with structural abnormality, in addition to their mis-segregations. Overall, our findings show, for the first time, the involvement of chromosome instability in maintaining tumor heterogeneity, which underlies the enhanced growth, persistence and treatment resistance of cancers. © 2013 Hu et al.