T R Y I N G

Timo Wagner

When I discovered and began to study dance in college, I quickly learned to strike the word “try” from my vocabulary, because trying meant I wasn’t doing the thing or dancing. Trying would often accompany another verb; trying to leap, trying to balance. Instead I framed my efforts into just doing the thing at hand; just leap, find balance. Semantically, “trying” felt unnecessary or even weak. Since that time, my relationship with that word has been pretty much the same–in my life and teaching I rarely (if ever) use it.

When asked to write about “trying” as a co-organizer of Contact Improvisation Twin Cities (CITC), I was somewhat baffled. How could I frame my experience with a word I felt so detached from? But after more thought, I realized I actually love this word. The form itself is really built on trying, and begs a different definition of the word; trying as an invitation to experimentation. And as for my experiences with CITC, we have been trying to build a community, trying to get more organized, trying out new programming, trying to address important needs, and goddamnit, trying our best.

Contact Improvisation (CI) has been a part of my dance story since the beginning. I was organizing late night jams before I had even taken a formal CI class. CI has long been a way to find clarity in myself as an artist and as a human outside of the dynamics of performance. It is important to my life, which is why I wanted to support the form in my community.

Now, CITC offers weekly Monday jams. Every first Monday of the month, we practice The Underscore, a long-form dance improvisation structure developed by Nancy Stark Smith. Every third Monday, we invite live musicians to improvise with us. All other Mondays, we have a short guided warm-up which leads into open dancing. In addition to our weekly jams, we have a new series named “Monthly Musings”. These events are for tangential explorations within the world of CI. The second definition of trying comes in handy here, as we’ve been experimenting quite a bit; guest workshops, a moving community discussion of our guidelines, and a continuous hour of shaking into jamming, with more to come.

Along with all of that organizational trying, I am dedicated to the continued research and experimentation with the form itself. Each time we practice CI, we add to the collective conversation that is the form, which speaks to its foundation: it isn’t a single codified technique, and continues to evolve as it is practiced. At a recent multi-day jam, I explored new personal research topics through one of the most useful tools I’ve learned in CI: the secret score. This self-motivated directive was all about endings. I tried:

● Practicing immediately and without warning ending dances at the feeling of being done, bored, distracted, in need of taking care of myself, etc.

●  Following an impulse to leave as it arises.

[Which isn’t to devalue the practice of staying in a dance beyond initial discomfort, not-knowing, tiredness, awkwardness, or boredom, and seeing what lies beyond those states.]

●  Noticing how it feels to drop something i’m engaged in when impulses redirect.

[Sometimes refreshing and freeing, sometimes like I was inconsiderate – being with all of the feelings that came up.]

● Noticing what it feels like when I broke the rules to my own secret score and stayed in a dance beyond my impulse to leave

● Sensing what it feels like to actually want to stay in a dance. The importance of intimately understanding what YES feels like required my understanding that I know how to say NO.

In this secret score, I was able to explore a way to disengage from a dance without having to explain or “find an ending” (which I discovered was an unconscious secret score I had been practicing!). I found I was deepening the conversation with myself within the social practice that CI tends to be. I was tuning my ability to listen to my own shifting desires and needs, which I realized was allowing me to fully practice one of the basic principles of CI—be responsible for your own safety.

This score was an experiment that helped me listen to myself. It also allowed me to interrogate how this approach of  “self-centering” (or is it self-centeredness?) could contribute to being a good community member and an effective community leader. How can I tune to my own limits as an organizer? How can I frame my leadership as trying to do the best I can? Organizing and advocating for dance can be very trying. Here, a third definition of trying as “difficult” or “hard to endure” is useful. There is an abundance of trying things to juggle in the life of a dance artist. But the practice of CI continues to remind me that I can conduct my own research, centering self-care is vital to being a generous leader, and that endings of all kinds can be informative and valuable.

Timo Wagner is a dancer and yoga teacher in the Twin Cities. They are a co-organizer of Contact Improvisation Twin Cities. CITC on Facebook