The Point of Contact

This paper discusses an experimental approach to a three-hour ‘lecture’ in the year 2 Models and Theories of Performance Practice module of the BA (Hons) in Drama. The students were introduced to Contact Improvisation - a form of improvised movement, which emerged in America in the 1970s - through a tripartite structure of lecture, practical session and reflective, phenomenological writing. A key aim was to encourage students to experience theory and practice as inter-woven and to discover whether this movement form would be regarded as interesting for its own sake and/or transferrable in some way to the students’ parallel studies in acting and directing. The session involved a general introduction to phenomenology as the study of experience and to phenomenological writing as a mode of first-person description in which the students were encouraged to attempt to capture in words aspects of their experience of encountering and embodying Contact Improvisation for the first time.