Collaboration on Contact Quarterly Magazine (2006)

On the particular way Contact Improvisation Spreads

CI in BUENOS AIRES has a very strong presence. If you’ve never gone out of town, you believe it naturally exists all over the world. In Buenos Aires, JAM is an everyday word and an option for every night of the week.
Even though at the Jams I found silence, the city sounded too hard. I decided to leave Babylon and look for nature. I went to CORDOBA, a district in the centre of the country where the landscape is trees, rivers, and sierras, and where people live in another time…I find the way of life in the sierras totally linked to CI spirit. That’s why I was surprised when I found out nobody there knew what CI was about.
Causally (and I say causally and not casually!), I met some other people on a similar search, who arrived to live at the sierras already familiar with CI. We coincided on a wish for an experiment: Bringing the basic concepts of CI to every day life.
So we rented a studio in the middle of nature, close by a village called SAN MARCOS SIERRAS, (150 km away from CORDOBA CITY), where we lived altogether for a month in a spontaneous and self-gestated encounter. We spent the week experimenting, and on Saturdays we opened the space with classes and jams to whoever was interested in finding out what it was that we were spending so much time on.
One Saturday, a painter came from Cordoba city. He participated in the class and spent the rest of the day painting landscapes. When I approached him to ask how he felt, he answered: “Inspired! You’re living the art here.”
It ended up that this man was the director of the Contemporary Art Centre in Cordoba city, and during our chat he mentioned that since he had assumed that political post, he hasn’t painted again. The two following Saturdays, he came back and kept on dancing, painting, and— totally enthusiastic about what was going on there—he offered us the support and the space of the Contemporary Art Centre, which up to that point was only used for art expositions.
We happily accepted his proposal, which implied taking CI to Cordoba city.I feel something special when dancing in new spaces, particularly when it happens in spaces that were never danced in before. At CAC, we did the first Jams and classes, and we also got support to organize a workshop with Cristina Turdo, my first teacher in Buenos Aires.
At every Jam, we agreed on the date for the next one. And so the CI net kept spreading and contacting new bodies, while ¨contacters¨ from Buenos Aires and ROSARIO kept arriving to enjoy the possibility of dancing on such a far, unknown, and receptive land, close to the river and mountain.
And so, in 2005 the CI movement was born in Cordoba. Nowadays, Jams, classes, and “living together” experiences happen regularly at the sierras and in Cordoba city. [Translated from Spanish by Paula Colangelo] [Carolina Becker, Mallorca, Spain; carolinabecker7@gmail.com]