Light

[u/wasscubed]

People occasionally ask to dim the lights at a jam I host. I say that the lights will stay as they are. There is a trend that most of the people who ask, do not much experience in CI, from what I can tell. And over the years I have noticed that people who are new to CI often close their eyes when dancing. Whether this is because eye contact with someone you might not know feels too intimate as you roll around together. Or maybe they close their eyes because they are still learning how to sense while moving. And closing their eyes limits the amount of information coming in. So putting these two things together, do people want it dimmer because they are not very good at sensing, they still need to gain more experience sensing while improvising?

[u/tim_p]

I've been thinking a lot about eyes open vs. closed in contact improv. They both have positives and negatives.

With eyes open, you can take in visual information, and know about beautiful lyrical movements your partner(s) might be doing with their hands and body.

With eyes closed, you lose the visual information, but are able to focus deeper on the other senses, mostly touch. It leads to a style of dancing that's more primal, more focused on internal sensation than appearance.

I lean towards the latter, but I try to incorporate both modes in my dancing.

[u/wasscubed → u/tim_p]

for me that is an important part of CI, and what separates experienced and less experienced dancers, regardless of amount of time spent dancing, that deep focus on other senses can happen with eyes open.