David Koteen: If you were to fantasize—in your dream of dreams—the effect of CI [Contact Improvisation] on Western culture, what will you project?
Nancy Stark Smith:
More peace.
Flexibility (improvisation) based on a direct sense of being on the physical earth, in your physical body;
communicating with respect, intelligence, curiosity, compassion, humor, and love across boundaries
(race, language, ideology, dance form, cultures, subcultures, generations).
Clarity, confidence, risk, respect.
And more: cooperation, imagination, vitality.
High art play, adventure in work, responsibility, and humor.
A sense of independence and interdependence.
from Caught Falling: The Confluence of Contact Improvisation, Nancy Stark Smith, and Other Moving Ideas
by David Koteen and Nancy Stark Smith, 2008.
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For the Global Underscore, we invite attunement
to the social, political, economic, and cultural realms
in which we each and others are situated
and in which we each and others practice the Underscore.
We invite awareness of oppression and inequity, acknowledging that oppression limits us all
and prevents some from participating fully, or at all,
in the Global Underscore, Contact Improvisation, and dance in general.
~ Patrick Crowley, Sarah Young, Colleen Bartley, Nicole Touzien, GUS Coordinators
