Thank you for all the dancers and sites who participated in Global Underscore 2024! At this interesting juncture in the evolution of Contact Improvisation and Underscore with the passing of Nancy Stark Smith and Steve Paxton, the desire to connect with each other globally continues through the Underscore, either at the same time or “atemporally”…❤️

The GLOBAL UNDERSCORE (GUS) centers on a yearly dance event in which dancers all over the world practice the Underscore simultaneously for a 4-hour period.

GLOBAL UNDERSCORE 2024
Saturday, 22 June 2024
14:00–18:00 UTC (10:00 am–2:00 pm EDT New York)

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We dedicate Global Underscore (GUS) to Nancy Stark Smith (11 February, 1952 – 1 May, 2020), the creator of the Underscore. To learn more about Nancy, visit her website. Remembrances of Nancy are shared on Contact Quarterly’s NSS Harvest Facebook page.

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.

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

COUNTDOWN TO GLOBAL UNDERSCORE 2024
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