After trying to organise teaching at the LEAP partner organisation Tanzhaus Zürich proved unfeasible, an alternative plan to make use of the LEAP mobility was to attend Research Code 35, a week-long contact improvisation (CI) research project organised by the Bern Jam team. The Bern Jam is one of Europe’s longest running annual CI jams and in recent years has offered the opportunity for 25-30 experienced CI teachers and practitioners to gather together to exchange interests and insights from their practice of the form.

Besides simply taking each other’s classes, a strong and widely-varied form of sharing material among experienced CI teachers has arisen that has come to be known as “CI laboratories” or “lads”, or more commonly and simply as the act of “labbing”. The idea behind labbing is that peer groups of experienced practitioners can share or present ideas or questions, and all those present can contribute ideas towards working with and exploring the proposition. 

My experience of CI labs is that they can range from adopting a class-like form where exercises are presented by one or more people and then feedback solicited from the peer group that took the class. On the other hand, I have experienced groups that form around an anonymously written proposals and, out of more or less skillful processes of group thinking, decide on or invent a structure within which to research the proposal. 

In reality, there is a wide range of approaches but they are nonetheless distinct from jamming and I think take the shape of various forms of social organisation. I think this contrasts with the openness of the jamming situation in that something needs to be talked about and worked out between people which requires entering the world of social exchange and language. In the jamming situation, the invitation is to sink into a somatic relationship with ourselves, to dive deeply into the felt sense and experience thinking as a physical activity. The brain is thought to have evolved initially to control movement (2).

I had never attended Research Code before and, after reading the invitation, expected labbing activities to account for a large proportion of the research time. What was surprising and gratifying for me was that as a group we steered clear of labbing and simply took the repeated act of improvising with each other in CI jams as the sole research activity.

On reflection, what I think made this possible was that a large proportion of participants had some degree of familiarity with Nancy Stark Smith’s Underscore  Practice (1). In the best traditions of the Underscore, there was not a slavish adherence to the score but instead a collective creative adaptation of the score as a container to serve the wide-ranging interests and needs of the group.

The Underscore explicitly offers itself as a container for research through its invitation in the opening circle of participants to “plant seeds” by sharing their interests. I feel this to be an act of group thinking and intelligence. While everyone offers up a small selection of their personal interests, time is limited, often interests overlap so that if someone mentions something that’s in the front of my mind then I’m freed up to offer up something else. 

Some people speak from long considered interests, while some people speak from what is arising in the moment. A sort of list is accumulated and, once heard, there is no obligation to focus on or hold to what I or anyone else has seeded. Then everyone dances.

The seeds, while not foregrounded, often show themselves in the dancing. They also often crop up as references during the closing circle where participants can share their reflections from the dance. Practicing CI by repeatedly dancing together in jams framed by opening and closing circles leads to a continuity and richness of practice and dialogue through the accumulation of shared experience and growing familiarity with each other.

As the week proceeded, it became clear though our daily checking in circles that we were all most interested in making the jam the sole container for our shared and individual research and that there would be no scheduled time devoted to labbing.

Instead, what arose were groups that gathered around special interests, for example, Mindfulness and CI, and Performance and CI. Such groups would take time to meet between jams to talk and they would also share a special score (an OverScore maybe?) that they would enact inside of the larger Underscore frame. In this way, the week unfolded with two jams a day with a variety of self-organised activities that during the breaks and evenings.

On reflection this was an immensely rich week where the group placed its trust in simply dancing and dialoguing together as research. 

1. Koteen D. & Smith N.S. 2008. Caught Falling: The Confluence of Contact Improvisation, Nancy Stark Smith, and Other Moving Ideas. Contact Editions

2. Alain Berthoz. 2002. The Brain's Sense of Movement  Harvard University Press