Excerpt -Auór Journal interview with Irene Sposetti

What brought you to the practice? 

A sports instructor I hardly knew, met during my physical-theatre studies back in 1999 in Rome, dropped me one day to a studio, firmly convinced I shall try out a peculiar movement practice he came across with, and I never met him any more…I always found that start pretty amusing! I studied then in Rome with Italian choreographer and dancer Simonetta Alessandri.  From there I moved swiftly to Paris to continue my studies in theatre and dance. There I had the opportunity to deepen my understanding and embodiment of contact improvisation. I met many great dancers and teachers who very much influenced my future professional life as a dancer, researcher and teacher.

What is it about the form you are drawn to?

Contact improvisation is a dance that develops in a culturally innovative and international community where I find a lot of freedom and affinities in the way I can embody, investigate, learn, and share with others. It’s a place where I can always question, discover new things, transform myself, and co-create. 

Movements generated in a CI dance confronting ?

No, if I keep a clear level of awareness at all times. This enables me to listen and I define my own boundaries and needs within an improvised dialogue with others. By being constantly alert, it offers me the chance to understand what possibilities are available, my responses, and eventual limits, even in a very fast exchange. 

I love the challenges and the risk-taking involved in a dance, whilst also caring for my own and my partners’ safety. I very seldom do anything that I don’t feel like doing during a dance. For this reason, I never linger in relating to someone that lacks listening and capacities of negotiation. I choose rather propose new options in the movement dialogue we are engaged or even propose the closure of the dance if needed.

Where is your focus when you are practicing?

My focus shifts or remains concentrated during a dance. It is a fundamental and malleable tool of investigation which carves directions and brings to light discoveries. It is not bound by control but leads by presence, curiosity, intention and intuition. Contact improvisation has a focus on physical touch, awareness, mindfulness and flowing movements. What do you think these characteristics bring to you? 

I love the deep-felt sense of gravity in my body shifting in space through proprioception and touch. It makes me feel alive, fully embodied. It opens in me channels of creativity, playfulness, and physical intelligence at play. 

I love to be concentred in dancing, in heightened states of alertness and physical awareness.

Is it a trust experience?

Trust is a state which underlines my breath, my nights and days, my silences, my words, the way I walk life, the way I relate to people, to loss to gains and endings, the way I listen within and without, the way I am and become.  Trust is a word most students and beginners say when discovering contact improvisation. Nowadays I wouldn’t use that word myself to describe my experience of dancing. Trust for me is a wide subject. It’s the state which underlines my breath, my silences, my words, and the way I am and walk life. Trust is the way I relate to people, the way I deal with losses and gains, and the way I listen to myself inside and out. 

Dancing in improvisation and partnering can be a very direct way of revealing our personal relationship with trust indeed.

What is the most exciting thing about contact improvisation from your perspective in performance as an observant?  

“CI performances” can be often a bit boring for me to watch, especially if the performers do not inform their dance with compositional awareness, including space, the audience, and a sense of development or narrative. The practice of CI is not itself a performance for me, even though it can be very fascinating or fulfilling to watch at times. Also during jam sessions, where practitioners gather to practice, one can assist in excellent spontaneous performative events.

How has contact improvisation informed your life?

Often It seems to me as if my life and dancing simply merged as if I am in a never-ending CI Jam!…A flow of becoming, a journey made of creative embodiments, interactions, changing and refining. An evolving motion including so many possibilities, manifesting in a coherent and indeed mysterious way. A flow, an expression of trust and authenticity, a state in which I am profoundly engaged and detached at the same time, a place where I investigate and learn, where I create, interact, and enjoy. 

Excerpt form an interview made by Auór Journal in June 2019

In Conversation With Dancers Irene and Kieran. When we stumbled across this beautiful contact improvisation video, we just had to know more about the people and the practice behind it. Contact improvisation, as we’ve discovered, is a form of improvised dancing and the exploration of one’s body in relation to others by using the fundamentals of sharing weight, touch, and movement awareness. It plays with the artistry of falling off balance, counterbalance, finding the shelves of the body, learning the mechanics of the body in order to handle someone else’s weight or be lifted. So, we set out to interview contact improvisation…