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Instant invention Andrew de Lotbinière Harwood's jam session by WALTER KRAJEWSKI
We're all familiar with this to some degree. On any first encounter of the sexual kind, we search for subtle signals, sending our own and awaiting responses. It's the mating dance in which we expose our vulnerability and risk embarrassment and rejection. Contact improv, as Harwood suggests, also runs on the edge of risk. In his Structured Improvisation, which he performs with Kirstie Simson, they agree upon some parameters, select some music, but then trust their ability to respond to each other's movements. Each watches how the other uses the space and then attempts to use it differently. Each may be in a completely different mood at any moment, setting up a dynamic contrast or complement. They let their bodies talk to each other, running the risk of banal chatter, hoping to make intriguing corporeal statements and achieve flashes of poetry. Harwood has always been a risk-taker. He started with gymnastics: balancing or swinging on bars, hanging from rings, defying gravity. Harwood the gymnast instantaneously reacted, ever at risk from a false move or a missed contact with solid support. When he passed from gymnastics to yoga, he realized that the "still point" was not for him. His discovery of dance was nothing less than the introduction to an addiction. Given his own reflex to move, it was only natural for Harwood to question the nature of reflexes. Réflexe (suite) is an ensemble piece based on this exploration. "We have natural reflexes, such as to reach out and touch and to withdraw into self-protection. But beyond the animal instincts, there are also the emotional reflexes we've been taught," he says. "In a relationship, people may become protective, leery about another person and suspicious of their advances. We have to question these emotional reflexes. Do they serve us well? Do they interfere?" Harwood's current program at Tangente is an overview of the possibilities of the now 25-year-old contact improvisation technique. Réflexe (suite) is specifically structured to offer solo, duet and ensemble sections. In Structured Improvisation, Harwood and Simson present a more typical duet form of risk-taking contact improv. In Hask, on the other hand, Simson takes the gamble as a soloist that, at the moment, the impulse within her body will take flight. If she can snare it, the dance will take hold. If she can't, who knows? But that's the chance, the tension--and the rewarding thrill--of improvisation. Andrew de Lotbinière Harwood performs at Espace Tangente, Thursday-Sunday, May 1-4. $15, students $12. 525-1500 |
Jazz musicians don't exactly make it up as they go along. It takes years of experience to be able to respond with elegant style to another musician. And according to Andrew de Lotbinière Harwood, contact improvisation--a form of instantaneous composition based on immediate response to body contact with the other dancer(s)--is the dance equivalent to jazz.