Back to the ground, background
I began organizing the blindfold jam in Helsinki, Finland, about six years ago. It was something I remembered from some contact festivals, somewhere at the start of the 2000s. At one point I didn’t see it happening anymore so I thought it would be lovely to bring it back as it was a bit different take on a contact improvisation jam.
I had heard that some hadn’t previously felt it safe. I was wondering perhaps that was one of the reasons it was discontinued. I don’t remember there being much structure in the blindfold jams I attended. I don’t remember consent being discussed.
I have danced contact improvisation since about the turn of the millennium. I have a degree in contemporary dance, acting and anthropology. My dance training is leaning on somatic practices. Currently I’m finishing my artistic research doctorate at the University of the Arts Helsinki focusing on consent in immersive performances and game performances.
I also have a background in club culture and sex positive culture. I identify as non-binary.
I thought to mention these historical details as these are grounding how I understand contact improvisation and how I approach organizing the jam.
Art, what a curious thing
Organizing the jam is part of my artistic work. I’m not saying this to underline an ego, but for concrete reasons.
Contact improvisation started as the artistic work of one particular (queer) artist, but it has underlined co-creation from the start. This contradiction is at the very heart of CI as a practice.
When I originally started the blindfold jam, I chose not to organize it from inside the community, because I felt I needed to set up safety structures I didn’t see in the CI community at that time. I didn’t hear discussions about safer spaces, privilege or consent. I heard of people not taking part in jams – also the regular jams -, because they didn’t feel safe. I wanted to do something, to present an alternative rather than start a discussion which I felt at the time would result in changes only through a very slow process.
This is not to say I don’t understand and appreciate the communal nature of CI or the communities I am a part of. I do. However, at that point I wanted to create a space where concerns of safer spaces and the marginalization of queer people would be addressed, and practices of consent would be organized into concrete structures. I felt that there should be a clear and transparent structure for ensuring safety – one of those structures being that there is one person taking care of the safety in the space and everyone always knows who the person is.
To be sure, I’m not always presenting this as an overall solution to all jam spaces. I am simply articulating the reasons for making a personal decision in relation to this jam.
Improvisation and consent
In addition to safety, another artistic inspiration for the jam was that I sensed it did something for the communal exploration of touch that I felt was in some ways truer (always a funny word, but bear with me) to the origins of CI and in some ways took it to a fresh direction.
CI – as I understand it – was originally about exploration through a shared contact point. It was a countermovement to the traditional model of teaching dance where a teacher shows a perfect movement, and the students copy it. CI was part of the somatic turn in dance in the sense that it moved the focus from the form of dance to the experience of dance.
However, CI has also accumulated a lot of forms as it has developed. There are tables, spirals in particular ways and specific ways of lifting, to mention a few.
Dancing blindfolded disrupts some of these forms and patterns. You cannot see the form of the other person, so you need to feel it. You don’t see what’s the direction of their movement, so you must sense it. Dancing CI blindfolded sensitizes you to feeling the movement, rather than seeing and acting on based on information you receive through sight.
Of course, other things often happen, too, when you take away the sense of sight. People tend to control a lot of things through sight – our personal space, who we let close to us, who we feel drawn to based on how they look and so on. These are wonderful things as they are meant to keep us safe, but the control may also make us stick to particular patterns of movement.
This brings us to the tricky part. I would say that the rules of the safer space makes the space of blindfold jam safer in some regards, but taking away sight makes it riskier in others – for example, bigger acts of sharing weight most often are physically riskier done with eyes closed.
Perhaps one of the trickiest dimensions is consent. This is the reason why most of the safety instructions in the blindfold jam I organize relate to consent.
In other kinds of spaces (sex positive spaces to mention an example) the clearest rule is asking before touching. In CI this becomes tricky, because CI is very committed to non-verbal communication. In a non-CI context, when I want to be as sure as I can about consent, I ask verbally. I feel the boundaries are more fluid when negotiating physically. It means more room for miscommunication. This is a simplification as I do also feel that physical ways of negotiating consent should be as valid as verbal ones.
In the blindfold jam I have tried to solve these challenges in relation to consent by introducing both verbal and physical tools for communication. I’m the safety person in the space keeping an eye on the jam. As a safety person, I have a few simple physical signs I’m using to actively make sure if I’m unsure of a situation being okay for dancers involved.
I will not go into detail on the instructions as these are introduced at the beginning of each jam. Here I’m trying to keep the focus on what are the main challenges and how – on a general level – those are being addressed in the jam.
This I feel is the most important: Consent is the responsibility of everyone in the space. I as the organizer am trying to create an environment that enables a space of both freedom and safety. I am giving some simple tools to enable everyone to take care of themselves and each other. I have a special responsibility as the one setting the frame for the jam. But ultimately, consent is the responsibility of everyone sharing the space. It can’t be completely outsourced to the organizer.
This asks the ability to respect the boundaries of others and the ability to articulate one’s own boundaries.
In terms of what I understand as the basics of CI, this calls for careful listening. In that sense, consent is not a new thing added on top of CI, it’s a deepening of the listening that has always been essential to CI.
How is the other one moving in relation to you? Are there cues by which they are trying to indicate their wishes or boundaries? How are you responding to what is being communicated to you?
Moving forward
CI is a communal practice. Even though I started by explaining why I felt I needed to organize this jam in a slightly different way, I am part of the global community of CI.
For me this means trying to make things better for everyone together. As a professional artist and organizer, I’m trying to make sure I have ways to hear from the dancers about what could make the jam I’m organizing better. And like in a dance, I can invite, but I cannot force a response. In terms of organizing, this means that if there are problems, dancers need to articulate these to the organizer. I need to be able to listen.
The aim is to explore what we haven’t yet explored in a safer way. In this shared exploration we need to communicate to know where we want to go. It might seem contradictory, but we need to articulate where we are when not knowing where we are and where we are going. In this constant curious dance of communication, we can find new things while making sure we’re all okay.
How do you move forward? What helps the other one in their dance?
For me the best contact dancer in the world is the one that makes the other one feel like the best dancer in the world. I sadly repeatedly fail at it. I constantly enjoy trying to get there.
‘Here I found love. What else could I ask for?’
‘It’s kind of like contact improvisation, but kind of like a thing of its own.’
Feedback from dancers at the Blindfold Jam