Contact Improvisation Group Exercise: Cueing

Cueing Exercise

Annie Brook, MA LPC

© 2001 Annie Brook. All rights reserved.

In a Group – Mill about the room. Expand your peripheral vision and feel the attention on both your own dance and the other dancers. Look for possibilities for contact as you dance. Now occasionally come close to another dancer and see if you can read what the interaction is about to be. Notice if you are sending/receiving signals and what these are. Let your awareness be on these messages as you engage in a mini dance. Is the person over or under? Are they offering levers? Lifts? Are they "expecting" something from me? Where is their center? How do I want to play? Is this a slow or energetic invitation? Do I desire to go over, under? Move on to your own dance and continue to have mini dances, always exploring the cues, both internal and external, and the messages these cues give you. Complete the dance and dialogue, noticing what you tend to pay attention to. Are there certain people with whom the messages are congruent and easy? What makes this so? Finish the dialog, let go of analysis, and see what happens as you dance.

Return to exploring cueing which includes lifts and more complex moves. What are the cues? How do you know where to go? Where is your intention and attention? Note that there are not necessarily answers for this, and certainly not a "right" way to do this. The intent is to make you aware of the subtlety of the contact language, and that you are indeed reading and intending and interpreting as you go.

After playing with cueing, we found that our dances had much more momentum because we had flushed out a subtle language. It wasn't spoken or defined, yet awareness of it served to increase our risk taking with each other.

© 2001 Annie Brook. All rights reserved. An excerpt from the book Contact Improvisation and BodyMind Centering, available here.