Description

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The inside-out of dancer/Contact Quarterly editor Nancy Stark Smith's life as seen through the kaleidoscope of her thirty-six year involvement with Contact Improvisation. The book includes Q&As between the authors tracing the history of the dance form; photos of dancing and living; life stories; anecdotes from friends, colleagues, and family; and a description of Stark Smith's Underscore. The Underscore is a framework for practicing and researching dance improvisation that Stark Smith has been developing since the early 1990s. It is a score that guides dancers through a series of changing states from solo deepening/releasing and sensitizing to gravity and support, through group circulation and interaction, Contact Improvisation engagements, opening out to full group improvisation with compositional awareness, and back to rest and reflection.

About the Author

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DAVID KOTEEN is a writer, a dancer, an organizer, who began dancing contact improvisation in 1981.His published writings include: IV Passings To A Bridg-gap, Among The Unfertilized Ladies, Decay's Miscellany, Foreigners' Prayerbook, Sunday Morning Meditations, Foreigners' Psaltery, Red and the Wolf, Custard Apples, Nuff Said, Some Seals, Mist Fortune Cards, and the musical HERESY. NANCY STARK SMITH trained as an athlete and gymnast, leading her to study and perform modern and postmodern dance in the early 1970s, greatly influenced by Judson Dance Theater breakthroughs in NYC in the 1960s. She danced in the first performances of Contact Improvisation with Steve Paxton and others in 1972 and has since been central to its development as dancer, teacher, performer, writer/publisher, and organizer. She travels worldwide teaching and performing Contact and other improvised dance work with many favorite dance partners.