Contact [and] Improvisation

This special issue of the Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices focuses on contact [and] improvisation praxis. As a movement proposition, contact improvisation (CI) has done much to influence developments in the field of dance and somatic practices since its inception in the early 1970s. In the nearly 40 years of Contact Quarterly’s circulation as a vibrant publishing platform and newsletter for dance, improvisation and CI practices (since the first Contact Newsletter in 1975), and despite a rise in postgraduate and doctoral research into CI, there has not yet been a peer-reviewed academic journal issue dedicated to a discussion of practices and theories emerging from CI. For the editors, this gap seemed an important one to name, and the invi- tation to edit this issue emerged following organisation of two conferences as part of Contact Festival Dartington 2013 and 2014 at Falmouth University, UK, both of which focused on discussing CI practices. The 2013 conference, Political Ecologies in Contact: Articulating Improvisation Practices,1 invited practitioner and academic responses to the notion of articulating what CI is, and in 2014 Contact Improvisation for Critical Response 2 asked contributors to consider how CI practices might operate as platforms for critical exchange