Steps towards decolonising contact improvisation in the university

Abstract

To engage critically in a process of decolonisation is complex in a postcolonial, globalised world in which migration, knowledge exchange, hybridity and fusion are commonplace. What is it to look openly to other cultures for inspiration and guidance while also holding anti-racist decolonising attitudes? How can contact improvisation (CI), for example, be decolonised? How are its foundations in postmodern dance, Buddhism and martial arts made sense of in current contemporary discourses of decolonisation? What is interesting about the development of CI is that despite its roots in the inclusive politics of the 1970s American counterculture, the form is acknowledged as predominantly white and yet it draws heavily upon aikido, and in the approaches developed by Nancy Stark Smith, Tibetan Buddhism. Recent thinking and research invite deeper examination of what it might mean to decolonise CI as a practice for the twenty-first-century curriculum. This chapter discusses the decolonisation of the teaching of CI in the university. When oppressions and obstacles are institutionally and systemically inherent, as with racism, it is not only ethically agile to develop teaching and learning dialogues that deconstruct such oppressions but ethically necessary.