The Floor Becomes the Ceiling

A five-hour private lab for six dancers, built on two threads: centres of gravity, and where support actually comes from. This journal documents each class from both sides. What was taught, and what the dancers found, in their own words from the recorded closing sharing.¹

What the class was built on

Centres of gravity first. The aim was to widen attention past the point of contact and start tracking where the weight actually lives, in yourself and in the person you are dancing with. A dance can keep the skin of contact and lose the weight underneath it; the centre is what tells you the difference.

Alongside that, grounding. The feet, the heels, the sense of being connected downward rather than perched on top of the floor. Lifts come later than people think, and they come from below: an unrooted base transmits its wobble upward into whoever it carries.

Few exercises, each one long. Bringing energy up from the ground and consolidating it on one or two points of contact, staying until tone arrives in the body. Statues that reshape each other, first in pairs, then in threes, under one rule: two centres of gravity stay in contact somehow, whatever shape the bodies take. And then the score the day was named for.

The score: reversing where support comes from

Lie on the floor. Close your eyes. Now flip the room in your mind: the surface under your back becomes the floor of the space above you, and you are holding it up. You become the support.

Contact Improvisation carries an unspoken hierarchy between the one who gives weight and the one who receives it. This score dissolves it while the dancer is still lying alone on the ground, because the most passive position in the room becomes an act of support. Reciprocity, embodied before the duet even starts.

One dancer named it the high point of his day, and described the mechanism better than it was taught:

"It's totally different if you lay down thinking that you are laying down on the ground, or if you are laying down because you are holding a bigger space. Generally when I enter a jam I use the floor a lot to be in contact with something and feel myself, but I never thought about just reversing the sensation."

That is the whole score in two sentences: the body stays exactly as it is, and the direction of support reverses. Daniel Lepkoff wrote that when he believes he knows where down is, he is always wrong, since only gravity has that information.² The score is a way of borrowing that doubt on purpose.

What the dancers found

The ground stopped being a surface:

"I never thought about the ground like that. It's a relation between the ground and me. I can use the ground as a partner. I'm supporting it and it's supporting me. It was like, wow. It opened the whole space and many possibilities."

One dancer met the axis he avoids:

"There was a point where I was like, oh wow, I'm not really dancing with this horizontal axis, because of a fear of falling. I don't really open my body in that way. I just noticed that."

One connected her own grounding to her partners' safety, a link most dancers never make out loud:

"Sometimes I'm missing a bit of stability in my feet, and then the lifts are a bit wobbly and people don't feel so safe. So really connecting back with the heels, with the sense of okay, I'm grounded to the earth, brought a lot more stability in my body."

One described what a score is for, which is that a single constraint changes everything downstream of it:

"How the dance changes when I'm just connecting with my chest, always trying to find it again even if there's a disconnection and coming back to that. I always find that fascinating, when I have one thing I'm playing with like a score."

An experienced dancer found language for what her body already knew:

"A lot of things I feel like I'm doing quite intuitively in the body by now. I liked getting the mental concept again, like, ah yes, that's a repositioning of the body."

And one dancer put the case for touch over sight better than any theory of the form:

"If you change perspective, things change with the sight. But if I touch somebody and I feel this body, I cannot be fooled."

One thing to practise

Lie down on the floor. Give your weight completely, the way you always do.

Now keep your body exactly as it is and change one thing in your mind. You are holding the space above you.

Stay a few minutes and notice your ribs, your breath, the front of your body. Then get up and dance with it.

A question to carry

Which axis do you avoid, and what are you afraid would happen if you opened it?

You probably already know. Most of us have one direction we quietly never go.

In presence,
Eric