Ecki Mueller, Alyssa Lynes and Bernd Ka teach a Compact Training Program in Freiburg with a small consistent group of dancers over the course of 4 months: This May, 2015, they decided to devote an evening to film and discussion as part of the CI Training.  They first viewed “Fall After Newton” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMj3Coktu40)  and then “Five Ways In”.

Here are a few of their comments:

Ecki (one of the organizers of Freiburg CI International Festival): It’s very interesting to see which different questions these people come to the festival with and to realize how very different ideas and approaches or questions that people have and to make clear that an event like this is hosting all these different people with different worlds in their minds and what they bring to the festival. And specifically with this film, I feel like that you point very much to these individuals and really you go deeply in to their questions that they have in their life in a way-what the dance does to help them with this question that they have. And this opens a very wide range of different worlds behind this film. I think this is the quality of this film. Showing the different personal perspectives, questions.

Participant A response: There is one idea coming to me. It’s where Dani was selling her clothes and the other girl said that here we are a community that everybody feels like to be very open and very good but everybody wants to buy the new clothes to be the most beautiful. So this was funny.

I saw also in the festival that, OK there were all these questions, spiritual question, what I am doing and what is my relation to the other and to myself etc. but there is also ‘yes, I can do it!’ I feel also that a lot of people want to have a nice dance, to be able to do it well. So this doing well, being nice takes us always to another place.

Ecki: There are some people in this Contact community that don’t like to play this, to be nice, to take so much care of the other. There is some resistance against that. You can feel sometimes that they try to go against this hippy nice very smoothy thing. But I think it’s like 90 percent that like to go with the flow, be very nice, also to yourself. But we don’t provoke like the first generation, They provoked each other and risk like hell. We stay much more away from this. We are much more gentle. But still there are some people with this kind of first generation way who want to break patterns, to risk something, to confront people. But there are not very many. I think it’s good that there are some other minds with ideas as well in this community that fresh us up again.

Alyssa: I am thinking what you said about how people want to do it well.   Then the question is ‘what is doing it well for me?’ because it might be different than ‘doing it well’ for each of you. And this is striking to see “Fall after Newton” and then seeing “Five Ways In” today because I think they had a very different ‘doing it well’ and maybe each of us has a different feeling about that. That to me was very clear. They were really going for momentum over being smooth and fluid as Ecki was teaching this morning.

Participant B: There are not so many places where there are 300 people and you can touch and be touched by everyone. At the end these things they do, its really a great thing.

Ecki: It was at the end of the week. At the beginning it might be more difficult for some.

CI Compact Training Program: (http://www.bewegungs-art.de/ ciiFreiburg@web.de)