NJ Blog - Nina Enemark

New Jammers Participant Blog

Entry 3 - 27th June 2015

Reflecting on the New Jammers programme, I feel really lucky to have had this opportunity to explore CI facilitation in such a nourishing and stimulating environment. I felt a huge amount of engagement and support from everyone involved in the programme, which has helped me to develop my ideas and approach to facilitating in a way that would not otherwise have been possible.

The collaboratively led jam at the end of the programme made it clear to me how much we had come together as a group and learnt to listen to each other; for me it was a great lesson, as well, in trust and giving up control – as we were only responsible for 5 minutes of the warm-up each – which I hope I can take away with me and make part of my facilitation practice in general. This final jam showed me how rewarding and enjoyable collaborative creative tasks can be when there is this level of trust, support and listening; I hope to continue to be part of activities like this. 

The last two New Jammers sessions, where we each led a half-hour warm-up, were a fascinating glimpse into the different perspectives that everyone in the group was coming from, which highlighted to me that there is no one perfect way to facilitate, no limited set of ideas or themes that has to be used. The possibilities are endless. This also helped me to give up (here’s hoping, anyway!) some of my perfectionism about facilitating; there are just so many ideas and exercises to choose from and dream up and all that matters is that they serve their purpose within a warm-up and hang together coherently. I loved having this opportunity to try things out – without it having to ‘work’ – in a safe space. This is what I feel the programme was about, for me, all throughout: it created a unique space to experiment, receive expert guidance and share ideas and experiences with people all going through a similar process and asking similar questions.

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Spider diagram exercise: 23rd May 2015

Following a mentoring session with Tom, all New Jammers were asked to complete the exercise below as a way to focus and articulate their interests and enquiries.

Entry 2 - 12th April 2015

For me, the jam included in this session’s exploration of Nancy Stark Smith’s UnderScore was one of the most full of surprises, free of physical and mental effort, and in the moment – and I’m curious as to why.

This experience, for me, seemed to grow from the UnderScore warm-up phase that each person goes through at their own pace, particularly the stages involving exploring the skinesphere and kinesphere. Here, bringing my attention to the sensations already happening in my body, and then exploring my range of movement without ‘stepping out’ from where I have planted myself on the floor, gives me a sense of ‘pre-doing’: moving without fully moving. In this way, I feel my intention and desire to move is heightened. When I actually do start to ‘travel with the kinesphere’ (one of the stages marked in the underscore), somehow there is more to the movement – intention, pleasure, presence – and less effort.

At the opening circle, as we threw around ideas about what defines the underscore, the concepts of ritual and ‘participatory theatre’ (to me, seeming to signifying the same thing, although I’m not familiar with the work of Nicolás Núñez, who uses the latter term), and heightened intention seems to chime with this idea. Ritual magic can be (and has, anthropologically, been) understood as mentally projecting something desired, and thus effecting the thing desired.[1] In addition to what happens specifically in the skinesphere/kinesphere exercises, to me it seems that having to take personal responsibility for going through the warm-up process demands a heightened commitment to each element, as there is no facilitator to move you on to the next element, ‘letting you off the hook’ if you hadn’t engaged particularly deeply with a certain exercise. You have to work through what that element is about before moving on.

That this heightened intention is experienced collectively again brings ritual to mind, as does Nancy Stark Smith’s term ‘glyphs’ for the UnderScore symbols. I find this really interesting, as hieroglyphs in Egyptian temples tell the stories, or myths, of the gods and describe the rituals enacted in those temples. As such they consecrate the space as sacred and give form to what happens there, helping to make the experience repeatable. The glyphs of the UnderScore give external, symbolic form to the movement that already happens in a jam, but as with the hieratic, esoteric language of many archaic rituals, their ‘meaning’ speaks to the already initiated; a few words denote broadly the sort of activity these symbols refer to, but ‘understanding’ them, I think, happens on an embodied, experiential level. They become the myth that accompanies the physical performance – never fully comprehensible on their own, but providing a framework and container for action that heightens its focus.

As a facilitator, I think the underscore offers a potentially really useful vocabulary for planning and articulating exercises that can play into a warm-up. A warm-up can draw not only on the underscore’s warm-up phase (which itself distils many commonly used warm-up techniques) but also on the various ‘grazing’ interactions represented in its ‘roadmap’ (as one New Jammer put it) of symbols. I also like the attention it gives to a collective ending for the whole room, which sometimes happens in jams but isn’t (usually?) prompted. Maybe a facilitator could play with this and invite a coming together, or just generally direct attention to the composition of the whole room, at the end of a jam…?

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[1] I’m reminded of a story a friend told me about the night before she went sky-diving. She was absolutely terrified. That evening, she visualised being an eagle soaring through the air, to the point that she could feel it physically. And when she jumped out of the plane she wasn’t afraid; she had ‘become the eagle’.

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Entry 1 - 15th March 2015

For me, this session began by highlighting something that keeps coming back to me (and I keep losing, and having to rediscover), about contact and facilitating: the importance of listening to what my body is telling me. 

Penny invited us to do our own warm-up, whatever we needed. Having to take responsibility for my own warm-up made me notice how I felt my mind was floating away from my body, high up into a taut, cerebral space. I realised that I needed someone to press my feet firmly into the floor, and enlisted a fellow New Jammer to do this with me. 

I was quite amazed by how powerfully this helped release the tension I was carrying. It was exactly what I needed, and brought home to me, again, that acknowledging and addressing my own warm-up needs has to be my starting point as a jammer as well as a facilitator.

I really liked how we shared our stories about how we came to CI with the rest of the group while standing, then sitting, in a circle, warming up the people to either side of us. I felt connected to the group – the two people on either side of me that I was warming up, and by extension, the rest of the group as we formed a kind of linked chain – in a way that I may not have done if we had just gone round in a circle telling our stories. 

We use circles with connecting touch a lot in jam warm-ups, but not really in settings where people share things about themselves; this crossover was interesting to me and made me appreciate even more the impact that being physically connected in a circle can have.

The main exercise of the session was responding to the questions that Penny had laid out around the room on big sheets of paper for us to write on, and then discussing the questions and responses. The same kind of language seemed to appear on each paper: themes of listening, openness, exploration. 

As we discussed the questions – ‘What is a warm-up?’, ‘Do we need facilitators?’, ‘Are there particular qualities that make a good jammer?’ and others – I felt increasingly happy and lucky to be there with this group. The atmosphere felt warm, supportive, fun, generous – four hours just flew by. I felt we shared a language. 

The following weekend at UKCITE (UK Contact Improv Teacher Exchange) I got a taste of how this language is even more widely shared within the CI community. This first session feels to me like the start of an exploration of how to take the things I love about contact that are intuitive, felt and embodied and externalise and name them, build up my vocabulary in this language and develop an overall toolkit (as someone referred to it in our discussion) for facilitating. 

Being on this journey with such a lovely group already feels like it’s having an impact on me, working to demystify the facilitation process as we learn together and from each other.