I’m happy to announce my first video about my work on Safer Brave Space!
In the video, I explain that the foundation for safer brave space is the value: “respect each other.” I suggest making “take care of yourself,” which is what some people describe as the “first rule of Contact Improvisation,” the second rule. I show how to use the Beaulieu Test to determine whether group guidelines support safer brave space and then apply the test to the guidelines of several groups, including Touch&Play.
The video is a recreation of the presentation, “The Foundational Value of Safer Brave Space,” which I did as part of a panel, Openings into Just Space: The Role of Consent, Governance, and Pedagogy in Contact, at Critical Mass: CI@50 at Oberlin College in July 2022. Critical Mass was a celebration of 50 years of Contact Improvisation. I changed my presentation upon learning that Daniel Hayes, who founded Touch&Play, which seeks to explore “chemistry in Contact Improvisation,” would be presenting on consent. My presentation was not recorded so I recreated it in this video, which is also posted in the CQ Contact Improvisation Newsletter: CI 50th Anniversary 2022 special edition.
I reference the following links in the video:
- Safer Brave Space page on this blog
- “How the First Rule Brought #MeToo to Contact Improvisation” published in Contact Quarterly Vol. 44.1.
- A Compendium of Contact Improvisation Jam Guidelines and related material from around the world.
- Explanation of my oil pastel triptych, “Jam Series,” in the blog post, “Art about Safer Brave Space.”
In addition to the presentation on safer brave space, I wrote “Getting There from Here: A Roadmap for Safer Brave Open Jams as part of the Critical Mass: CI@50 long form essay collection. To find out when it gets published and other news about my advocacy, please subscribe to this blog:
© 2023 Michele Beaulieux … Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. That means you are free to share and adapt as long as you attribute to Michele Beaulieux, don’t use for commercial purposes, and use this same license. And if you do share, I’d love to know! I continue to tweak, so to avoid sharing an outdated version, I recommend linking to this page, where I provide the date of the current iteration: 4.11.2023
Reservoir of Hope 