Art and politics in democratic opening Argentina: the beginnings of Contact Improvisation in Buenos Aires

Abstract

This paper reconstructs the beginnings of Contact Improvisation (CI) dance in Argentina, specifically in Buenos Aires in the 80s, in interrelation with the sociopolitical context of democratic opening. CI, which emerged in the United States in the early 1970s, was introduced in the country in the mid-1980s, almost a decade after its introduction in other South American countries. However, the reception of this practice in Buenos Aires was especially significant, becoming in a few years the city in Latin America with the greatest development of CI and one of the cities in the world with the highest concentration of practitioners. This text analyzes some milestones of that rapid expansion in the aforementioned territory in connection with the framework of Buenos Aires counterculture of that time, which operated as fertile soil for the development of the practice. The article is based on a qualitative methodology and on the recovery of personal interviews with referent people of Buenos Aires CI, exposing results of field work that contribute to filling an important vacancy in the situated study of this aesthetic-political practice in the Argentine territory.