What is skin?
It is an organ. It is (almost) an entire sense. So it has something in common with the eye, the ear, and the tongue and nose. It is the place where you end. It literally holds you in place while transmitting data about what is in contact with your extremities. The skin is the membrane that physically divides you from not you. Even while you (the place where you invest your identity) are the membrane that divides the sacred from the material, making both the other.
When we dance we watch each other. We use ears to listen to the noise of the footsteps and to the breath, our ears listen to ourselves, and each other. Once we have danced somewhat we begin to smell (taste) each other with our noses and rarely but sometimes with our tongues. A strange quantum of information is exchanged between two (or more) dancers through the olfactory function; genetic and environmental data is processed below the level of consciousness as well as lucidly in the frontal cortex.
The skin (and more broadly the sense of touch), however is the primary sense relied upon in Contact Improvisation. One could have a cold and be blind and deaf and still be a primo virtuoso CI practitioner. If a dancer were deprived of the sense of touch it would be worse for their CI career than spinal damage. In CI the skin grows eyes, it learns to watch and listen, and in moments of supreme sensitivity, it can appear to taste the flavor of a partners sweat.
The skin takes on a life of its own, it has its own senses, from pressure into fascia to the scaffolding of bone architecture. It watches for firmness and listens to softening, it tastes the intention of the muscles even as they begin firing and smells what is coming in the next moment. It transmits this data back to the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind, along with information ranging from the heat of a person and their heart rate to the state of their health and more ineffable gestalt data.
CI gives the practitioner the ability to invest their identity deeply into a state of touch, to explore the caverns of information regarding who we are when we touch, what we are like when we are touched and what the moment to moment awareness can do when consciousness is given a mandala or mantra, a tantric point of contact in which to invest its sense of self until even that sense rolls off and one is left as just a dance. Not even a whole self for we are relying on another’s legs, or are those ours? If that person breaks the point of contact I should fall…. But I have faith that they are there and faith in my ability to fall. My religion is a faith in my ligaments and skin; that they will hold me together binding me tight. Counter-intuitively expanding rather than contracting to meet the fall; my limbs will learn to caress the earth’s spin distributing my weight evenly, falling voluntarily into the enormous gravity of the planet (rather than fearfully contracting to protect the body and face which leads to greater suffering).