In the 1990s, Nancy Stark Smith, one of the most active propagators of contact improvisation and editor of Contact Quarterly, developed a practice out of her teachings called "the underscore."[13][37] It consisted of a score serving as a descriptive and prescriptive base for the practice of group improvisations.[8] In this practice, vocabulary is tailored to fit the specific experiences of dancers and benefits from Nancy Stark Smith enmeshment with contact improvisation.

As a teacher of contact improvisation, she had observed that particular warm-up exercises and movement activities were helpful in bringing dancers to a state of body-mind preparedness for engaging in a Contact duet. The Underscore is a scored collection of those exercises and activities, complete with pictographs[38][39] that represent each phase and subphase of its progression.[40]

Some moments of the practice clearly refer to activities explored in the practice of contact improvisation:

"Bonding with the earth" thus refers (in part) to the experience of the "Small Dance"

"Engagement" to the commitment that can be involved in a contact improvisation duet

"Skinesphere", the space beneath the skin[41] (as opposed to the kinesphere, which is the space surrounding the body[42]), refers to the inward focus involved in some somatic preparations for the practice of contact improvisation.