I’m having a little difficulty with this word; “improvisation”.  Its a term that connotes an uninhabitable territory, uninhabitable because the specificity of its meaning doesn’t touch the sides of the territory it alludes to.

Too large and too small. Also too ‘universal’ as its a word that could be applicable to any creative action in any context. When I realized that butoh is at once improvised, scored, intricately choreographed, or any combination of those things I realized I was looking at a cultural artefact. It grew out of a set of circumstances and as a response to those circumstance. That response caught on, was elaborated on and evolved etc. But it wasn’t called improvisation,  it was called butoh.

Same could be said of jazz (sorry, a hackneyed comparison but useful). The languages we speak are usually improvisationally administered situation specific events. When I lead a dance and movement improvisation workshop recently the questions that I focussed it through were:

1. What is the language we are improvising (creating, in the moment, emergent, contingent) ?

2. What is the language in which we are improvising? (that which is already known, learnt, familiar in our bodies) ?

In my own work I take into account the hodge podge of modernist, post – modernist, cultural, intercultural, etc movement codifications as what largely makes up the movement vocabularies I’m improvising in. What is the name of all that? Calling it improvisation distracts me from the material itself. It also raises up the idea of improvisation – what people think improvisation in dance is. They are usually both right and wrong at the same time, and the idea that they have is not what improvisation actually is.

I’m happy to sub categorize my work and link it to post modernism. That’s a term that is problematic in similar ways however, there’s a lot of argument about what post modernism is. But at least when I think about post modern dance I can locate it, I can come up with names, dates, aesthetics, agendas, and places.

In New Zealand I’ve largely been going about this business of training the discipline of improvised dance / composition by myself. Shall I name what I do with my own surname, creating a name branded technique of my very own? Anyway these questions are a summation or an expression of where I’m at both personally and artistically. I can publicly pull apart my work and name its constituent parts to anyone who cares to ask, but I’m still at a loss to give it a cultural identifier, to find a place for it in general scheme of things.

larsen-vs-oneill

http://skellis.net/audio/kl_se_2Nov09.mp3

Currently am writing an exegesis so I feel a bit guilty about posting. But this is short and its something I talked about in my solo performance lecture. its simply this;

Duck on a skateboard.

Its been said in a book about improvisation in theatre that performance improv’s are often like a duck on a skateboard. So you’re walking down the street and you see a duck cruising around on a skateboard. And the thing of it is that its so novel that you fail to see that its being done badly.

Been thinking about the triangulation that occurs between the improvising performer and the audience. The way I’m thinking about is in the context of a solo. So I’m the one dancing and hypothetical you is the one watching (btw thanks for coming to watch hypothetical-you).  I don’t know what the audience is experiencing and they don’t know what I’m experiencing. But that’s not a fragmentation or a binary to me, that’s part of the whole event. Even if I’m actively performing and the audience is actively watching albeit in situ the event is still something that WE do together.

So I’m dancing away there and making up the stuff that I make up, its full of emergent ideas and a pretty unusual movement vocabulary. And hypothetical-you is sitting there trying to relate to it. There may be some mirror neuron stuff going in hypothetical-you’s nervous system but actually chances are if the movement that I’m doing is

1. unrecognizable / highly unusual..and

2. the dynamic is relatively low energy / internal as it can sometimes be

the result tends to be that hypothetical-you can have an experience that’s less than satisfying, maybe even baffling. If however I up the stakes a little by picking up the movement dynamic, going ballistic, doing riskier stuff the mirror neuron effect can kick in a little more strongly. Even if what I’m doing has a low recognition factor . I reckon that’s partly why people like the dynamic stuff in dancey dance land.

But with the improv thing often being performed by some very intelligent people (like Simon for example) who can create material that is pretty high end creative (maybe even ‘original’ or ‘innovative’) and tends to skew most of the perceived cliche’s, there’s a pretty good chance that your average hypothetical-you isn’t going to be able to traverse its diameters.

I’m not driving at any particular point here that I’ve haven’t driven around before. But this was sparked up again by a piece of writing about originality in theatre and how contentious that can be when there is little precedent for its existence. That combined with the culture playing a part in writing it into existence (there’s me triangulation again)  but simultaneously not recognizing it.

I’m in preparation for my masters performance coming up in about 5 weeks. It will be two 45 minute improvised solos over two consecutive nights. This is the 1st ‘major’ work I’ve done for a long time now. The longest improvised solos I have ever done been 20 minutes.

A new component I’ve added to my practice is contemplation. I’m approaching contemplation via Ralston.  His take on it is this: “..being open to a direct experiential breakthrough in consciousness with the intent that it occur.” It involves placing ones attention on a question and staying present to the  question until insight is experienced. This can be done sitting or whilst doing an activity.

I’m doing it sitting (I’m working hard enough in the studio already). The duration I’ve given myself for each session is … 45 minutes! I’ve been interested in developing my stamina in the area of concentration for a long time now and contemplation is one way of doing it. This new aspect of the practice has a sub agenda stitched into it;  working on developing a feeling sense in my body for 45 minute durations – useful for the upcoming performance event.

Was just thinking about abilities / skills / expertise (as I frequently do) as an improviser and one of the the things that I think can mark out a very good improviser is their ability to make less experienced improvisers look good (competent, aesthetically etc). In the context of a collaborative performance in real time that is.

( Simon stop being so bloody busy and important and say something. I’m beginning to feel like an overblown twitter feed on here! )

Improvisation itself has no purpose or function; it is a thing that operates inside purposeful and functional action.

That’s this morning’s insight. It has emerged from reflecting on some of the ways I’ve seen improvisational performance wielded as a Utopian site for liberation from the exile of the familiar. Admittedly this is partly how I wielded it when I first started down this track.

In my experience of practicing improvisation, it always starts with what is known; the room, the situation, the body that I have, the languages / ideas / movements I have learnt and developed, another person dancing with me etc. In and of itself it is seldom a magical process that leads to new plains of originality or radically liberating experiences of transcendent creativity.

When I see improvisational performances driven by compulsive agendas aimed at abandoning the familiar, very recognizable aesthetics still tend to emerge visibly. I see material and decisions that I don’t enjoy seeing – selfish actions and decisions. The goal of being evermore inventive by compulsively abandoning personal historical elements sets up certain conditions. Under those conditions a performers ego can easily transform from being interesting for who they are, to being unbearable to watch. This pursuit of the new becomes cliche’.

Improvisation can be a site for choreographic / performative invention and investigation. However as an intervention used to unsettle ones own entrenched aesthetics its not necessarily an effective vehicle. Improvisation is invisible, plastic, far too easy to impose on aesthetically – it doesn’t actually have its own aesthetics other than the recognizable prominence of the decision making process happening in real time. Improvisation is not a ‘no limitations zone.’ It most certainly has its limitations, usually when no limitations are set. Improvisation loses its efficacy with poor direction, flimsy content/structure, imprecise action, or non attendance to audience.

I’ve heard it said that most people don’t have the discipline to handle a Utopia. Improv can appear to be a Utopian site for honesty, co-authoring, chance, indeterminacy, failure, creativity, expressivity, spontaneity, egalitarian making, sensitive responsiveness, and fun. But the best improvisers I have seen have all that embedded in discipline, techniques, purpose, and the threads of history woven into in their skills. “Release technique is all well and good but you’ve got to have some technique to release!”a friend once remarked to me. A contentious throw away remark that I agree with in sentiment – you can’t depart from where you never were.

Sifting through the rubble – thoughts and reflections on Improvisation.

It was suggested to me that in writing whatever it is I am writing, that I keep it simple. Along the lines of why you do it, why you value it, your understanding of it …

Well here is simply as I can.

Why do I do it? I dont really anymore.
Why do you value it? It made me feel good. It seemed like a frontier at the time. It gave me a sense of flow.
My understanding of it? Reasonable in a experiential way. Minimal in an academic sense. And less than useless in a grant writing way.

Now slightly more convoluted.

The why and how….

I am an explorer at heart. I would like to say I am an investigator but I think that is a little steep in terms of my general approach to life. My habit is to explore until I find something of interest and then I investigate the something until the lure of finding another something draws me back into exploration mode.

I first encountered improvisation as a wee bairn at National Capital Ballet School. I had the privilege of being trained by Janet Karin. As a progressive dance thinker, Karin, introduced all the young dancers to composition classes that involved structured or lead improvisations as content. Though I was exposed at this early age I don’t think it bore much relevance to my later interest except by making less foreign.

It wasn’t until I started training at The Victorian College of the Arts that I met my first ‘real’ dance teacher Jane Refshauge. Real dance, hmmm. I mean dance as dance. The dance that makes children spin around in the supermarket isles, dance when your spirit/breath moves you to express yourself physically from the core of your soul. Refshauge taught Kinesiology and taught it through an ideo-kinetic paradigm. It was this work that began my dance ‘bent’, it opened me up to internal/external perception play, and on a personal level gave me a depth of listening that was free from the calamities of my everyday life.

Refshauge, as the inspired teacher she is, led me to Deborah Hay. Actually she told me that I was going to help her organise a workshop and in return for my help I would attend. Hence I met and worked with Deborah Hay. Hay totally blew my mind and keeps blowing it to pieces every time I engage with her work. She has a practice that uses many simple but effective tools to trick the mind into the Now into being present. That is her schtick ‘Being Present’ or a Present Being. I found and find her work so fresh that I still use it to find newness and possibilities.

Running concurrently I became involved with Contact Improvisation. Not being a particularly touching-feely person I came to enjoy this practice for its physicality and action-based principles. I came to it from an intellectual perspective as opposed to the multiple perspectives CI incorporates these days, community, spirituality, emotional-release, blah blah. Through learning and practicing CI in Melbourne I began working with State of Flux. S of F had 4 main arms, teaching, performing, community building and research. Through somatic education (Alexander, Feldenkrais, yoga, tai-chi, ideokinesis) we had the ability to access my body’s resources from many directions. We worked together actively for over ten years and during that time we built and taught the Melbourne CI community and ran monthly improvisation nights called Conundrum. It was through these nights that I saw a large range of improvisation performance practices and levels of experience.
S of F also received funding to bring Nancy Stark-Smith out from the USA to run workshops.

David Corbet, who was also in State of Flux, and I eventually branched away and started working and researching by ourselves. We started to develop our own way or our own methodology for making performance. http://www.slightly.net/excavate/ and www.davidandjacob.com

Understanding the ‘it’ of improvisation…

Improvisation literally means ‘unforeseen’ therefore in essence we all deal with improvisation everyday of our lives to a greater or less degree.

I understand that improv can be used as a tool to create material for movement/theatre, improv as research, improv as self expression, improv as a practice but my niche or area was Improvisation as performance. The open score. Real-time choreography or composition. Recently I discovered that this term has already been taken by a Portuguese dancer/maker Joao Fiadeiro.

My experience, thinking and research was from the perspective of improvisation as performance. The act of improvisation as the content of the work. No explicit meaning per se, just allowing the audience to create their own meaning/story from the implicit action. The practice of improvisation or play only becomes or actualises whilst being observed, it needs to be seen. Or so Corbet and I realised one afternoon during a creative development. We weren’t doing anything because anything we did had no point. We could make an edge to play against but no point until we opened the process up to a showing everyday. Then we had our point or the pointy end of the day.

We used somatic body practices and ideo-kenisis to develop new body awareness and we practiced improvisation to develop the real-time composition capabilities of the mind and performance complicity. Then by having others observe us we were able to see our work through others eyes. This often would give us the inspiration to work the next day.

What do I know about it? I know that improvisation is a slippery beast, as soon as you think you have a hold of it you dont, as soon as you think you know it you are only grasping at straws. Performance improvisation as with most things takes rigourous work and dedication to reach a level of proficiency . David Corbet and I called our main work ‘Excavate’ precisely because of this required rigour. To work down to the bedrock is important in Performance Improvisation otherwise you can fall into the trap of ‘frenetic activity’ or you might get caught up in how amazingly interesting you are being.

Bits and pieces….

I am fond of the saying; creativity is not beholden to the arts. I liken this to a common argument that Improvisation is more alive than set/choreographed work is. As far as I am concerned this a crock. The state of performing is the same regardless of whether the work is improvised or set. If a performer is present within whatever they are performing then they are alive and present with in the work. In the current climate Michael Jackson has recently passed away and there are many shots of him singing as a young boy. He looks so alive, fresh and vibrant as he sung and performed but we know his father was ruthless in the rehearsals.

Improvisation is in fashion in high-art at present. Part of me thinks that this is reflecting our modern obsession with reality television.

Where to now?

I don’t know whether studying improvisation has given me anything more than some good feelings and self exploration through different modalities. At present I am wondering what sort of job I can get or apply for where “not knowing” is an advantage. Maybe I can write on the application “I am really good at making a diverse range of interesting decisions in the moment. Things occur to me that I have never thought of before…”

When I first started performing improvisation we used to describe it as a play between Terror and Ecstasy. I love this. And if anything this would be one my keys to enjoying the ‘it’ of Improvisation.