A question has been asked by a regular reader of this blog; given the accumulated specialty knowledge underpinning and being produced by the writing on here..what are we going to do with it?

Theres a Jackie Chan video on a previous entry. It reminds me of an earlier movie of his called Battle Creek Brawl. In it his father repeatedly asks him to give up his pursuit of martial training and commit to the family business. Jackie’s character is unconvinced by this future and pursues his training with his Uncle. Eventually an opportunity arises whereby Jackie could win a lot of money if he wins an open tournament in Battle Creek, Texas. Of course he does win it, winning money, the honour of his family , the respect of his Uncle who trained him, and of course his father see’s that there is some financial reward in his art. Oh yes and Jackie gets the girl too.

When I originally pursued dance it was an emancipatory act. From there choosing improvisation was also an emancipatory choice, a freedom of sorts. As a younger man the lack of fiscal rewards were of no consequence to me. Now I’m at a loss to explain out loud why this pursuit is so deeply important.

It doesn’t get me paid, or laid. There is little recognition from within the dance world and certainly not from within broader Western culture. I get mystified and sympathetic comments from academic peers. And few people know how to even begin discussing the practice with any degree of cogent or informed perspective.

So why improvise? What are its applications? Why is it important now? These questions are still as persistently present, still as boring, and still as hard to answer as they were when I first started. In fact as I age they seem to harder to justify and to qualify. And yet its what I do. Its where I call home.  And I just don’t know what I’m going to do with it. I never have.

Every now and again I come across a little piece of writing that adds clarity to navigating the endlessness of the improvisation spectrum.

The challenge for each event is to find the enabling constraints and techniques of relation that tailor the event to whats singular about that piece coming together.

Brian Massumi

What I like about this text is that it seems to match with my experience. The beginning of an improvisational performance is always the hardest for me, I’m better at endings.  At the outset I am self conscious in part because of feeling a responsibility to the challenge stated by Massumi. I don’t agree with the idea of a singularity however. But finding the actions commensurate with the event, clearly attending to the limitations or constraints at hand tends to bring up the ‘right’ responses at the right times.

Simon say something learned and interesting please

In a little hall off K Road I’ve been working by myself on practice led stuff for my masters research. In order to break any given session up, I set tasks and work on those tasks for specific durations. (I love duration in improvisation)  So I do this thing for 5 minutes or work on that for 20 minutes etc.

In the studio not only am I very cognizant of the influences I am drawing on. I tend to work on them directly – usually from some form of media ie; dvd roms, cd roms and books.  Also from memory I draw on other practitioners exercises and scores. I’m using Peter Ralstons Body Being principles from Cheng Hsin (also learning his tai chi set), William Forsythe’s ‘Improvisation Technologies’, Al Wunder’s vocal scores, Julyen Hamilton’s exercises that work on duration and time(ing), Steve Paxton’s ‘Material for the Spine’, image work from an improvisational class that the Batsheva company practices, Katie Duck’s eye / focal exercises, Min Tanaka’s stimulation and imagery work, and I am playing around with my own kinetic movement chains (read; dance phrases!) in order to see how they might be a part of the improvisational nexus I’m in.  So there’s a lot of people in the room when I’m working solo and I haven’t even talked about whats going on historically in my own movement techniques / aesthetics etc.

Probably the biggest ongoing challenge for me is attention and concentration. This is where I’m placing the highest demand and precision. I tend to bring together several components at once into a ‘single’ exercise. For example I might work on Ralston’s principle of being whole and total which requires placing your feeling attention on the entire body at once whilst engaging with Forsythe’s ‘Point Point Line’ movement operations. This requires detailed internal and external awareness as well as clear intentionality.  The task can be further complicated by incorporating Hamilton’s feeling duration exercises – trying to feel one minute whilst dancing and working on the other components. Another example might be taking Al Wunder’s aspirant sounds score and working on a feeling image simultaneously such as ‘body as water drop’ which is designed to create sensations of moving ones weight under the floor.  This I find hard to do.

Then outside the studio I keep working on different ideas so that there’s an interstitial dynamic going on with the practice that generally has the affect of making me more and more conscious, and more skilled.  Which is kind of the point really.

For me watching a good stand up comedian provides inspiration, pleasure, and appreciation of expertise.  Particularly when I see free associative improvisation with known material done beautifully. Right there I recognize presence, memory, skill,  timing and instant feedback by way of laughter.

In approaching a solo performance at a friends fundraiser I did my best to keep a clean slate prior to going on, ie: an empty mind. It’s what I like to think that I do.  In truth I often organize some kind of idea in my mind to take onstage. In this case I had constructed a cardboard sign to wear around my neck. The audience could clearly read the text, on one side it said ‘ONLOOKER’, on the other side it said ‘LIAR’. This was inspired by images from a Tim Etchells book ‘ Certain Fragments’ and was also fueled by a persistent desire to be understood as a performer. I wanted to throw the audience something to grab onto.

As it turned out I ended up doing a stand up comedy routine. There was no dancing.  All the improvised movement I normally do was absent with the exception of a repeated motif consisting of a lean against a wall with rather bizarrely shaped hands . The underlying gag was that yes I was going to dance any moment now. This provided comic tension reminiscent of Victor Borge’s work. I swear I wanted to dance but talking and making sense to a group of people who actually laughed and responded to me directly shaped the interaction. I felt that the abstracted movement I tend to do had no reason to be in the performance. In the words of Bill Bailey “So I did not dance.”

Although it was an appropriate decision to develop the text I still felt (post performance) that there was a problem and the problem itself was cliche’ ie: the perceived chasm between movement and text. There’s a consistent sense – alluded to in my last my last post, of the unresolved. The incomplete.  As if the question driving the performance itself was not quite clear enough to begin with. Although I had wanted to bring dance into that particular performance there seemed to be no available entrance. No way of doing it that could reconcile my desire to perform movement with what was actually happening.

But I talked about dance. I stood in a roomful of people who laughed at me.

“All these things are difficult to form into words. If a person gives a name to something and then holds fast to that name, he will miss the real meaning.  Yet if no name is given, then he floats about in empty space and does not attain awareness. “

Chozan Shissai Master Swordsman Japan 1728

Having won a scholarship from NICAI at the University of Auckland I will be embarking on a project both as a dancer for choreographer Hans Van Den Broeck (Les Ballets C de la B, Belgium) and as a researcher for my masters project. My questions for Han’s project and how that will inform my own research are largely unformed. I trust that the right questions will emerge from the practice itself. I will be looking at Han’s ‘Settlement’ project through my inquiries into what is common to both choreography and improvisation. This demands that I develop my own academic perspective and working definitions of these two sites. In  all of the reading I have done so far on dance improvisation I have come across little that describes it satisfactorily, and very little that contextualizes it.

My personal need for context comes out of the recent realization that I have no idea how I came to be a performer of improvisational (contemporary / new / post post modern) dance  in New Zealand. In my mind there has to be a reason that something like me occurred within the artistic / economic / social / political climate of good ol’ Aotearoa. In as much as i was exposed to improvisational practices as a dance student (Alison East’s improv / comp classes and Catherine Chapells CI classes) there was never any precedent out  there in the ‘profession’. No example of any such thing as an improvisational dance artist. There were dancers and there were choreographers and there were also people who did both.

As I set about being one of those people who did both i developed choreographic, performative, and technical skills. When I chose eventually to immerse myself  in improvisation as means of authoring dance performance in real time, I experienced  levels of personal and political agency that the typical power relationships of choreographer and dancer had limited or no access to. There was a greater democracy in co-authored performance.  This ‘agency’ is something I will be looking into further.

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On completely different note I’ve also been intrigued by this question from Shelley’s earlier missive:

“What place does the structured use of time have in improvisation? Do conscious repetitions, variations and time constraints have a place in CI or do they belong to instant composition?”

There’s an implicit holding apart of two improvisational practices in these questions.  One can inform the other but perhaps it’s worthwhile opening up windows on their outcomes. The distinctions between CI and instant or real time composition are there to be picked through and elaborated on. But at this stage I will make the statement that real time composition is designed for performance which is why it takes structured time into account.  It can and frequently does take techniques, skills, dramaturgy, narrative, choreographic mores etc into account also. It has the facility to house tools such as those found in CI within its compositional field also.

Although CI can be performed it seems to me that it was originally formed with a democratic intervention into the elitist practices of modern dance in mind.  CI is designed for access.  Steve Paxton refers to Contact Improvisation as a ‘constant’, saying that it hasn’t changed since it was originally and that he has been looking for ways to explode the practice contact improvisation. If CI is to be performed it may well be useful for it to take time structures ino account in the rehearsal or preparation phases. Otherwise enquiring into structured time may well be irrelevant to its outcomes.

Anyway this is the current ambient thought cloud in my body and brain.