My earliest exposure to improvisation in dance in any formal sense was as a full time conservatory trained dance student at Unitec-Performing Arts School 1993. Weekly classes included Alison East’s improvisation / composition classes, Contact Improvisation and Skinner Releasing. Ali’s classes were aimed at generating choreographic material primarily through the use of imagery, often naturalistic images of animals. We also did live collaborations with musicians, which from memory were primarily impulsive exercises, intuitively based.

Contact Improvisation was taught by Catherine Chappell.  She taught us more thoroughly than we appreciated. In my second year we were given a week long CI intensive workshop with Hungarian physical theatre troupe Artus. This was followed by another week long workshop with Joan Skinner, creator of the somatic practice ‘Skinner Releasing’. It took me a long time to appreciate just what I had gained from this collection of artists.

After Unitec I trained at the New Zealand School of Dance. I just worked on technique; ballet, modern (mostly Hawkins and Limon) and worked on my choreography in my spare time. I did encounter the 5 Rhythms Method and began performing improvised works.

As a freelancer in amongst constructing choreography in the usual standard ways I did more one – off improvised performances usually solo’s (apart from a few duets with Guy Ryan), all memorable. They felt so natural to do that I neglected to really think of them as valid n my professional life.Everyone thought improvisation was ‘just improv’.  Merenia Gray however did include one of my undirected solo improvisations within a choreographed work. She’s been the only choreographer to ever allow me to do this.

I did more Contact Improvisation, attending occasional jams and two workshops with Martin Keogh. One of those workshops was aimed at up-skilling teachers. Pretty soon though I developed a distaste for CI and for the somatic practices I’d encountered in my training including any complementary practices such as Pilates, Feldenkrais, natural therapies etc. At the time I was teaching Yoga and not enjoying it. I was doing a lot of capoeira though.

In 2000 I had the opportunity to work with Min Tanaka in Auckland. This was a pivotal experience. I discovered a choreographic process that expanded my assumptions about choreography. From that point I no longer felt compelled to reject my previous dance training in order to uncover new movement vocabulary.

I began consciously unpacking this fascination I had with improvisation when I got the opportunity to take part as a choreographer on Choreolab. I found pretty quickly that although intuitively I knew what I was doing when I was improvising, I really didn’t know how I was doing it.

Around 2002 I reached a personal crisis point in which I was close to throwing in the towel on dance. I had been working with an improvisational collective spearheaded by Lyn Pringle called the Mandelbrot Set. We performed with live musicians at Happy in Newtown. Then independently of each other Eric Languet and Daniel Belton recommended I look into the work of Julyen Hamilton. I applied for a grant to do a workshop, got the funding and went to Spain. During that workshop I decided to work exclusively on improvisation in my professional life and abandon choreography as a way of making. Up to that point I had made around 25 short choreography’s and had accumulated a reasonable body of experience as a dancer working for other choreographers. I came back to NZ and initiated a show for the fringe called Radio. It was an all improvised collaboration with lights, projection, three dancers and A DJ. It won the Best Dance award that year. I got more funding to workshop / research improvisation with a group of dancers and composer leyton. Seemed like a good sign.

In 2004 I won the STAB commission to run a season of dance at Bats theatre in Wellington (NZ’s longest singular season of contemporary dance in one venue). After that I met four artists from Magpie Dance Music Company; Katie Duck, Michael Schumacher, Ellen Knopps and Mary Oliver. I got to perform with them along with some other NZer’s and ended up getting invited to perform with them for their 10^th Anniversary in Amsterdam.

On the way to the Amsterdam gig with Magpie gig I took part in the The Boiler Room in Hobart organized by Rik Goddard, I performed and did workshops with a lot of the other performers mostly from Australia including Tony Osbourne.

In Amsterdam I performed a solo and a duet with Sarah Foster as well as performing with Magpie. I also met and had studio time with another Amsterdam based improviser, Lily Kiara. During that trip I taught a workshop in Brussels alongside Claire O’Neil. We performed a duet together at Dans Centrum Jettelarsen-vs-oneill1 . I attended a Frey Faust workshop on CI also in Brussels and found that here was an approach I could relate to, so I picked it back up as a practice and dropped my 5 year practice of capoeira, itself an improvisational but aesthetically rigid practice.

On return to NZ I began performing solos again for Late Nite Choreographers, and became involved with a collective of improvising musicians called Vitamin S. I did a workshop with Martin Hughes and then facilitated an improvisational performance with Touch Compass I attended an Al Wunder workshop in 07, performed in an ensemble improvisation called Beautiful City which toured nationally, performed solo for the Mau forum with Helen Todd on lighting, created a solo called ‘You Are Not Alone You Are Just In New Zealand’ for Waikato and Melbourne, and performed solos for the Dunedin Fringe in 09.

I began my Master’s research in improvisation in last year and expect to finish in December.

I’m in Wellington currently working on a solo for Claire Lissaman from Footnote Dance Company. The solo is a response to the work of Phil Dadson – composer, musician, instrument maker, multi-media artist and general all round good guy. I originally intended with reworking some of Phil’s sound pieces (with his blessing) but my computer has died completely. So now the work is being constructed without sound…music TBC.

The solo itself is a structured composition that makes use of choreographed phrases (mostly made by me but some of the material has been made by Claire) and improvisational operations. With Claire I’m working on crafting the place where the phrases meet the improvisational sections. To do this I’m favouring a fluid consistency of dynamics and durational tendencies through both the phrases and the stuff that Claire will author in real time.

I’m working this way for two main reasons. One being that Phil’s work in performance occupies a spectrum of compositional mores from the live open format improvisation to digitally recorded materials. Secondly I’m thumbing my nose at my past tendencies to hold choreography and improvisation apart, problematizing the relationship and sometimes even holding the ‘improv’ banner up as a kind of semi political thing for my work to come from.

In making the solo with and for Claire I’m aware of the obvious..it’s something WE are doing. Duet/solo solo.

“Self Portrait”, a (mostly) dance show organized by Christchurch based Corrupt Productions toured Wellington and Auckland Fringe Festivals at the beginning of the year. The premise was to base a dance work on a self portrait by NZ artist Rita Angus. I was brought in for the Dunedin leg of the tour to replace one of the other choreographers.

The show was a  vehicle for me to create 4 improvised solo compositions over 4 nights ( more accurately solo dancer dueting / improvising with the the lighting woman ).  In responding to the Rita Angus painting which Julia Milsom selected for me at my request I began from a sense of disconnection from the artist and her body of work – ‘ve never really engaged with Angus’s images in the past. So I started from what I knew about line drawing. This resulted in a reflective / contemplative process that took into consideration compositional parallels between the mediums of visual art and dance. Although the relationship to time is different as are the materials used in each medium, composition is still composition (ie; to quote Julyen Hamilton “how things are made and how they might go together” )

I stipulated some specific conditions for the solos. The duration was set at 12 minutes. I used a piece of music by a NZ sound artist who calls himself Birchville Cat Motel. The 9 minute track was prefaced by 3 minutes of recorded silence allowing me to set a tone with the text. As the piece progressed the volume increased drowning me out in the process.

The improvised text drew from musings about the process of drawing, the solipsistic nature of creating a self portrait, and correlations between the creation of line in both visual art and in movement. The text wasn’t used directly to elucidate the meaning of the movement, it was its own composition. It still provided context and meta commentary on the whole work however.

The movement itself drew heavily from Forsythe’s line operations. This has been an integral part of my practice research for the last year or so. These movement operations were pertinent as they involved dealing with internally imagined lines which resulted in repeatable nameable events, phrases and spatial arrangements. The operations helped me to effectively ground the performance in the concept I was working with.

With regards to the light there were a number of pre-existing conditions and limitations. Firstly the rig was designed to light a number of shows on at the same time in that theatre ( Allen Hall ). The theatre itself was a problematic space to work the dance into primarily because of its lack of subtlety – its ugly. .The designer Marty Roberts whom I respect highly has worked with me in the past did a great job of working with the darkness of the space. I asked for a lot of bold colour in the lighting palette in reference to Angus’s abilities as a colourist.  Then Janice the lighting op and I started playing together in the days leading up to the performance. Its a learn on the job process. Although I can generally give a new lighting operator a clear sense of the game and can get a satisfying real time collaboration going,  I still have a lot of trouble explaining at the outset how it might go and what it is we’re going for together.

Performing for a new audience is like a blind date – I hope they’re going to like me and I hope I’m going to like them. I really have to discipline myself into relaxing and not doing too much – running off at the mouth so to speak. Because this set of improvised compositions were grounded in a clear conceptual framework I was strict about excluding gimmickry that can be used as a fall back in improv. I wanted to stay ‘en pointe’ as it were with the ideas I was working on. I also wanted to have a sense of interaction and connection with the audience. I couldn’t see them so this was hard work. Very much a ‘blind’ date in that sense too…

Post performance I’m often left with a feeling that is both complex and vague, as if I’m looking at a city in fog. There’s a sense of what I have just done and a gnawing desire to show that I’m more than that. The practice of performance improvisation is endless and I don’t want to be confined to an external perception of a singular event. This post performance ennui is a constant and I experienced it again in Dunedin. La petit mort perhaps.

At this point in the writing I feel compelled to summarise and conclude. But given the trajectory I’m following in improvisation and the pathways I’ve gone down I have a stronger sense of ‘not really knowing’. As a discipline I know how to end improvisations but those endings are not necessarily conclusions,  they are decisions to end.

What do you want from or through improvisation?

What are improvisations / your outcomes ( aims / intentions / directions ) ?

Perhaps a better beginning for this question might be: When you are improvising in performance are you trying to communicate with the world? If so, what are you trying to communicate? Can you know prior to the moment of emergence?

How do you train for improvisation ? (provided that you care to)

Or more specifically how do you train to represent aesthetic non idiomatic departures in dance – seriously what skills do you need in order to pull that off?

What kinds of improvisation do you distinguish (if any) ?

If improvised dance is non idiomatic, does its reliance on perpetual-departure-from-idiom  to  define and redesign itself keep it pre-cultural and pre-lingual ?

Belgian choreographer, ex -psychologist, director, and all around good guy Hans Van Den Broeck worked with 22 performers in New Zealand to regenerate a performance piece called ‘Settlement’. By way of preamble here is the press release:

Settlement is a performance created in 2 weeks with a local group of professional performers from different ages/ origins/ backgrounds. From day one they construct a temporary village/ settlement with material found or collected. The area where they work is inside ‘The Print Factory’ which was chosen as it’s a rough looking place that suggests an outside world. The creation process takes place in that environment. They associate around the notion of “settlement”, a concept with many different interpretations and subjective outlooks.The performance(s) are shown for an audience at the end of the workshop-period. It is not a work-in-progress, the aim is for a finished result. They try to perform the constructed outline 3 times in a row in one evening, to create the sensation of duration and a feeling of real life.The first settlement took place in May 2007 in Sydney. The intention of this project is to explore and to create this performance in other cities. Part of the research is to know how other participants in other cultures/settings react on the notion of “settlement”.

I have looked at Van Den Broek’s process through the lens of the compositional nexus between choreographic and improvisational process (yes I am a walking Venn diagram….thanks Simon and shuddup!). Rather than explain what that means at this point I will just talk about how I perceived Settlement worked as a performance composition.

Settlement is a little like a prefabricated building: it has a fundamental design with a degree of flexibility in terms of potential variations in construction. The structure itself is altered according to the site it occupies, it can house one or many participants, and when the occupants move in they create the look, feel, and micro culture of the place. This is influenced by what people bring to site as individuals and as a group collective. Hans himself is an occupant, placing himself within the work. Despite his apparent ‘hands off’ approach to guiding the process of workshopping Van Den Broeck is the key individual who embodies the concept, and is ultimately the design architect of Settlement.

The performance is made up of a series of scenes and images that vary and change according to the location and group involved (this project has been done in around 5 (?) cities / countries…TBC). I suspect however that the degree of variation in performance from group to group is kept on a tight leash. Van Den Broeck has very specific ideas about what Settlement is and how it works. Certain behavioral and artistic demands on the performers become evident and consistent as the workshoppng process unfolds.

The loose weave composition has many pre-installed decisions and conditions within its spacious design. That said however there is a subtly felt democracy within the group which influences the ‘school of fish’ decisions the collective can make. For example in the transitions between scenes, individuals listen to the group, and move in a loose ‘unchoreographed’ fashion onto the next scene. This placed a high demand on individuals to respond as a group at all times. In order for this to work in performance sensory acuity, feeling sensitivity, and non egotistically driven responses had to be part of the intrinsic design of the rehearsal process.

There whole composition could arguably be described as a set of task based improvisations with specific and occasionally unnameable parameters. Certain individuals were designated to act as ‘drivers’ within each scene in order to create some degree of control, (eg:create beginnings and endings) within the overall design of the work.

The simultaneous looseness and strictness created the potential for interesting interpretations of appropriate content within the site of the performance itself. For example when one of the performers displayed a pukana in the middle of the second night of performance, this expression of Maori culture although easily accommodated within the world of Settlement seemed out of step with the actual culture of  the piece. All individual decisions within the site of performance were improvisational within very tight ‘framings’ (Simon uses this word a lot to denote delimiters within improvisations).

Settlement was a theatrical event that 23 people extraordinarily brought together over a mere fortnight.  As a contributor I felt that my practice pragmatically and creatively fed into the demands and conditions of constructing Settlement ie:working on timing as an individual and as a member of an ensemble, ‘reading’ the composition accurately, and diverting my own egoistically driven creative impulses to become author. More importantly understanding how improvisation and choreography reciprocate each other within a composition allows a certain advantageous perspective. Currently that sense of ‘advantage’ is an intuition that is evading direct elaboration. However i can say that having a clear understanding of ensemble work from an improvisational point of view was enabling in terms of supporting the unchoreographed elements within the site of performance.

Shelley’s 6 questions are great topical launch points for contemplating and writing about improvisation. Rather than explore each question directly I am going to take an over arching view of her admittedly overwhelming provocations and then hone down to relevant topical components. In order to even begin doing that effectively I’m going to use my practice as the context of my reflections.

The 6 questions bring up two main areas of enquiry for me; time, and presence. In discussing how I deal with these things in my own practice, I’ll begin with a reconfigured question of my own “How does one train time and presence for improvisation?”

Drawing on the practices of Julyen Hamilton, Pedro Ilgenfritz, Min Tanaka and Peter Ralston I have looked for commonalities, principles even, that have pragmatic application for improvising in performance. For me Ralston’s notions of ‘feeling-attention’, and ‘feeling-awareness’ manage to summarily capture and pragmatically elucidate commonalities between these practices.

Feeling-attention and feeling-awareness take into account that all of the body’s sensory data ie: taste, touch, hearing, sight, and smell are either perceived as bodily sensation or converted to sensation. For example if you pay attention to an object such as a ball coming towards you, you ‘feel’ its trajectory and ‘feel’ your response to catch or avoid it. A ball flying through space towards you also has its own time or duration. This duration is  something that can be felt when you put your attention on it.

In my own practice I have committed to an exercise of feeling my entire body at once, whilst paying attention to its relationship to the floor and gravity, as well as to ‘external’ events (people, movements, objects, space, light, sound, and time). I constantly work on this awareness as a whole awareness, rather than build up its fragments.. In my experience it is this cultivated attention that is at the core of presence. Invariably at times focus shifts to different emphases such as having an awareness only of the ball for a split second and losing sense of where my body is. When that happens I lose accuracy in my relative response both to the ball and to myself.

A component of a Julyen Hamilton exercise that I still use and adapt is to practice feeling duration of one minute. This can be done whilst being still, or whilst improvising solo, driving a car, or performing in an ensemble etc. I’ve particularly enjoyed playing with different timings and durations of movement events within that minute. Moving my body at high speeds tends to shift my sense of time radically, the same also applies when I move incredibly slowly. But a minute is a minute is a minute. Only my perception of it and the movements I am doing within that minute alters.

When dancing a duet and playing with this particular exercise there can be incredible differences of perception between the dancers. Particularly between how the two people are perceiving time and execute timing within that same minute. The perceptual variances are not useful for composition in performance if, within the duet I am out of relationship with my own time, and/or the time of my partner. By ‘out of relationship’ I mean not perceiving accurately, and therefore not being present to what’s actually happening. It doesn’t necessarily follow that if I am present to what’s happening I then have to augment, join, or follow my partners timing. I still have other choices eg; exaggerate, conflict with, ignore etc . But my ability to choose in any moment is considerably lessened if I don’t pay attention to the ball!

There is a lot more to be written on this but for now, time to go.

In doing my Masters degree at University of Auckland I’m currently harvesting written and digital data in preparation for my research.  Up until now almost all of my work has been studio based ie: actually practicing improvisational dance and choreography with plenty of integrated reflective and reflexive work in the context of working in the profession. The result so far is a fairly extensive body of performance and teaching experience with little in the way of writing output. This is about to change.

Before I go on I want to note that this blog is the result of ongoing conversations between myself and Simon Ellis. In my personal experience its in conversations like these  that accurate and rich reflexivity about improvisational, choreographic and performative practices actually emerges.  I think I’ll qualify that statement as this blog develops.

In the meantime as I said earlier I am data harvesting. This is part of the hoop jumping exercise that is the academic process.  So I’m looking into theoretical and philosophical frameworks in order to qualify what it is that I already know and understand from practice.  It seems that justifying contemporary dance in contexts such as social, academic, artistic, financial etc is so deeply intrinsic in the practice of dance that it should be taught as a technique class at degree level.

Rather than list whose writings I’ve been looking into I will instead pluck out names and titles as the blog unfurls and hopefully this will be of benefit to whoever is tuning into this little nook of the net.  One name  I’ll throw out right now though is Peter Ralston.  A martial artist and teacher of considerable ability, his practice of Cheng Hsin has had a very deep impact on my work in improvisation.  Essentially an ontological enquiry, Cheng Hsin rigorously examines (amongst other things) perception and interaction at an experiential level. This work is ostensibly a practice of consciousness that is dynamic whilst simultaneously being internal and external.  What does that mean? Well that’s a book or two, but what it has resulted in is an ever increasing degree of accuracy of perception and skill and a greater degree of presence in my work. It has also led to practices in improvisation that I can apply to absolutely any activity and context I am engaged with.