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.

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.

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.

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.

Been trying to post a few things here: http://improv09.posterous.com/