Quotidote
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
5. June 2009 at 19:35
Hey Kristian
Am feeling the pressure of concocting a learned response.
Instead, thinking of Proust when he said about the quotes of others: “they are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.”
So, here’s Michael Schumaker (not the driver) from a recent email exchange:
“I think one alternative way to consider ‘experience’ in the context of presence is to consider everyone present at a given event and their awareness, or not, of presence. For me, ‘becoming’ begins when I remember that nothing but my presence in the never ending present moment is new.”
Here’s something I wrote a while back:
“The presence of remembering is elastic. It ‘swells and grows with the flow of becoming’ (Olkowski, 1999 p.110) and is answerable to the present. Remembering reverberates at all levels and in all actions, and yet its presence shifts between the past and the present, between memory and perception, between being and becoming.”
I agree with your skepticism re “the idea of a singularity”. But I like the resolve or desire for newness … as long as does not cost one’s awareness of listening.
Oh – and your writing reminded me of Andrew Morrish’s tendency to remark about audiences being one’s friend. Not sure how.
6. June 2009 at 03:23
Bravo Simon, I knew you’d deliver.
Proust was only half right. Its just bad form to quote oneself.
8. June 2009 at 06:04
Larf.
Give a bloke at least a small conceit.
Sheesh.