A Personal Genealogy of Improvisation

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.

This entry was posted on July 13th, 2009 and is filed under kristian. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.