Triangulation, Originality, Recognition

Been thinking about the triangulation that occurs between the improvising performer and the audience. The way I’m thinking about is in the context of a solo. So I’m the one dancing and hypothetical you is the one watching (btw thanks for coming to watch hypothetical-you).  I don’t know what the audience is experiencing and they don’t know what I’m experiencing. But that’s not a fragmentation or a binary to me, that’s part of the whole event. Even if I’m actively performing and the audience is actively watching albeit in situ the event is still something that WE do together.

So I’m dancing away there and making up the stuff that I make up, its full of emergent ideas and a pretty unusual movement vocabulary. And hypothetical-you is sitting there trying to relate to it. There may be some mirror neuron stuff going in hypothetical-you’s nervous system but actually chances are if the movement that I’m doing is

1. unrecognizable / highly unusual..and

2. the dynamic is relatively low energy / internal as it can sometimes be

the result tends to be that hypothetical-you can have an experience that’s less than satisfying, maybe even baffling. If however I up the stakes a little by picking up the movement dynamic, going ballistic, doing riskier stuff the mirror neuron effect can kick in a little more strongly. Even if what I’m doing has a low recognition factor . I reckon that’s partly why people like the dynamic stuff in dancey dance land.

But with the improv thing often being performed by some very intelligent people (like Simon for example) who can create material that is pretty high end creative (maybe even ‘original’ or ‘innovative’) and tends to skew most of the perceived cliche’s, there’s a pretty good chance that your average hypothetical-you isn’t going to be able to traverse its diameters.

I’m not driving at any particular point here that I’ve haven’t driven around before. But this was sparked up again by a piece of writing about originality in theatre and how contentious that can be when there is little precedent for its existence. That combined with the culture playing a part in writing it into existence (there’s me triangulation again)  but simultaneously not recognizing it.


 
 
 

Comments are closed.