Dancing Life

Part memoire, part historical fiction, this chapter weaves together practices, thinking and contributions of a handful of influential improvisers working in the US and Europe including Simone Forti, Nancy Stark Smith, Thomas Hauert, William Forsythe, Nik Haffner, and Alana Shaw. It combines interview transcripts, excerpts, and adaptations of sources available online and in print, impressions, dreams, and memories.

Moving In Medias Res

This essay considers how dance improvisation involves processes of interpretation which are fundamental to human experience. Particular attention is given to psychosomatic practices, that is, approaches to performance that depend on a relation between a ‘score’ of external actions and an ‘underscore’ of internal images. The essay first refers to several historically significant psychosomatic methods that promise a plenitude of self-presence, but then questions those methods through Paul Ricoeur’s critique of idealist phenomenology. However, the essay also argues that improvised dance in general, and the work of Marie-Gabriella Rotie and Jennifer Monson in particular, can offer an alternative psychosomatic approach which exemplifies the phenomenological hermeneutics of Ricoeur and Hans Georg Gadamer. Through exploration of concepts such as distanciation, appropriation, conversation, and occasion, the essay grasps dance improvisation as a unfinished practice in which the moving body unfolds the world—in particular the natural world—of which it is already a part by relating to it through a subtext that it interprets kinaesthetically.

Improvising Happiness

Solo improvisational dance forms from North Africa and the Middle East, most commonly referred to as belly dance, have their roots in community celebrations in which dancers improvise to the accompaniment of a diverse set of local instruments. The movement vocabulary of these forms became part of popular global discourse in the twentieth century through the inclusion of the dances at transnational fairs. Later belly dance was adopted as part of dance studios and recreational centres in small towns and major urban centres on all continents. Despite its global transmission and performance, belly dance has maintained improvisation as a core aesthetic principle.

Embodiology

Dance-drumming performance practices in West Africa reveal multiple modes of communication that take place between performers and informed audiences, in an ongoing exchange of novelty. In the Ewe case, the critical nature of the relationship between movement, music, and language lies within their explicit drum syntax producing Ewephone comprehension, which is processed through the body’s varying porous kinaesonic surfaces. This principle process is conceptualized as Dynamic Rhythm, the metacomponent of Embodiology, which is both a training methodology and a theoretical framework that makes inherent improvisation discernable to the nonpractitioner. In addition, as a result of this understanding, interlocking aesthetic values within West African performance practices are identifiable within the African Diaspora. This articulation of improvisation from a West African perspective creates a gateway for both the scholarly and artistic fields of dance to develop a way to understand these autopoietic phenomena that were, until now, largely hidden.

Moving Sound

The essay revisits the relationship between music and dance, sound and movement, in contemporary dance and music in improvisation. The main philosophical thrust for the discussion draws from the work of Peters, specifically his 2009 book The Philosophy of Improvisation. Peters argues that true improvisation requires a ‘powerful memory, memory of the parameters of an instrument, of the body, of available technology, the parameters of a work’s structure, and one’s place within it at any time, the parameters of an idiom, a genre and its history, its possibilities’. This idea, of the need to set parameters, understand rules, structures, as well as one’s positions within an improvisational process, is central to the discussion. The project Moving Sound, a collaboration between music director Dimitris Karalis and composer-saxophonist Yannis Kassetas, is discussed as a case study.

Transcending Boundaries

This chapter explores the relationship between disability and improvisation within dance, drawing from a number of dancers’ own views about the place of improvisation in their making and performance practice, and referencing work that deliberately incorporates improvisation as a device to blur the boundaries between the fixed and the fluid. The chapter focuses on the role of contact improvisation in the work of disabled dancers. By prioritizing the interaction with different bodies, contact improvisation can support an aesthetic based on sensory adjustment and accommodation. Conversely, contact improvisation might be seen to ‘smooth over’ disorder and involuntary motion that disabled dancing bodies offer as a reconceptualization of the acceptable aesthetic in dance. The discussion also includes reference to Notturnino (2014), a work of choreography by Thomas Hauert, which was commissioned for the Candoco Dance Company and offers a way to examine how dance improvisation has adopted disability in its shifting physical aesthetic.

Chance Encounters, Nietzschean Philosophy, and the Question of Improvisation

This essay is an attempt to think of dancing per se as a mode of improvisation. It draws on Nietzschean philosophy as a means to conceive of dance as a dynamic flux, made up of a multiplicity of forces. Improvisation ensues from the selection of these forces and their consequent corporeal becoming. What follows is a reading of Nietzsche’s work in terms of force and the will to power, which also draws on Deleuze’s engagement with Nietzschean philosophy. Improvisation is posed in these terms, as an encounter with chance that offers and produces the force of the future.

Instinctive Connections

This essay explores my practice as a dance artist in health and care settings and locates my experience in improvisation at the nucleus of this practice. Like the nucleus of the cell, improvisation is the place of regulation of my activity, at the core, guiding, nurturing, and holding me as I navigate the unknown; in terms of both the physical context in which I work and the creative and imaginative happenstances. This is exemplified through illustrations of practice in a dementia care setting and a children’s hospital. This essay also contends that improvisation, as a phenomenological process that does not suppose a truth but embraces a myriad of possibilities, enables dance artists to document the effects of their work and contribute to a growing body of evidence citing the manifold benefits of somatic dance and improvisation practices in healthcare.

Improvisation in Dance and the Movement of Everyday Life

Dance improvisation, as developed in the UK and the US in particular, has become associated with a number of tropes that apparently offer means of best practice. By attending to a few of these, I examine how they might offer insight into dance improvisation. This incorporates research into ways in which improvisation is a part of everyday life, as demonstrated most clearly in examples of infant movement and cognitive development. Taking Henry Montes and Marcus Coates’s dance film A Question of Movement as a case study example, I consider how their innovative way of dancing responses to life questions connects with the infant’s reliance on ‘thinking in movement’, a term offered by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone. Finally, I consider what dancers can learn from people living with chronic dementia-related diseases who forge ways to live in a perpetual present and, conversely, what insight dancers might offer through integration of dance improvisatory processes in caregiving.

Improvisation and Habit

Beginning with some reflections on Nietzsche’s demand that we learn new habits of thinking and willing, ones that will enable us to affirm the past as that which we willed, the focus here is on changing our own habits as regards the question of habit itself. Using the Slovenian dancer Jurij Konjar’s reimprovisation of Steve Paxton’s original Goldberg Variations improvisations as a case study, this essay provides a commentary on the documented correspondence between Konjar and Paxton. The central issue addressed here is Paxton’s desire to ‘outwit’ his habits of performance and Konjar’s ultimate acceptance and affirmation of his own. Countering the dominant antipathy to habit in the discourses on improvisation, this chapter argues for a deeper engagement with the essence of the habitual as the locus for a consideration of the very event of dance, understood (by Paxton) as having a ‘life of its own’ above, beyond, or outside the habitual structures of the performing self.