A Common Language

A common discourse in dance making practices is that improvisation is a process which  evokes  new and innovative movement languages. This can and does happen, but far less frequently than people tend to think. The word “improvisation” is a term that connotes an infinite spectrum of possibility, but the specificity of the words meaning doesn’t touch the sides of the territory it alludes to. Too large and too small, too assumed to be ‘universal’ as its a word that could be applicable to any creative action in any context. But in Western contemporary dance improvisation tends to be regarded as its own genre.

Typically performed improvisations tend to throw up identifiable materials ie; the historical stuff in the dancers bodies. Generally a hodge podge of modernist and post - modernist movement vocabularies informed by the dancers proportions, abilities, tendencies, dynamics, cultural inflections, and behavioural tics under the stress of performing. All that can be recognized, even named. Its possible to see what the dancer has trained in be it breaking, releasing techniques, butoh, ballet, etc.  But what is the collective name of all of that? Those are specific movement languages which are undergoing their own evolution. Improvisation is actually just a dynamic in the blending of those languages with the unfolding events in performance. 

Generalising the performance event by calling it improvisation usually masks it and distracts me from the material itself. At one level I don't actually care if the performers are improvising, I care more about what they are doing and how well they are doing it. When I lead a recent professional development workshop in dance and movement improvisation  the questions through which I focussed the workshop   were:

1. What is the language we are improvising (creating, in the moment, emergent, contingent) ?

2. What is the language in which we are improvising? (that which is already known, learnt, familiar in our bodies) ?

With those questions as the lens for the work I positioned improvisation as the method of making, the compositional paradigm I happen to be most interested in. This helped to remove obsolescent assumptions which, when allowed to remain unaddressed tend to make a lot of improvisations look very similar. 

At the moment my experience is that in order to improvise skilfully, movement languages have to be trained and refined (amongst a very large spectrum of other sub practices).  Otherwise it just ain't jazz