Personal toolkit for improvisation practice

Improvisation, by my own terms, means to be able to tap into any knowledge that is stored in the body. Human bodies are vessels brimming with knowledge and, in turn, the body becomes a kind of book and/or manual. New input are new scribbles over existing information. We are caressing thoughts and ideas through the embodied experience of improvising.  

Imagine that, in one slab of marble, all the faces that have ever existed are already present in that slab. All that needs to happen is for that to be carved out. This is like the dancer’s body. All the choreography in the world is present already in the body. It just needs to be sculpted and carved out. 

Skill A --> Emotional intention (story, narrative)  

Skill B --> Groove (rhythm)  

Skill C --> Puppet (someone else is moving you in space)  

Skill D --> Visual (visualisation, texture)  

Imagery visualisation   

- fists inside the pelvis, hands and feet  

- form/anti-form  

- angle/no angles  

- holding the heart and pulling the energy from the heart into your hands 

Questions:   

• How can one move between these different skill sets?  

• By using these different tools, can the dancer have multiple identities/a moving identity?  

Investigations to find answers:   

• Sending energy through the limbs and parts of the body, then using this impetus to go into a groove/rhythmic state  

• Imagining your body as a ‘guesthouse’ —> a new resident resides in your guesthouse and has just moved around the ‘furniture’ slightly, how do you react in your body to this feeling of something having changed? 

• Noticing the ‘arrival’ - the end of something or the beginning of something new, staying with the score. 

• Being able to use a scale of muscular intensity to affect the viscosity of the movement  

• Visualising from nature  

• Chaos vs. Control  

• Being passive, responsive and resistive to certain impulses to move  

The Sublime: a 'dreamt-of shadow'

Jacques Lacan begins one of his seminars on the Unconscious and Repetition (1981) by recalling an interrupted seminar a year earlier in which he developed the theme of anxiety. To nostalgia he dedicates the following poem by Louis Aragon, from Fou d’Elsa, entitled Contre-chant:

In vain your image comes to meet me
And does not enter me where I am who only shows it

Turning towards me you can find
On the wall of my gaze only your dreamt-of shadow.

I am that wretch comparable with mirrors
That can reflect but cannot see
Like them my eye is empty and like them inhabited

By your absence which makes them blind.

Aragon’s poem, and Lacan’s positioning of it within the domains of nostalgia, anxiety, repetition, and the unconscious, speak to the particularities of performance, and offer us material significant for the reading of performance, toward a reading of moving bodies.

What this poem calls forth is an acknowledgment of the disappearance of the body which performance insistently makes manifest: the impossibility of ever really seeing—actually perceiving—movement (Gilpin, 1996, p. 110). What does it mean to perceive movement? What can we really see? What can we really hear? 

Perhaps what makes movement so compelling is that it is compiled of ‘dreamt-of shadows’ — fleeting moments of absent images.

It's like an earthquake deep under the sea. In an unseen world, a place where light doesn't reach, in the realm of the unconscious. In other words, a major transformation is taking place. It reaches the surface, where it sets off a series of reactions and eventually takes form where we can see it with our own eyes... The best ideas are thoughts that appear, unbidden, from out of the dark (Murakami, 2018, p. 203).  

Meditation, the eternity of the universe and the sublime are ideas that I reflect on in my practice. In aesthetics, the sublime is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation.  

Ideas that I have been musing on…

• Practices of austerity to reach enlightenment and to arrive at a realm beyond life and death.  

• Passing shadows, living beings as mere shadows crossing paths 

• Shifting boundaries between reality and unreality 

• Lux in tenebris (light in darkness) --> subjects emerging from darkness, lighting conventions and dramatic impressions 

• Darkness, light and stillness  

• Depth and clarity of sound 

• Displacement

• Glimpses 

• Intermingling 

• Deformation

• Distortions

References:

Gilpin, H. (1996). Lifelessness in movement, or how do the dead move? Tracing Displacement and Disappearance In Susan Leigh Foster (Eds.) Corporealities : dancing, knowledge, culture, and power (pp. 54-71). London: Routledge. 

Translation as cited in Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), 17, from Section I: The Unconscious and Repetition: “The Freudian Unconscious and Ours.”

Murakami, H. (2018). Killing Commendatore. London:  Penguin Random House. 

Investigations around Memory & Authenticity

Let me imagine a locus for myself; a place that is both real and phantasmic... I will move through this memory terrain whilst writing, drawing from the memorized places the images I have placed on them (Hammergren, 1996, p. 54).

This is the starting point from which I have thus been focussing — questions around bodies as vessels of knowledge and the memories of our lived bodies. I’m interested in interacting with shadows, glimpses and memories as dancing bodies. What do these memories become? Perhaps they become glimpses of the Unconscious, Past and Present time intermingling. 

What is distinctive about the human memory? Memory is the basis of all culture. One of the major social movements of recent times has been the ongoing shift from a culture based on memory to one based on retention. Memory plays out in physical networks, where different parts of the brain move as in a synchronised dance. Every time we recall a memory, they say, the hippocampus is involved and ‘overwrites’ the original memory, each time with a slightly new interpretation or reconstruction. There are some cells in the hippocampus that are active only when we sit on a certain chair and not another chair — even in the same room.

If one tries to enter a particular space, one must adjust one’s body to that space but also yield to recollections springing from a bodily memory that is theirs and also belonged to strangers. How is this possible? How does my body react while entering that particular space? What bodily sensations do I get? How does it feel to touch an object, to adjust to a normative bodily code, to sit in a chair, to look out over a landscape, to move in a particular dress, to compare “this” body to “that” body? (Hammergren, 1996, p. 55-56).

In this sense, the kinesthetic discourse is a strategy which we perform with ourselves as tools, with the possibility of embracing all kinds of ‘source material.’ As a result we would privilege the bodily experience of wind, furniture, picking up objects, over their visual appearance. We would sense them before we visualize them, or at least use sight merely as a mediating sense. In privileging this bodily experience we call up memory associations, that is, we activate an artificial bodily memory (Hammergren, 1996, p. 56).

My question is though are they really artificial? Perhaps there is a kind of authenticity to our lived memories and the process of recollection?

Are you watching your inner film screen? Recall the memory and feel the sensations it contains. You can feel things like the water hitting your body as you dive into the sea. All these sensations flutter about our brains as we remember.

Between our temples most of us are equipped with our own private memory theatre, which continually stages performances, always with slightly new interpretations — and now and then with different actors (p. 27)

Improvisation tasks based on Authenticity & Memory

1. Improvisation task around body manipulation —> participants manipulate the one person’s body and limbs, the participant then improvises from the remembrance of that information  

2. Improvisation task in pairs —> person A sends impetus through different body parts of person B using touch, person B responds to the movement by going towards the touch, halfway through this improvisation person B closes their eyes, still responding to the touch… person A moves away, allowing person B to respond to this information and move from the remembrance of the information

3. Improvisation task of being aware and unaware of the body at the same time —> interacting with infinite number of selves frozen —> leaving traces and coming back to where the last trace/piece image was (can also be done by taking inspiration from other participants positions in space… imagining a statue garden of memories)

Questions that emerge from these tasks:   

• What is authentic?  

• What is your movement vocabulary and what belongs to others?  

• Is it me or is it not me?  

• Are we unable to delete knowledge?  

• When do we start 'curating' movement and body language? 

• Is vulnerability different to authenticity? To be vulnerable is intrinsic to being able to perform, is vulnerability key to authenticity?  

• How can one be present, available and authentic to the self?  

• When do we actually authentically move the body? I may think that I am moving a limb but actually I may be moving from a different point. It's important to remember that the body is a trunk with limbs attached.  

• How does the experience of the improvisation change/shift with the eyes closed? (Maybe it feels as if you are underwater, you’re unsure where you are in space)

• What parts of the body is your partner neglecting?

• How does it feel to move from the remembrance of the touches?

• Are these memory traces meaningless?

Memory Synonyms/related terms:

• Remembrance

• Mental images

• Impressions

• Reminiscence

• Recall

• Retention

• Evocation

• Reminders

• Echoes

• mnemonic (memory devices, techniques for memory retention and retrieval) - mnemonics make use of elaborate encoding, retrieval cues and imagery tools to encode any given information in a way that allows for storage and retrieval

References:

Hammergren, L. (1996). The re-turn of the flâneuse In Susan Leigh Foster (Eds.) Corporealities : dancing, knowledge, culture, and power (pp. 54-71). London: Routledge.