Improvisation in Process

Many contemporary choreographers use improvisation as a choreographic method. With cross-disciplinary historical antecedents, especially in post-World War II avant-garde art, improvisation remains a particularly relevant practice in today's cultural climate of political and economic uncertainty. This article describes an elastic dialogue of choreographic control in a rehearsal process that involves improvisation. A creative practice with such recurrent exchanges of control underscores a view that improvisation intimately affects choreographic choice, performance quality, and audience understanding. Notes 1. Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Brenda Gottschild Dixon, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996). 2. Keith Sawyer, "Improvisation and the Creative Process: Dewey, Collingwood, and the Aesthetics of Spontaneity," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 58, no. 2 (2000): 149–61. 3. Larry Lavender and Jennifer Predrock-Linell, "From Improvisation to Choreography: A Critical Bridge," Research in Dance Education, vol. 2, no. 2 (2001): 196. 4. Examples include Daniel Nagrin's Choreography and the Specific Image (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001); Louise Steinman's The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance (Berkeley, Cal.: North Atlantic Books, 1995); and Jaqueline Smith-Artaud's Dance Composition: A Practical Guide to Creative Success in Dancemaking (1976; rpt. New York: Routledge, 2004). 5. Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere, eds., Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003). 6. Oxford Music Online, "The 19th Century," section 5 of "Improvisation: Western Art Music" (by John Rink), http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com:80/subscriber/article/grove/music/13738pg2 (accessed November 28, 2009). 7. Andy Hamilton, "The Aesthetics of Imperfection," Philosophy, vol. 65, no. 253 (1990): 326. 8. For further reading concerning a confluence of factors that contributed to a shift in the practice of improvisation in Western classical music, see Robin Moore, "The Decline of Improvisation in Western Art Music: An Interpretation of Change," International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, vol. 23, no. 1 (1992): 61–84. 9. Robert O'Meally, ed. The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), x–xi. 10. Belgrad, Culture of Spontaneity, 195; Warren Tallman, "Kerouac's Sound," Evergreen Review, vol. 4, no. 11 (1960): 168. 11. Susan Manning, Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 12. Serge Guilbault, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 13. Roger Copeland, "Merce Cunningham and the Politics of Perception," in What is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism, ed. Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 308. 14. Ben Shahn, The Shape of Content (Cambridge, Mass.: The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1957), 65. 15. Charles Olson, "Projective Verse," Poetry New York, no. 3 (1950): 13– 22. 16. George Dardess, "The Logic of Spontaneity: A Reconsideration of Kerouac's 'Spontaneous Prose Method,'" Boundary 2, vol. 3, no. 3 (1975): 732. 17. Belgrad, Culture of Spontaneity, 190. 18. Note the title of O'Meally's book, The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. 19. Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity; Dardess, "The Logic of Spontaneity"; Sawyer, "Improvisation and the Creative Process"; and Hamilton, "The Aesthetics of Imperfection." 20. Mark Seltzer, "Body" in The Companion to American Thought, ed. Richard Wightman and Jemes T. Kloppenberg (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 83–85. 21. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigree Books, 1934); Richard Shusterman, Performing Live (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). 22. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books 1959); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990). 23. Colleen Thomas, interview by the author, July 29, 2008. 24. Bebe Miller, interview by the author, April 14, 2009. 25. Martha Graham, "Graham 1937," in The Vision of Modern Dance: In the Words of Its Creators, 2nd ed., ed. Jean Morrison Brown, Naomi Mindlin, and Charles H. Woodford (Hightstown, N.J.: Princeton Book Company, 1998), 50. 26. Ann Copeland, "Improvising: Learning to Relish Risk," Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, vol. 9, no. 2 (2007): 96. 27. Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/ Putnam, 1990), 9. 28. Kent De Spain, "The Cutting Edge of Awareness: Reports from the Inside of Improvisation," in Taken by Surprise, 37. 29. Susan Foster, "Taken by Surprise: Improvisation in Dance and Mind," in Taken by Surprise, 4. Quoted in Hamilton, "Aesthetics of Imperfection," 336. 31. Ellen Graff, Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928–1942 (Durham, N.C. Duke University Press, 1997); Julia Foulkes, Modern Bodies: Dance and Modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey (Chapel Hill: The Univeristy of North Carolina Press, 2002); Susan Manning, "Ausdruckstanz across the Atlantic," in Dance Discourses: Keywords in Dance Research, ed. Suzanne Franco and Marina Nordera (New York: Routledge, 2007). 32. Quoted in Hamilton, "Aesthetics of Imperfection," 329; Daniel Nagrin, Choreography and the Specific Image: Nineteen Essays and a Workbook (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), 58; Paul Matteson, interview by the author, August 1, 2008. 33. Sally Banes, Democracy's Body: Judson Dance Theater 1962–1964 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993); Carolyn Brown, Chance and Circumstance: Twenty-five Years with Cage and Cunningham (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); Cage/Cunningham: A Film by Elliot Kaplan (Kultur Video, 2007); Richard Kostelantz, ed., Writings About John Cage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick, No Fixed Points (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). 34. Victoria Marks, "Against Improvisation: A Postmodernist Makes the Case for Choreography," in Taken by Surprise, 139, 135. 35. Quotation taken from the author's personal study with Campbell between 1997 and 2001. 36. Miller, interview. 37. Victoria Marks, interview by the author, August 4, 2008. 38. Thomas, interview. 39. Miller, interview. 40. Anne Bogart, And Then, You Act: Making Art in an Unpredictable World (New York: Routledge, 2007), 42. 41. Ibid., 55. 42. Ann Copeland, "Improvising," 98. 43. Marks, interview. 44. Marks, "Against Improvisation," 139. 45. Karl Rogers, interview by the author, September 10, 2009. 46. Thomas, interview. 47. Jennifer Nugent, interview by the author, August 5, 2008. 48. Matteson, interview. 49. Miller, interview. 50. Rogers, interview. 51. Nugent, interview. 52. Marks, interview. 53. Marks, "Against Improvisation," 139. 54. Miller, interview. 55. Rogers, interview. 56. Miller, interview. 57. Thomas, interview. 58. Bogart, And Then, You Act, 83. 59. Ibid., 69. 60. Tere O'Connor, e-mail message, September 6, 2005. 61. Marks, interview. 62. Christine Moorman and Anne Miner, "The Convergence of Planning and Execution, Improvisation in New Product Development," Journal of Marketing, vol. 62, no. 3 (1998): 15. 63. Marks, interview. 64. Bogart, And Then, You Act, 90; Miller, interview. 65. Miller, interview. 66. Ann Copeland, "Improvising," 103. 67. Anne Bogart, "Violence," A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre (New York: Routledge, 2001). 68. Tere O'Connor, Movement Research Performance Journal: Dance Writing, vol. 25 (Fall 2002), http://www.movementresearch.org/performancejournal/pj25/25index.html (accessed November 28, 2009). 69. Doris Humphrey, "What a Dancer Thinks About," in The Vision of Modern Dance, 64. 70. Charles Weidman, "Random Remarks," in The Vision of Modern Dance, 67

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