Improvising Perspective

The unstructured dance-theater improvisation involving more than 2 people.

There are times I just can't help but look at it as a microcosm of the big wide world. It has everything. It roils, it breathes, it is brilliant and full of shit and boring. Not to mention unending, repetitious, deceiving in its proclivity for patterns and structure. The bottom line is everything eventually falls apart. When it happens that a group (very rarely more than a quartet in my experience, and usually a duet) starts mashing infinite variations over a uniting theme, really going at it without showing any signs of EVER making a big change, you know that eventually the performers would die and that too would fall apart. It is broad, expansive, and unremarkable because I witness breathtaking, truly beautiful futility in practice everywhere I go every day of my life. In a sense, it is a base form of artistic expression because it is pure mimicry -- taking a blank slate, dropping some chemical compounds on that guy, maybe a spark of divinity if you're so inclined, and watching it evolve, baby. Yow! It can be really thrilling to participate in, maybe because it is alternate and fresh, albeit parallel, to our familiarities. You're really conscious of this being living, of these kinaesthetic, emotional, and impulsive sensations all being part of a process of enacting what it means to, well, exist.

For me, as an improviser, it makes me feel like I know things. It makes me feel like I can stare futility in the face and say, I laughed at you the other day and then threw Boglarka over my shoulder and ran around with her in random directions until my legs gave out. Or, I watched someone stand up and fall to the floor for eight minutes straight; I inscribed imaginary words in the air with varying parts of my body, nearly in tears, because it seemed like the most important thing in the world to do at the moment, while ignoring the people rolling and gurgling on the floor next to me. So, yeah, I've been there, is the sensation. I have developed a sensitivity to this sort of tragedy, and this sort of joy, and this sort of disappointment. It steels me with an incredible calm at the same time I feel like it makes me softer, more receptive to humor.

Then there is specificity, or choreography. Pouring performance into structures and forms, exposing specific elements of the madness in an attempt to precipitate understanding or joy or something magical in the minds of a viewer. To refresh the pathways of perception and empathy. Not that busted-wide-open improvisation doesn't have this power, simply that choreography is more insistent, using any number of methods to coerce or seduce a viewer to notice it and to consider it; to represent itself as trustworthy, consistent, good (or bad), and worthwhile.

And I am out of gas.