Artists improvise during rhythm workshop led by jazz pianist and composer, Dave Burrell. (Photo: Toni Shapiro-Phim)
Dance improvisation is spontaneous choreographic creation. What does it mean to come to the stage to interrogate that which you do not know and cannot predict?….Improvisation drives new creation, new practices, new questions. The unknown possibilities of “becoming” require mystery, mastery, intuition, rigor and wit.”
– Jawole Willa Jo Zollar
Corrine Karon reflects on improvising with dancers from diverse backgrounds:
As a tap dancer, there were definitely times were I would initiate a rhythm to pull into something. And it was interesting because it would bring the whole improvisation to a whole other place. And then someone would come in and sing. And it was like, “Oh, we can do that, too,” and then the improvisation went to a whole other level. I thought it was extraordinary to have all these disciplines together, because it really changed the focus of some of the improvisations we did. I don’t think it would’ve happened if we didn’t have such a mix of disciplines together.
Adrienne Abdus-Salaam on a profound experience improvising:
My best improvisational experience was with JungWoong… I felt like I had had an outer-body experience… Ultimately, the body’s gonna do what the body feels comfortable with, especially if you’re working with another person. It’s muscle memory. So at the end of the day, what’s going to happen is you’re gonna go back to the thing that works. You’re gonna try all these other things; they may or may not work. But the thing that works physically is usually the thing that looks good, too. Because if you don’t feel good, you’re not gonna look good. So that’s when I began going back to trusting the process, trusting your bodies.
See two video clips of jazz pianist and composer, Dave Burrell discussing his experience working with the Professional Learning Community. In the first clip, Dave discusses improvising with familiar material as a way to play with an audience’s expectations. In the second clip, Dave talks about the need to anchor his improvisation in a constant tempo, allowing for an interplay between his left and right hand that pushes the dancers to places of unpredictability.
Ananya Chatterjea similarly points to the notion of deconstructing audience expectations of movement in a performative context. Her thoughts on critical refracturing are particularly resonant:
Critical refracturing is a very important thing for us to think about in this company, because it’s about what kinds of visual, auditory, and other kinds of expectations that audiences bring. What kind of contract do audiences have with performers that they bring with them to the stage. What do they expect to see when they see these kinds of bodies? Perhaps they don’t expect to see certain things. How do we not do things just for shock value, but bring people along, in order to show how we have to work to reach beauty? I think beauty is a very important thing, whether it’s the beauty of gestural movement or whatever it is. But for those of us working in the social justice community, it’s not easy to access beauty just like that, because too much has happened. So we have a lot of work to access beauty.
So, just thinking about how we make those unlikely partnerships onstage. How do we work through what is expected of us? What happens when all these bodies that are right here stand? And what do they expect to see of us?
Germaine Ingram shares an example of applying Ananya’s concept of critical refracturing to her own artistic practice:
One phrase that [Ananya] talked about both in the talk-back on the preceding night at Temple, and during our conversation with the learning community, was – I think she called it – “critical [re]fracturing.” And that phrase really kind of stuck with me: this idea of breaking open these notions, ideas, histories, and narratives that people think they know well. And for artists to do this critical refracturing for themselves, breaking open these stories , these inclinations, these habits that we’ve become accustomed to. That kind of informed one of the pieces that I did for the Juneteenth celebration I did at the Johnson House. You know Juneteenth is thought of as this celebratory time. It represents the joy and sense of promise associated with the announcement that legal slavery has ended. So I wanted to do something that bumped up against this sense of joy and promise, and did this kind of critical refracturing. I did this piece that represents how a formerly enslaved person would approach the uncertainty related to this new experience: somebody whose never known what freedom is. How do you in your body approach this promise? And ask the question, “Can I believe that I can look wherever I wanna look? After for so many years having to use my gaze in ways that didn’t offend the master.” Or didn’t offend the notion of what was the appropriate use of the public space for people of color. “Can I walk where I wanna walk?” What does this mean in terms of how I relate to public space, how I can use that space and define that space for myself? What does it mean for the agency that I have over my own body? What I call myself? How can I use this voice to call myself by my own name, instead of the names I’ve been called… and can’t insist on a name that I think is consistent with the way I think of myself, and with my real ancestry. So this piece was my attempt at doing some critical refracturing.
Below, see and excerpt from Germaine’s performance of Bearing Witness at the Johnson House for a Juneteenth celebration, June 15, 2013. Featuring Diane Monroe on violin.
Khalil Munir shares his thoughts on the transformative potential of improvisation:
The power of improvisation is so powerful. You have people relating without speaking, telling stories, connecting, all in the space – everyone in the space. Even when you were recording, you were connected. Connecting, learning, experiencing. For everyone involved it was this powerful process that was the beginning of something. That was the beginning of this piece behind me. That was the beginning of that, because after that, Dave was really inspired and said, “I would love to work with you again.” So that was the beginning of Heaven’s Dew.
Dew Crew Memoirs 