sarma

Over the past year, improvisation festivals have cropped up on two North American coasts: The 2nd Annual Improvisation Festival/NY (New York City), Seattle Festival of Alternative Dance and Improvisation (WA), Improv Festival and Symposium (Vancouver, B.C.), Engaging the Imagination: A Festival of Improvisation (San Francisco, CA), and Taken by Surprise: Improvisation in Dance and Mind (Berkeley, CA).

Glancing at these titles, one might not know that dance was the subject of celebration, or that the California events also included theater, music and the spoken word. All the festivals offered performances, teaching, and symposia/ discussions. All added out-of-town artists into their local brew. In fact, many of the same artists travelled from coast to coast to participate in these events. This showed some devotion, for there was little or no money offered, perhaps because all but one of these festivals were first-year ventures. As reported, the events were well-attended by an enthusiastic public. Critics were notably absent.

Something is happening here. All of these events were initiated and produced by dancers. What is provoking them? This phenomenon provokes me. The following impressions arise both from my participation in the NY and Vancouver projects and my experience out in the field as an improvisational choreographer and performer for many years.

When I was invited to participate in the NY "Improvisation Festival" last December, my first thought was to decline. Those two words together sent up a flare. A "festival?" At its worst, a meat market, a fashion show. The traditional format invites comparison, and work is often ungracefully juxtaposed. The parading of artists in one door and out the other is particularly difficult for artists whose work depends on tuning into a space before performance. There is simply no time for the art.

Although the work of certain improvisational artists (myself included) has long been presented in international festivals of dance, it has most often been framed as exotic or "alternative" fare. One can well imagine why producers are wary of booking work that is "unpredictable" or "unrepeatable" in the customary way, but this reluctance has helped keep both audience and press underexposed to the development of improvisational dance, and thus at a loss to appreciate its current sophistication. So it's high time for improvisational dancers themselves to begin a campaign for education.

I have become accustomed to expect very little open-minded viewing of my work by audience and critics alike on those occasions when my work has been announced as improvisational, either in the advance publicity or in the program The great majority of audience for dance seems to become instantly polarized by this labelling - aficionados expecting "risk" and "spontaneity" on the one side, traditionalists expecting "self-indulgence" and "the threat of participation" on the other. As I see it, none of these expectations have pertinence to my own work. In light of this, I have as often chosen to omit any reference to improvisation as I have chosen to include explanation of it. So far, neither approach has satisfied my need for my work to be seen freshly as dance, not methodology.

A festival could be just the chance to broaden these expectations. But where do we start? I turn to the word "improvisation." What has it come to mean? It is currently applied to an enormous range of approaches, methods, practices and performances. From loosely constructed scores for performers with and/or without "dance" experience (requiring little rehearsal); to spontaneous or ad hoc performances by experienced artists (whose work is customarily not improvisational) who take the opportunity to taste a collaboration or try something out in the zing of the public eye; to basically set movement choreography leaving a few choices to the performers; to highly defined and rehearsed (sometimes over years) scores for movement, attention and interaction; to the participatory, gravity and touch-focussed score of contact improvisation, to describe but a few.

Contact improvisation itself brings up a related quandary. As the only improvisational dance form to have arisen from modem dance, and have a name of its own, Contact's very appellation has, in my experience, created a kind of unconscious moratorium on the public's awareness of and openness to other developments in the field of improvisational dance over the last 20 years. This has had some frustrating fall-out, with work as far-ranging as non-improvisational video art, solo performance, and duet dances with virtually no physical contact, being assumed under its label. This part of the prevailing confusion takes on absurd proportions. A festival of improvisation at this point in time might address this confusion. A simple acknowledgement of the ranginess of its subject would be a good place to start.

In expressing these thoughts to the NY festival organizers, Julie Carr and Sondra Loring, I found them in an exploratory and inclusive frame of mind. As a result of their openness, I constructed a way to approach some of these concerns. I was joined in this effort by my collaborators in Image Lab: improvisor/choreographers Karen Nelson, KJ Holmes, and Scott Smith.

For our project, we set up a series of "Observatories" in a small theater on weekday afternoons as part of the festival. The Observatories opened to the public our practice of an improvisational composition score which applies our improvisational skills to an investigation of the meaning of movement. It is a collaborative learning form, both for ourselves and an audience. It seeks as much to demystify an improvisational process as to preserve its mysteries. We were grateful for its welcome in the festival, the dialogue it stimulated, and its seeming relevance to the incredible variety of participating artists. And it was a relief for me to translate my concerns into action.

The 2nd Annual NY Improvisation Festival was a two-week event, from November 28 to December 12, 1993. It succeeded in spawning the 3rd Annual which will take place November 27 to December 11, 1994. It also planted a seed for the Improv Festival and Symposium in Vancouver, which happened the first two weeks of August '94 at the home base of E.D.A.M. (Experimental Dance and Music), directed by Peter Bingham.

Peter had participated in both annual NY festivals as part of the Contact Group, an ad hoc collective of experienced contactors interested in high-level exchange. With the input of Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith and myself, he constructed a residency project for working improvisational groups to share time daily in his beautiful studio theater at the Western Front Lodge. Two groups participated: a smaller collection of the Contact Group, renamed Group 6-Peter, Nancy, Chris Aiken, Jeff Bliss, Julie Carr and Ray Chung; and Image Lab (which also included Nora Hajos and Ray). Steve Paxton was present briefly, and Simone Forti was in residence to share her dance narrative approach with members from both groups. Although the time was incredibly full, most of us took the opportunity to visit each other's work sessions, share performances, and take each other's classes which were offered to the public each morning. In fact, all of the work, to varying degrees, was open to the public. This was a brilliant stab at a new format for improvising artists - a working festival.

Immediately following the Vancouver event, over half the participants travelled down to Seattle to teach and perform at the festival there. From Karen Nelson's telling, the main organizers, Heidi Drucker and Robert Harrison, having been informed about the Vancouver gathering, had seized the opportunity to bring these out-of-town artists into the heart of their festival. As Karen put it, "It was a great confluence of travelling dancers and local artists and a real shot in the arm for the alternative dance scene in Seattle."

It is certainly possible that the appearance of so many festivals for improvisational dance in one year is coincidental, as artists in each area respond to their local conditions. It's obvious, however, that the impetus for at least a couple of these festivals came from the others. Whatever the case, thanks to this phenomenon, I've been stimulated to air some prickly questions about being part of, as well as out in, the field.

Over the past year, improvisation festivals have cropped up on two North American coasts: The 2nd Annual Improvisation Festival/NY (New York City), Seattle Festival of Alternative Dance and Improvisation (WA), Improv Festival and Symposium (Vancouver, B.C.), Engaging the Imagination: A Festival of Improvisation (San Francisco, CA), and Taken by Surprise: Improvisation in Dance and Mind (Berkeley, CA).

Glancing at these titles, one might not know that dance was the subject of celebration, or that the California events also included theater, music and the spoken word. All the festivals offered performances, teaching, and symposia/ discussions. All added out-of-town artists into their local brew. In fact, many of the same artists travelled from coast to coast to participate in these events. This showed some devotion, for there was little or no money offered, perhaps because all but one of these festivals were first-year ventures. As reported, the events were well-attended by an enthusiastic public. Critics were notably absent.

Something is happening here. All of these events were initiated and produced by dancers. What is provoking them? This phenomenon provokes me. The following impressions arise both from my participation in the NY and Vancouver projects and my experience out in the field as an improvisational choreographer and performer for many years.

When I was invited to participate in the NY "Improvisation Festival" last December, my first thought was to decline. Those two words together sent up a flare. A "festival?" At its worst, a meat market, a fashion show. The traditional format invites comparison, and work is often ungracefully juxtaposed. The parading of artists in one door and out the other is particularly difficult for artists whose work depends on tuning into a space before performance. There is simply no time for the art.

Although the work of certain improvisational artists (myself included) has long been presented in international festivals of dance, it has most often been framed as exotic or "alternative" fare. One can well imagine why producers are wary of booking work that is "unpredictable" or "unrepeatable" in the customary way, but this reluctance has helped keep both audience and press underexposed to the development of improvisational dance, and thus at a loss to appreciate its current sophistication. So it's high time for improvisational dancers themselves to begin a campaign for education.

I have become accustomed to expect very little open-minded viewing of my work by audience and critics alike on those occasions when my work has been announced as improvisational, either in the advance publicity or in the program The great majority of audience for dance seems to become instantly polarized by this labelling - aficionados expecting "risk" and "spontaneity" on the one side, traditionalists expecting "self-indulgence" and "the threat of participation" on the other. As I see it, none of these expectations have pertinence to my own work. In light of this, I have as often chosen to omit any reference to improvisation as I have chosen to include explanation of it. So far, neither approach has satisfied my need for my work to be seen freshly as dance, not methodology.

A festival could be just the chance to broaden these expectations. But where do we start? I turn to the word "improvisation." What has it come to mean? It is currently applied to an enormous range of approaches, methods, practices and performances. From loosely constructed scores for performers with and/or without "dance" experience (requiring little rehearsal); to spontaneous or ad hoc performances by experienced artists (whose work is customarily not improvisational) who take the opportunity to taste a collaboration or try something out in the zing of the public eye; to basically set movement choreography leaving a few choices to the performers; to highly defined and rehearsed (sometimes over years) scores for movement, attention and interaction; to the participatory, gravity and touch-focussed score of contact improvisation, to describe but a few.

Contact improvisation itself brings up a related quandary. As the only improvisational dance form to have arisen from modem dance, and have a name of its own, Contact's very appellation has, in my experience, created a kind of unconscious moratorium on the public's awareness of and openness to other developments in the field of improvisational dance over the last 20 years. This has had some frustrating fall-out, with work as far-ranging as non-improvisational video art, solo performance, and duet dances with virtually no physical contact, being assumed under its label. This part of the prevailing confusion takes on absurd proportions. A festival of improvisation at this point in time might address this confusion. A simple acknowledgement of the ranginess of its subject would be a good place to start.

In expressing these thoughts to the NY festival organizers, Julie Carr and Sondra Loring, I found them in an exploratory and inclusive frame of mind. As a result of their openness, I constructed a way to approach some of these concerns. I was joined in this effort by my collaborators in Image Lab: improvisor/choreographers Karen Nelson, KJ Holmes, and Scott Smith.

For our project, we set up a series of "Observatories" in a small theater on weekday afternoons as part of the festival. The Observatories opened to the public our practice of an improvisational composition score which applies our improvisational skills to an investigation of the meaning of movement. It is a collaborative learning form, both for ourselves and an audience. It seeks as much to demystify an improvisational process as to preserve its mysteries. We were grateful for its welcome in the festival, the dialogue it stimulated, and its seeming relevance to the incredible variety of participating artists. And it was a relief for me to translate my concerns into action.

The 2nd Annual NY Improvisation Festival was a two-week event, from November 28 to December 12, 1993. It succeeded in spawning the 3rd Annual which will take place November 27 to December 11, 1994. It also planted a seed for the Improv Festival and Symposium in Vancouver, which happened the first two weeks of August '94 at the home base of E.D.A.M. (Experimental Dance and Music), directed by Peter Bingham.

Peter had participated in both annual NY festivals as part of the Contact Group, an ad hoc collective of experienced contactors interested in high-level exchange. With the input of Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith and myself, he constructed a residency project for working improvisational groups to share time daily in his beautiful studio theater at the Western Front Lodge. Two groups participated: a smaller collection of the Contact Group, renamed Group 6-Peter, Nancy, Chris Aiken, Jeff Bliss, Julie Carr and Ray Chung; and Image Lab (which also included Nora Hajos and Ray). Steve Paxton was present briefly, and Simone Forti was in residence to share her dance narrative approach with members from both groups. Although the time was incredibly full, most of us took the opportunity to visit each other's work sessions, share performances, and take each other's classes which were offered to the public each morning. In fact, all of the work, to varying degrees, was open to the public. This was a brilliant stab at a new format for improvising artists - a working festival.

Immediately following the Vancouver event, over half the participants travelled down to Seattle to teach and perform at the festival there. From Karen Nelson's telling, the main organizers, Heidi Drucker and Robert Harrison, having been informed about the Vancouver gathering, had seized the opportunity to bring these out-of-town artists into the heart of their festival. As Karen put it, "It was a great confluence of travelling dancers and local artists and a real shot in the arm for the alternative dance scene in Seattle."

It is certainly possible that the appearance of so many festivals for improvisational dance in one year is coincidental, as artists in each area respond to their local conditions. It's obvious, however, that the impetus for at least a couple of these festivals came from the others. Whatever the case, thanks to this phenomenon, I've been stimulated to air some prickly questions about being part of, as well as out in, the field.