he concept of dance improvisation has always been appealing to me. I remember my first improvisation class. I was nine years old and had been practicing classical ballet and contemporary dance for several years when our teacher introduced this new way of being in the dance studio: improvisation. We were to start moving, with no choreography, exercise or movement phrase to rely on. We were encouraged to take risks and avoid falling into familiar patterns. It was magical. Since then I have been involved with improvisation in several forms and settings (as part of the creative process, as method of exploration and self-awareness, in social dancing such as argentine tango, swing and contact improvisation jams, as a healing process, as pure self-expression and as part of a performance).
I came to realise that improvisation is an indivisible part of life. As practitioner and theorist Susan Leigh Foster puts it: “The performance of any action, regardless of how predetermined it is in the minds of those who perform it and those who witness it, contains an element of improvisation.” (Foster)
Therefore, not only is improvisation a huge part of dance, but also of life. Nevertheless, it is almost completely excluded by both human and in extend, dance history. Contrary to improvisation, history is almost exclusively occupied with that which is known; that which id documented and archived. Therefore, there is little (if not none) space for something that is built upon temporality, spontaneity and flux, such as improvisation.
On the other hand, one could easily wonder: is it really necessary to go through the process of pining improvisation down in the name of history, or should we simply accept its nature and respect it as a form of resistance to the industrialisation that characterises our times? After all, much like live art, improvisation “ends as life does. It cannot be timeless.” (Malzacher) But it can be limitless.
There is indeed great discourse about whether it is possible and even appropriate to attempt documenting live art. What Peggy Phelan has described as Disappearance, is believed to be one of live art’s most significant values, investing it with strong politics of resistance. On the other hand, having access to a kind of performance history is considered by many to be vital for its survival and development. Dance is at a great extend characterised by the same ephemerality which gives it value and at the same time threatens its self-awareness and development. As choreographer Jonathan Burrows puts it, dance is forced to continuously rediscover itself, (Burrows) which is as valuable and liberating as it is limiting. Therefore, the same problematic occurs: Is it possible to document dance and if so, is not the action of documentation depriving it of its valuable disappearance and ephemerality?
What is unique about dance improvisation is the simultaneity in which creation and execution occur; the moving back and forth between the known and the unknown and the experience of the unpredictable that is shared between the performer and spectators.
Which brings me to my question: How can we document improvised dance performance in a way that allows space for the element of improvisation to remain active? How can we avoid transforming it into choreography?
As Foucault points out, when the archive functions as the precondition of ‘what can be said’ it has both enabling restrictive potentials. (Foucault et al.)
But what if we allowed the archive a different function?
Von Bismarck speaks of archival gaps as “formative and performative in-between spaces in the archival meaning production”. She introduces the role of the curational in the archiving process, identifying the archive as an “on going never to be finalized process” of a number of activities (the acts of collecting, assembling, ordering, presenting and mediating -the professional specificities of curators- refer to objects of differing origins, to information, persons, sites and contexts, between which they establish relations), thus rendering it ideal to re-present flux, ephemerality and ‘disappearance’. (Von Bismarck)
The idea of gaps, as well as overlaps, not only in archives but also within the process of experiencing, remembering and documenting improvised dance was crucial to my project. In those gaps I saw the opportunity for improvisation. Thus, I set them as the main axis of my process...