IMPROVISATION

This course is a comprehensive survey of creative exploration in movement through improvisational and compositional exercises. Through this course, we will engage in ideas and practices that access and develop creativity, find connections between imagination and dance-making, and enrich movement vocabulary. We will co-create an experimental container to explore movement in solo, duet, and ensemble formats. We will stretch ourselves to explore the broad scope of what dancing together can mean. We will also work hard to fleece our inner saboteur, let go of what we THINK dancing is supposed to look like and work towards a place of greater creative autonomy. Loosely put, improvisation is composing while doing; this happens all the time in everyday life far beyond the dance studio. We will develop skills to track and make our decisions while making them. 

In this class, we will focus primarily on improvisational practices stemming from American (US) postmodern dance lineage. Still, we will also spend time considering how improvisation takes place across various dance practices/traditions and how that is crucial to how we navigate situations in our everyday lives.  

​

This course will introduce improvisation through the frame of scoring and systems, looking at how these frameworks can serve as methods for archiving and directing dance improvisation practices. Students will learn what improvisational scores and systems are and practice building and performing scores individually, in small groups, and as a class. We will practice observing and generating movement systems through the writing scores activity.  

When I am in a creative process (be it long-term or in the moment), I always return to these questions (courtesy of the Great Anne Bogart)

 

How do you make things? 

How do you change things? 

What do you get attached to? 

What are you willing to let go of? 

How does “rigor” enter your creative research? 

How do all of the parts come together?