THE FORM-THAT-YOU-ARE-NOW-TAKING
JENNIFER KAYLE, APRIL 2019
What follows is a letter I wrote a long time ago. It’s a response to a digital conversation that was sent to fellow artists in the 2011 Chicago Dance Improvisation Festival. The 3-day festival was curated and organized by Lisa Gonzales and hosted at Columbia College, Chicago. Alongside our group, The Architects, some of the featured artists at the 3-day festival were: Bebe Miller, Chris Aiken & Angie Hauser, Nancy Stark Smith & Mike Vargas, and our music collaborators, Arthur Brooks’ Ensemble V. During the festival, I performed with The Architects, and also moderated a public conversation with well-known practitioners and teachers, Susan Sgorbati and Peter Schmitz.
Before the festival, a conversation had begun on an email string to prepare for an opening event. A message from a fellow artist seemed to criticize improvisation practices that focus on “ways of composing,” claiming that this methodology is insufficient preparation for improvising, and also, that it’s a different preparation than work grounded in sensing, attending, and orienting in the moment of performance. I never got to learn more about what the author meant in any detail. On one interpretation, the idea was that we should focus on sensing and orienting, and “ways of composing” are ancillary. In our professional activities, I’ve encountered this idea before, a view that pits impulse against intent, and sensing against forming. This formulation always strikes me as a false binary. I added to the conversation hoping to complicate the territory under consideration arguing for another way to name and perceive the distinctions at hand.
I’ve excerpted and tinkered a bit. The heart of it is the same.
I. Introduction / A Dance
I am grateful (insert gesture) for starting this conversation, and for articulating (underline, punctuate) so clearly, areas of interest. And I’m also grateful to participate in a conversation at this level (stutter step, fall down). Perhaps others feel similarly that, as a professional teacher, it is nice to discuss one’s questions and one’s growing edge with colleagues (strange unison, progressing oddly on the diagonal, oops, off-diagonal, new sort of wiggly diagonal). Though I always bring my questions to the classroom, the level of investigation is different, and there are also other agendas and necessities there (insert series of unseemly actions, followed by: silence: nudity).
Or in other words, I wish we could be moving together right now!
Communicating in the distance – a typical contemporary situation that I tend to feel is more so a predicament. The Architects all live in different states and though we work together yearly, we are doing a lot of individual teaching for most of the year. As a result, I sometimes suffer (cue oddly un-sentimental sound track) a sense of isolation in: “the work,” as we often call it. This distance has brought into new focus the necessity of assembling the ensemble for our “ensemble improvisation.” (designer brings up gratuitous spotlights. nobody in them.) It is a challenge, and a gift, to be accompanied in the moment of creating.
Although this is not always at the center of our conversation, we perceive the ensemble work we practice to be meaningful as social and political beings, as participants in a world struggling to find new models of organization, especially with regard to power, justice, pluralism, and freedom; we believe that in some way, we’re investigating the relationship of group structures, both benevolent and coercive, to the agency and creativity of the individual. We continue to ask through our practice, sometimes tacitly, sometimes directly, if there are ways to think and create together that may be both the evidence of, and the vehicle toward, these emerging modes of human and social evolution.
(evolution… a specific lens to view the way forms come into being, have a being, and disappear – or in other words – evolution: a theory of composition. Or is it: composition: a theory of evolution? Maybe both. Or a third thing. There’s always a third thing)
This brings me to some wonderings that I hope we can discuss, debate, and exchange at the upcoming Festival:
I am always interested to discuss with other improvisational artists, how they see the importance of what we do for the world beyond the studio, beyond our field, to the overall human endeavor. At this moment, how do we see the importance, the necessity, the contribution, the potential of what we do for the world? What might be the beliefs or intentions of our work as a human project? As a counter-proposal to the postmodern condition? As a practice in recuperating or rehabilitating what is being eroded or diminished elsewhere in our contemporary lives? Or…is all this too much proselytizing, too much naiveté, and the kind of questionable romanticism with which our form is often associated and dismissed? Are there intractable structures of culture and power, structures of access, visibility and invisibility, that prevent us from making a wider impact?
Related Question for us to consider:
Is the theater in the world anymore?
Is the world in the theater anymore?
(Pull the stage curtains back. All of them. Still can’t see anything. Nothing. Space? Yes. “The performance” is in the hall. I’m missing it. Is my-perception-of-a-performance-I’m-missing…the actual performance? Projected desires, perceptual ghosts. Wait, somebody is sending photos to my phone. Somebody else is watching the body of the performance and is sending me still shots of something happening for which I am not physically present. As I shuttle back and forth through the photos, is this the performance? Is this the world we live in?)
II. Other Points of View / Terms
As a partial answer to the question above, and in spite our mediatized world, I still believe that showing up, physically, to the presence of the body in the presence of other bodies, is both the irreducible foundation of our work, and the primary source of its value. And while this may apply to any rigorous dance practice in general, I also believe that the peculiar and powerful nature of improvisation, of showing up to the body to make something unique in, unique to, this moment, is the lightening rod of improvisation’s necessity and power. In a sense, it is a deeply physical process, but also meta-physical, including the physical, but also an enlargement, an in-corpor-ation that extends beyond itself.
“In a sense” is an important phrase for improvisors as we tune into sensation and build the sensory intelligence that fuels our creative choices. As improvisers, we practice tuning into far more than the so-called five senses. This tuning is a deep and ongoing practice, so I wonder – are we contributing to the growth of human capability? ( composition: a theory of evolution ) Do the practices we practice help refine and expand the sensitivity and acuteness of our multi-senses? What “sense” is being activated here, in the total awareness of the moment, of moving in and through the body-of-this-moment? What sense is the sense of “presence?”
The Architects have been exploring through teaching and performing how improvisation is sparked by awareness, and further by the awareness of awareness. And we have been testing-out what this has to do with “composition.” (insert: group improvisation. Then: stillness, break, clear, agreed.) I put the word in quotations because to discuss what we think we are doing with regard to “composition,” or how we define or identify ways of composing, is a place where I think we can have very productive disagreements- the kind of disagreements that are useful to diversifying and crystallizing some possibilities in the evolution of an art form. (evolution; a theory of composition, or vice versa).
One question offered to start our festival conversation was, “how do we prepare ourselves?” This is a very serious question, both as a practitioner and a teacher. (Insert: lunge. Open shirt pocket. Take vitamin. Close eyes: begin). Similarly, a suggested prompt for discussion stated, “It is not enough simply to study and practice ways of composing.” My question has to do with how we conceive of these practices, and whether we’re arguing over semantics, or over concrete differences in perspective and pedagogy.
There’s perhaps another way to look at this issue of perception and composition. (Here comes that third thing?!)
If “practice ways of composing” means to acquire knowledge about canonical compositional formulas and then exercise them, then I agree – not an adequate preparation. Yes, this knowledge is enormously helpful, and also, not enough. It renders “ways of composing” as something separate from the process of mining perception and sensation in order to move. When I hear other improvisation artists talking about how they do what they do, this either/or situation is not what I interpret from their explanations. (Right everybody? Don’t answer that. I think maybe the diversity of our practices and concepts is essential. I think the most important thing is to understand the complexity and rigorousness of each other’s approach. Talk back. This is a democracy.)
The way it has been proposed to me by an important teacher, Peter Schmitz, we practice spontaneous composing through an integrated attention to being/doing/forming. Not a spreading thin of one’s attention, or a willful switching about, but an enlargement and integration of what one can perceive and what complex decisions one can make in the midst of all that information and experience. We understand impulse and decision-making as intimately braided, each giving rise to the other in tangled ways. We are cultivating a receptive consciousness, and that consciousness is awake in each moment of choice. In our group, Katherine Ferrier likes to say, “composing is choosing, choosing is composing.” (She opens her eyes really wide when she says this. Her inner knowing is so acute, and she emphatically wants you to see it.) But, choosing is continuous with sensing and listening; as awareness is tuned, then moving-as-perceiving, and moving-as-choosing, emerge as a whole.
(peripheral vision…vibration…herd of dancers galumphing past, swept up on cue, don’t mess up the canon! Damn, late. Sorry. And now: the sorry solo)
As we attend to the swirl of sensation, there is a peculiar state where this information can simultaneously be integrated with the awareness that there is also a form happening in the body, and a form happening in this body’s relationship to everything else. An integrated attention holds that this feeling and this form are in-forming one another. The complexity of the practice grows from there, from noticing that the form this flow is taking can instantaneously be submitted to other attentions, other modes that would allow us to extend, complicate, or triangulate with everything else that’s happening. Such a sensory-driven compositional state can be in a dialogue with multiple formal considerations. Our individual process fuels the structuring process in the group, causing organization to emerge as a result of what we (each and together) are attending to. We simultaneously tune and listen and scan and decide; we feel our insides and our environment as a whole; we marinate in kinesthesia, memory, observation, association, imagination, desire, and curiosity. When I jokingly say above “there’s always a third thing,” it’s part frustration that there’s so much information and experience to digest in this process, and also part insight that beyond one thing, and two things, the third thing is about their integration, holding them as a unity.
Composing by listening carefully to the form-that-you-are-now-taking is a process that extends far beyond conceptual application of stock compositional structures. Giving spontaneous shape to the sense of a moment is so enjoyable when it feels simple, even though it draws on a complex integration of multiple levels of perception, knowledge and intelligence. (I like sharing with you when my philosopher husband interjects during these essays… He asks, “the form-that-you-are-now-taking,” why is it all hyphenated? And I said, “because it’s a totality- the form, the you, the taking, the now…a connected unity.” And he said, “ok, convinced.” A big endorsement from a professional skeptic.) The way I understand the training, this is what the training is for – to be able to weed through the complexity with your attention, to remove some filters and dampers on your receptivity, and to improve the fluid integration of your feeling and forming, listening and choosing. So that it feels simple. Even though it isn’t.
Before the festival, a conversation had begun on an email string to prepare for an opening event. A message from a fellow artist seemed to criticize improvisation practices that focus on “ways of composing,” claiming that this methodology is insufficient preparation for improvising, and also, that it’s a different preparation than work grounded in sensing, attending, and orienting in the moment of performance. I never got to learn more about what the author meant in any detail. On one interpretation, the idea was that we should focus on sensing and orienting, and “ways of composing” are ancillary. In our professional activities, I’ve encountered this idea before, a view that pits impulse against intent, and sensing against forming. This formulation always strikes me as a false binary. I added to the conversation hoping to complicate the territory under consideration arguing for another way to name and perceive the distinctions at hand.
I’ve excerpted and tinkered a bit. The heart of it is the same.
I. Introduction / A Dance
I am grateful (insert gesture) for starting this conversation, and for articulating (underline, punctuate) so clearly, areas of interest. And I’m also grateful to participate in a conversation at this level (stutter step, fall down). Perhaps others feel similarly that, as a professional teacher, it is nice to discuss one’s questions and one’s growing edge with colleagues (strange unison, progressing oddly on the diagonal, oops, off-diagonal, new sort of wiggly diagonal). Though I always bring my questions to the classroom, the level of investigation is different, and there are also other agendas and necessities there (insert series of unseemly actions, followed by: silence: nudity).
Or in other words, I wish we could be moving together right now!
Communicating in the distance – a typical contemporary situation that I tend to feel is more so a predicament. The Architects all live in different states and though we work together yearly, we are doing a lot of individual teaching for most of the year. As a result, I sometimes suffer (cue oddly un-sentimental sound track) a sense of isolation in: “the work,” as we often call it. This distance has brought into new focus the necessity of assembling the ensemble for our “ensemble improvisation.” (designer brings up gratuitous spotlights. nobody in them.) It is a challenge, and a gift, to be accompanied in the moment of creating.
Although this is not always at the center of our conversation, we perceive the ensemble work we practice to be meaningful as social and political beings, as participants in a world struggling to find new models of organization, especially with regard to power, justice, pluralism, and freedom; we believe that in some way, we’re investigating the relationship of group structures, both benevolent and coercive, to the agency and creativity of the individual. We continue to ask through our practice, sometimes tacitly, sometimes directly, if there are ways to think and create together that may be both the evidence of, and the vehicle toward, these emerging modes of human and social evolution.
(evolution… a specific lens to view the way forms come into being, have a being, and disappear – or in other words – evolution: a theory of composition. Or is it: composition: a theory of evolution? Maybe both. Or a third thing. There’s always a third thing)
This brings me to some wonderings that I hope we can discuss, debate, and exchange at the upcoming Festival:
I am always interested to discuss with other improvisational artists, how they see the importance of what we do for the world beyond the studio, beyond our field, to the overall human endeavor. At this moment, how do we see the importance, the necessity, the contribution, the potential of what we do for the world? What might be the beliefs or intentions of our work as a human project? As a counter-proposal to the postmodern condition? As a practice in recuperating or rehabilitating what is being eroded or diminished elsewhere in our contemporary lives? Or…is all this too much proselytizing, too much naiveté, and the kind of questionable romanticism with which our form is often associated and dismissed? Are there intractable structures of culture and power, structures of access, visibility and invisibility, that prevent us from making a wider impact?
Related Question for us to consider:
Is the theater in the world anymore?
Is the world in the theater anymore?
(Pull the stage curtains back. All of them. Still can’t see anything. Nothing. Space? Yes. “The performance” is in the hall. I’m missing it. Is my-perception-of-a-performance-I’m-missing…the actual performance? Projected desires, perceptual ghosts. Wait, somebody is sending photos to my phone. Somebody else is watching the body of the performance and is sending me still shots of something happening for which I am not physically present. As I shuttle back and forth through the photos, is this the performance? Is this the world we live in?)
II. Other Points of View / Terms
As a partial answer to the question above, and in spite our mediatized world, I still believe that showing up, physically, to the presence of the body in the presence of other bodies, is both the irreducible foundation of our work, and the primary source of its value. And while this may apply to any rigorous dance practice in general, I also believe that the peculiar and powerful nature of improvisation, of showing up to the body to make something unique in, unique to, this moment, is the lightening rod of improvisation’s necessity and power. In a sense, it is a deeply physical process, but also meta-physical, including the physical, but also an enlargement, an in-corpor-ation that extends beyond itself.
“In a sense” is an important phrase for improvisors as we tune into sensation and build the sensory intelligence that fuels our creative choices. As improvisers, we practice tuning into far more than the so-called five senses. This tuning is a deep and ongoing practice, so I wonder – are we contributing to the growth of human capability? ( composition: a theory of evolution ) Do the practices we practice help refine and expand the sensitivity and acuteness of our multi-senses? What “sense” is being activated here, in the total awareness of the moment, of moving in and through the body-of-this-moment? What sense is the sense of “presence?”
The Architects have been exploring through teaching and performing how improvisation is sparked by awareness, and further by the awareness of awareness. And we have been testing-out what this has to do with “composition.” (insert: group improvisation. Then: stillness, break, clear, agreed.) I put the word in quotations because to discuss what we think we are doing with regard to “composition,” or how we define or identify ways of composing, is a place where I think we can have very productive disagreements- the kind of disagreements that are useful to diversifying and crystallizing some possibilities in the evolution of an art form. (evolution; a theory of composition, or vice versa).
One question offered to start our festival conversation was, “how do we prepare ourselves?” This is a very serious question, both as a practitioner and a teacher. (Insert: lunge. Open shirt pocket. Take vitamin. Close eyes: begin). Similarly, a suggested prompt for discussion stated, “It is not enough simply to study and practice ways of composing.” My question has to do with how we conceive of these practices, and whether we’re arguing over semantics, or over concrete differences in perspective and pedagogy.
There’s perhaps another way to look at this issue of perception and composition. (Here comes that third thing?!)
If “practice ways of composing” means to acquire knowledge about canonical compositional formulas and then exercise them, then I agree – not an adequate preparation. Yes, this knowledge is enormously helpful, and also, not enough. It renders “ways of composing” as something separate from the process of mining perception and sensation in order to move. When I hear other improvisation artists talking about how they do what they do, this either/or situation is not what I interpret from their explanations. (Right everybody? Don’t answer that. I think maybe the diversity of our practices and concepts is essential. I think the most important thing is to understand the complexity and rigorousness of each other’s approach. Talk back. This is a democracy.)
The way it has been proposed to me by an important teacher, Peter Schmitz, we practice spontaneous composing through an integrated attention to being/doing/forming. Not a spreading thin of one’s attention, or a willful switching about, but an enlargement and integration of what one can perceive and what complex decisions one can make in the midst of all that information and experience. We understand impulse and decision-making as intimately braided, each giving rise to the other in tangled ways. We are cultivating a receptive consciousness, and that consciousness is awake in each moment of choice. In our group, Katherine Ferrier likes to say, “composing is choosing, choosing is composing.” (She opens her eyes really wide when she says this. Her inner knowing is so acute, and she emphatically wants you to see it.) But, choosing is continuous with sensing and listening; as awareness is tuned, then moving-as-perceiving, and moving-as-choosing, emerge as a whole.
(peripheral vision…vibration…herd of dancers galumphing past, swept up on cue, don’t mess up the canon! Damn, late. Sorry. And now: the sorry solo)
As we attend to the swirl of sensation, there is a peculiar state where this information can simultaneously be integrated with the awareness that there is also a form happening in the body, and a form happening in this body’s relationship to everything else. An integrated attention holds that this feeling and this form are in-forming one another. The complexity of the practice grows from there, from noticing that the form this flow is taking can instantaneously be submitted to other attentions, other modes that would allow us to extend, complicate, or triangulate with everything else that’s happening. Such a sensory-driven compositional state can be in a dialogue with multiple formal considerations. Our individual process fuels the structuring process in the group, causing organization to emerge as a result of what we (each and together) are attending to. We simultaneously tune and listen and scan and decide; we feel our insides and our environment as a whole; we marinate in kinesthesia, memory, observation, association, imagination, desire, and curiosity. When I jokingly say above “there’s always a third thing,” it’s part frustration that there’s so much information and experience to digest in this process, and also part insight that beyond one thing, and two things, the third thing is about their integration, holding them as a unity.
Composing by listening carefully to the form-that-you-are-now-taking is a process that extends far beyond conceptual application of stock compositional structures. Giving spontaneous shape to the sense of a moment is so enjoyable when it feels simple, even though it draws on a complex integration of multiple levels of perception, knowledge and intelligence. (I like sharing with you when my philosopher husband interjects during these essays… He asks, “the form-that-you-are-now-taking,” why is it all hyphenated? And I said, “because it’s a totality- the form, the you, the taking, the now…a connected unity.” And he said, “ok, convinced.” A big endorsement from a professional skeptic.) The way I understand the training, this is what the training is for – to be able to weed through the complexity with your attention, to remove some filters and dampers on your receptivity, and to improve the fluid integration of your feeling and forming, listening and choosing. So that it feels simple. Even though it isn’t.