Skip to content. | Skip to navigation

Personal tools
Sections
You are here: Home / Contact Improvisation / Ensemble Improvisation's Essential Ingredients

Ensemble Improvisation's Essential Ingredients

The ability to cooperate is developed in practice, and ensemble improvisation provides an opportunity to explore a balance between external and internal receptivity, developing cooperation as an art.

A Crucial Pair of Complementary Skills

Collaborative improvisation presents a special challenge. It involves people aiming to cooperate without being able to rely on using routine - explicit rules and patterns - as the basis for their coordination. (In a way, improvisation is the search for action beyond routine.) The quality of ensemble improvisation generally depends on the quality of collaboration between its members, and not just the actions of any individual. In this vein, I see a fundamental, complementary pair of skills that are essential to vital, engaging ensemble improvisation:

  • The ability of an individual to be receptive and respond to their own ongoing processes - feelings and sensations, inertia, ideas, inspirations, whims, joy of moving, etc - while remaining receptive to influence from activity around them
  • The ability of an individual to be receptive and respond to activities of those around them, while also being receptive to what's going on within themselves.

Altogether, I see as key the ability to be receptive to what's going on inside and around you, without letting one preclude the other.

Here's one way I see this emphasis being helpful:

By factoring in one's own, internal activity to my responses to external activity, one maintains some coherence in an ongoing dance. This tends to foster responding to external correspondences that fit where you're going, in the moment, and vice versa - to better integrate your own and the other person's trajectories. This can make for combinations that are less forced, more coherent. The tension between the internal and external helps keep what's happening coherent yet continually changing, vital to all involved, rather than monotonic / monotonous.

I believe this recipe reduces tendencies for one initiative / person / state to take over the collective activity, or at the other extreme, for a dancer to isolate themselves from the others. Even more, I believe it provides the foundation necessary for everyone in an ensemble interaction to cultivate their own inspiration and to thrive on each other's, and thus for the ensemble to collectively change and grow.

See Respecting Boundaries for guidelines that support this approach, and Contact Improv As a Way of Moving for a framing of contact improv with this premise deep in its foundation.
I've posted a blog entry that develops this notion in the context of the Underscore, after an inspiring session.
Document Actions
Ken Manheimer says:
Jan 02, 2013 09:50 PM
I've been getting a wonderful opportunity, in working with the Havlik group, to experiment with some practices that explore this principle with a specific concentration on physical dynamics - trajectory and momentum.

I'm pretty convinced that the crucial skill in contact improv - and maybe physical partnering, in general - is the ability to respect your own trajectory while also being receptive to, able to integrate with, other people's trajectory. I've been developing layers of a few exercises, structures, that bring focus to following ones own trajectory in a way that fosters also being receptive to what's going on around you, and exploring the interactions from that base. We've then been gradually refining the focus to approaches that are more versatile, enable greater adeptness for varying your path, merging without sacrificing your coherence. It's all based in bringing the notion of the small dance to dynamics - momentum and trajectory - and partnering.

I believe that this begins to get at some of the elusive, dynamic experience that is centrally useful to partnering - how to approach it - and that is hard to teach, or even describe.