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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 - simple rules and patterns - as the basis for their coordination. That's because improvisation is the search for action outside of routine. Thus, 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, there is a 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 activities of those 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.

In combination, the key is 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 find this emphasis useful.

By tempering my responses to external activity according to my own, internal activity, I maintain some coherence to my ongoing dance. This can mean that I sometimes have to let go of external opportunities, because they don't fit my trajectory at the moment. It tends to foster, instead, favoring external correspondences that fit where I'm going, in the moment, and vice versa - a tendency to better integrate both my own and the other person's trajectories, making for combinations that are less forced, more coherent. This tension between the internal and external helps to keep how I respond to what's happening, in either direction, coherent yet continually changing, not monotonous.

Such an inter-responsiveness provides a basis for everyone to be a full partner in the collective activity. It averts tendencies for one initiative / person / state to take over, or at the other extreme, for a dancer to isolate themselves. It provides the foundation necessary for an ensemble interaction to collectively change and grow, for everyone to cultivate their own inspiration and thrive on each other's.

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.
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