In 1991, I came back from six months in Germany feeling a little emotionally bruised and not sure what to do next. I did, however, have one vision. I wanted to start a group of dancers and musicians who got together on a regular basis to explore the experience of collective improvisation. A few chance meetings led to some other interested artists and a few phone calls found a studio we could rent. We met for the first time with four people. It was a little bumpy at first but we figured it out. Friends brought friends and the group grew. The group was never very large but then neither was our studio; a typical evening was usually six to eight people. We met every other week for five years, then life happened and we went separate ways.
Almost twenty years later, the group got going again. We met once a month for about three years until we got shut down by COVID-19. As soon as the quarantine lifts, we’ll start it up again. The group has been an important artistic outlet for me, a source of good companions, and an important teacher.
The format of the group is pretty simple. We come into a room and set out musical instruments. We gather and begin. Whatever happens for the next hour and a half happens. Then we talk a bit, pack up, and go home.
The structure of the group is minimal within the following guidelines.
Stay as true as you can to what you are feeling in the moment, without needing anyone else to be a certain way so that you can be o.k. If you feel inclined to move, move. If you want to make a sound, make a sound. If you want to sit and be still, do that.
Keep the awareness that you are in a group. This doesn’t mean that you have to do what everyone else is doing. Some of the most interesting moments are created by contrast. Rather, this means to keep an awareness of the group, its influence on you and your influence on it.
Avoid spoken language and stay out of the verbal realm. Our society is heavily oriented towards language and ideas. This is a chance to let go of all that and experience life more directly.
Allow silence and stillness to happen. In doing this work, we found that “pieces” arise and conclude quite naturally. The silence and stillness after a piece has concluded can be a bit uncomfortable at first, but allowing ourselves to be in the silence and stillness allows the group energy to settle and something new to arise.
Everyone is a dancer. Everyone is a musician. There is an African saying that, “If you can walk, you can dance. If you can talk, you can sing.” To this I would add that if you can clap your hands, you can play a drum, and that I have danced several times with people who could not walk and were sitting in chairs. This isn’t about being “good.” It’s about using movement and sound as ways of interacting with our fellow humans and with the vast mystery of life.
The music is created by the participants on acoustic instruments. Sounds created by a physical action, not a speaker, feel different in the body.
Sometimes the dancers follow the music, and sometimes the musicians follow the dance. Often, the dancers may start a piece by moving onto the floor in silence. It is quite interesting to let the dance start, to feel the energy of the dancers, and to allow that to determine the nature of the music we create.
Sometimes, whole pieces may happen either in silence or with just vocalizations.
Participants are encouraged to move freely between the roles of musician, dancer, and witness.
Although some of us have spent years studying music or dance, there is something fresh and alive about someone with relatively little experience picking up a drum or walking out onto the floor.
Sitting and watching is fine, but if you do this you should not consider yourself as separate from the group, but rather participating as a witness.
Vocalizations such as scat singing, humming, or talking in gibberish are strictly encouraged.
The first, most obvious attraction of this work for me is that it lets me combine the two artistic modalities that I most love, music and dance. My explorations of these two modalities over the years has led me deeper and deeper into the questions of what they essentially are and why they make sense as human activities. If we strip away all of the cultural baggage around performance and being “good,” what is left? Many millennia ago humans began making sounds and moving their bodies rhythmically as a way to relate to each other and to the world in which they lived. One of the questions that drives me is, “How can we, living in the digital age, get back to that primal relationship with movement and sound as an essential human activity and reclaim it from the cultural forces that want to commercialize it and turn it into a commodity?”
I love the way that the improvisational nature of this work continuously drops me into the place of not knowing what’s going to happen next, sometimes not even knowing (rationally) what’s happening right now. This helps to get me out of my rational, thinking mind and allows me to drop into just noticing what’s happening here and now, feeling it in my body, getting an intuitive sense of an appropriate response, and then acting. This happens moment by moment, again and again, every time I do this work and carries over into my daily life. I love the lack of verbal language in the group for a similar reason. Both the experience of being with other humans in a non-verbal environment and the need to express myself in non-verbal ways help to open up my ability to sense life directly, without the need to classify and categorize.
I have, over the years, become increasingly disillusioned with the current paradigm of music and dance as “performance” arts and the performer-audience separation that that implies. The performers get all the attention and the audience gives their attention. Something seems off to me here. This paradigm has all of us busting our butts trying to become “good” enough to be the one who gets all the attention. And then when we perform, we feel the responsibility to be “good” enough to deserve the focused attention of the audience. Especially as a musician, I feel this pull to try to be “good” constantly pulling at me and find that it tends to pull me away from the intimate relation to sound and the reasons I love music so much.
In the Improv Group, we throw away the performer-audience paradigm and instead focus on music and dance as essential human activities that help to connect us to ourselves, to each other, to the experience of being human, and to the great mystery in which we all live. As a musician, I find it incredibly liberating to be able to drop the imperative to “perform,” to let go of trying to be “good,” and instead to pay attention to what is happening in the room and play what my guts are telling me is appropriate for the current moment, whatever that might be. Sometimes it is something very simple. Instead of being a “performer,” I am an active participant in an artistic event that is happening in the moment, has never happened before, and will never happen again.
As a dancer, I feel the effects of the performer-audience paradigm as a pull to think about what I am doing in terms of what it looks like from the outside. All of the reasons that I am so in love with dance as an artistic modality have nothing to do with how the dance looks from the outside and everything to do with how it feels from the inside. I find that paying deep attention to the moment-to-moment experience of the body as it moves and allowing those experiences to motivate new movement is a rich way to be in the world with profound impacts on my physical and mental well-being.
Part of the richness of this experience comes from the awareness that in the Improv Group, we are not dancing in isolation; we are not playing music by ourselves and for ourselves. We are constantly being witnessed by the other members of the group who are at the same time being witnessed by us. In the traditional performer-audience paradigm, the audience is passive and safe, taking no risks, and revealing nothing of themselves. In the Improv Group, we all take risks, each in our own way, and we all get to share in the beauty of our fellow group members opening up and revealing aspects of who they really are.
Although the Improv Group work is not intentionally structured to be therapeutic, I, and many other participants, find that it often is. My sense of this is that when we listen to what we are feeling in our body, the body will tell us what it needs. It will show us where we need to heal and what needs to happen in order for it to heal. It is not at all unusual for group members to shed some tears during the group or have other emotionally powerful moments. Participants often speak of feeling psychically “clean” when the group is over.
I also love moving to live acoustic music. Music that is played through speakers does not feel the same in the body as music that is generated by a physical acoustic event in the room, and recorded music does not have the ability to respond to what is happening in the room. Furthermore, with recorded music, the same song, played again, is exactly the same. Familiar songs can start to wear a groove in the mind. And music these days is almost always incredibly loud, simply because it can be. While the music in the Improv Group may be relatively quiet, I can, if I open up my perception, still feel it in my body. The musicians are constantly responding to the room, to the dancers and to the other musicians, and the music is never the same. It is here for this moment, and then gone. I find it incredibly refreshing to move to.
The volume level of the music also leaves space for singing and vocalization. This is another area where the performer-audience paradigm has left many of us with a lot of emotional rubbish getting in the way of what should be a very basic human experience. In the Improv Group, we tend to sing a lot. We sing with the instruments and without. We sing to each other from across the room and we sing with our heads touching. Our songs, like our dances, rise up from the inside.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with dancing to recorded music and there is nothing wrong with an audience watching a performance. I engage in these activities too from time to time myself. I see them as different media. Just as watercolor, oil paint, and metal sculpture are different media, so are dancing to recorded music, performance, and the work we do in the Improv Group. Each medium has its own challenges, its own limitations, and its own set of possibilities that it opens up. I choose this particular medium to work in because I like the possibilities that it opens up. I recognize, however, that like all media, it does have its challenges and limitations.
Finally, I love this work because I love the way the group mind guides us through the process. Even though each of us is staying true to his or her experience of the moment, none of us are doing this in isolation. We are all paying attention to what is happening in the room, which creates a powerful connection. One person sighs, and a ripple of sighs goes through the group. We often get the sense that something is guiding us, that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. Beautiful collectively created artistic pieces arise and fall away, never to be seen again. I think that of the 100 most interesting performance pieces I’ve witnessed in my life, 95 of them have happened in this group. I might not understand how or why this happens, but I love it when it does.
This work is not for everyone, but for those of us who love it, it touches us deeply.
Here, hear: "How can we, living in the digital age, get back to that primal relationship with movement and sound as an essential human activity and reclaim it from the cultural forces that want to commercialize it and turn it into a commodity?”