Performing Improvisation: noticing, remembering, connecting.
- Submitting institution
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De Montfort University
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 33040
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
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- Brief description of type
- Multi-component output: collection of creative and critical work on related topic, collectively greater than the sum of their parts.
- Open access status
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- Month
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- Year
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
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- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
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- Reserve for an output with double weighting
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- Additional information
- This multi-component output comprises two practical and three written components. The meta-aim of this research interrogates dance improvisation practices with specific reference to noticing, remembering, liveness and performer/audience relationship. Outputs catalyse my previous research and scholarly activities (which include earlier REF submissions), enabling further analysis of the role of improvisation as performance.
Aims:
1. To analyse what and how dance artists notice in the moment of improvising.
2. To interrogate how noticing and remembering can productively generate improvised performance.
3. To explore the development of performance methodologies that offer meaningful shifts in the performer/audience relationship
4. To develop strategies for writing about and from practice.
My work with seminal American dancemaker Deborah Hay (2011) significantly impacted my subsequent improvisation practice and informs all five outputs here. The book chapter (2019) examines my engagement with Hay’s approaches to noticing and resisting normative performer/audience connections. The journal article further examines performers/ audiences by interrogating the potential for audience interventions in improvised performances.
This backdrop of research gave rise to Renaissance, a commission for an ensemble improvised performance for mid-scale venues, which questions the potential to maintain an intimate audience/performer connection. Challenges with proximity instigated improvisation tasks in movement, text and remembering that directly address the audience, prompting them to recall their own histories. A deeper exploration of the interrelationship between remembering and improvised movement/text to develop audience/performer connections was made in the duet performance, This is… . The related book chapter (2020) uses the improvised text from a later performance of This is… to problematise the distinction between practice and scholarly research.
Findings address the significance of noticing in improvisational practices, and emphasise remembering to provide material and structure. Techniques for engaging/connecting with audience are posed, and a method of privileging practice is tested through writing from ‘stage to page’.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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