Notes on Improvisation
On a deeply instinctual level, the improviser seems like a creature worthy of our immense loathing. In the same way that one might correct a child for blurting out whatever is on their mind, that very ire appears to be just as readily levied at the improviser. The improviser, that loafing, cocky, impulsive thing, who shamelessly indulges in one of the purest modes of creative play — of total absorption in the present. How magical! How disgusting.
This is an incomplete series of observations considering improvisation as a kind of loose aesthetic sensibility. A kind of electric tummy-feeling that you just know when you feel it. A kind of tummy feeling that seeps into your ears, eyes and mind. A kind of style, an artistic process, which I think, is becoming more and more noticeable.
1. Improvisation is (generally) best described as the production of text through an immediate, and unmeditated performance. It is (ideally) not recorded or transcribed in any way. This is not to say that it cannot be recorded, but rather, that the improvisational mode is something that is more purely experienced in the moment of its immanent production, neither its re-production.
2. Currently, improvisation is best known for its presence in music, comedy, poetry, and oral storytelling. This is because improvisation is firmly rooted within the oral tradition, in arts of rhythm. Anticipation. Which as unplanned texts, improvisation naturally plays within. To drive a little deeper, the pattern-seeking brain can (very reductively) be thought of as a kind of anticipation machine. Improvisation, then, could be thought of as emerging from the colliding cadences of conscious and unconscious experience.
“This space – memory – combined with our continuous process of anticipation, is the source of our sensing time as time, and ourselves as ourselves”
– Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time.
3. Here are some examples of things I have found to be experientially improvisational:
Commedia Dell'arte
High School Theatresports
Jazz (and all its concomitant variations)
Genial conversation with strangers
Catherine O’Hara
Tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons or Call of Cthulhu
Children playing pretend
John Coltrane
Ancient historical graffiti
The films of Joel Haver
Youtube shorts of 2000’s sitcoms
The English Renaissance Clowns: Richard Tarlton and William Kempe
Whoopi Goldberg
The Grateful Dead
Justin Kuritzkes’ Youtube video Potion Seller
Combat sports
Church Organists
Fighting Games like Street Fighter, Smash Bros. and Tekken
Whatever Generative AI presents itself as attempting to be doing
Middle Ages troubadours
Shaggy-dog stories
Tickle fights
4. One of the most valuable and desirable mental states is the flow state. A kind of thoughtlessness where self-referential thought quietly recedes and total absorption in the present task takes priority. This is one of the reasons why orgasm is so enjoyable. It is something completely of its own moment. Improvisation, not too dissimilarly, encourages flow through practice, presence, and attentive listening to the needs of its participants — like good sex.
5. Improvisation is a kind of serious spontaneous play, a state of creative experimentation where no mistakes can really be made — for to have failed at playing is to not have played in the first place. This is the same serious play that you most likely experienced as a child, fully believing that something like the stick straddled between your legs was anything but a stick, maybe a horse, and then refusing to admit otherwise.
6. Every rule of improvisation is a tool. Essentially a guideline, or equally, an insistence of certain techniques. At a cursory glance this might seem antithetical to thinking of improvisation as a kind of free play. Rules might imply a failure state, a way of playing incorrectly, or even badly. Rather, thought differently, improvisational rules can be seen as being loaded with different intentions, and in this light a preference for certain rules becomes the foundations of different improvisational styles.
7. Bad improvisation is one of the worst things that can ever be inflicted upon someone, both as a performer and audience member. To the performer, it appears (and feels like) an entirely personal failing. To the audience member, there is an instinctual recoil from an imagined shame. It seems to give improvising a bad name, and more importantly, it doesn’t matter at all. Bad improvisation disappears just as fast as good improvisation arrives. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. There must be risk. In this spirit, the improviser is bravery, for improvisation is anathema to fear that is, inaction.
9. Improvisational thinking relies upon Improvisational memory. Whilst improvisation appears to be an utterly fleeting ephemera — disappearing as soon as it emerges. The improviser’s work still exists in continuum within the improviser through memory, in recognition of movements that have come before so as to avoid recreating them in future.
10. With the ever-increasing deluge of information assaulting our nervous systems at all turns in this charmed modern life, it comes to be that Attention (with a Capital-istic ‘A’) is becoming as increasingly commodified as it is becoming harder to retain. In order to survive this information overload, the ability to instinctually categorise (and hence, reduce in complexity) information presented with minimal context becomes necessary. In this climate, the aesthetic of improvisation is more easily able to break through the noise:
a. Because it seems spontaneously produced, improvisation immediately appears candid, ‘truthful’, and the truth is always interesting.
b. The work is more easily parsed; improvisation is (generally) generative of its own internal-context that is then easily discarded by the viewer.
c. If received as a transcribed product, it becomes immediately, and infinitely, reproducible. Combined with improvisation's low cost of preparation, this widens the margin of profitability.
11. Conversely, more earnest improvisation resists commodification because it does not result in a tangible product that can be sold. Watching an improvised performance is as compellingly about paying attention, as it is about paying attention to performers who are themselves able to pay complete, and masterful, attention to their craft. The “product” of improvisation is sustained, creative attention, an allure that is lost in digital transcription.
12. A great pleasure of improvisation comes from the awareness that the work is (or has been) completely made up — an awareness of the individual who is creating. Improvisational work creates some of the most intimate relationships with audiences this way, even more so when the work appears comparably indistinguishable from rotely rehearsed pieces. A famous (tropey) example is the satisfaction that comes from knowing that Viggo Mortensen broke his toe kicking an orcish helm in The Two Towers, and used that pain to inform the grief of the take that was then used in the film. Improvisation is quite meta-textual in this sense, deeply (unignorably?) aware of the audience's relationship with the work and the artist. There may lie a larger point about the history of improvisation being intricately tied with changing levels of textual awareness’ (i.e: meta-theatre, meta-cinema, meta-poetry).