Territories of Improvisation

Posted by admin on December 14th, 2007 filed in art, music, theory

Friday was the final day of a three day symposium on improvisation being held here in Newcastle. The morning session on interfacing the body brought up too many interesting points to consider here. What has been great is that virtually all the presentations have been by practitioner / theorists giving the symposium an energy that you don’t get with musicology conferences and paper only panels. What follows is a rough summary of a few presentations and a discussion of some of the theoretical connections that were established between this event and a number of ongoing discussions and concerns of my own, rather than a detailed and well referenced analysis.

Gretchen Schiller led an exercise in embodied point plotting which ended up in me performing some pretty demanding movements with the slightly terrifying but wonderful Yiorgos Bakalos. Gertchen then gave a presentation on Kinaesthesia and what she referred to as a kinaesfield, a field of movements and flows, a continuum in which the body moves, a continuum which moves through the body and not necessarily revolving around the the body in what she described as a balletic fashion, there was a brief mention of space which inscribes the body which I would have liked to hear more on, but hopefully this discussion will be developed later. I’m not going to go into much detail here as many of the ideas she discussed are directly relevant to what I’m trying to write at the moment, which will be appearing here in one form or another in the near future. Hopefully I’ll be able to rope Gretchen into the discussion somehow.

A lot of discussion came out of John and Adam’s presentation (images above) on digital and electronic interfaces as filters of gesture and intention. There was a lot of talk about unpredictability and various forms of mediation. One particularly interesting point was his reference to the impossibility of a “ground zero”, a kind of absolute freedom or abandonment to be attained through performance (I’m bending his words slightly but he seemed to agree with this in the questions which followed the presentation). The recurring theme seemed, to me, to be one of negotiating restraint, of a constant awareness and negotiation of the constant mediation through instrumentation, performance, idiom and so on; a far cry from a kind of pre-symbolic space free of mediation. Although this is in many ways a tired argument if limited to the banality of the “how free is free improv” discussion, their presentation and the resulting discussion achieved much greater depth, which I’m not going to try and repeat here. What I found interesting about this ‘ground zero’ point is that it picked up a thread from last week’s Music and Philosophy symposium (organised by Lars and Ian). Although not necessarily fascinating in isolation, in relation to much of the discussion that goes on in arts spheres about the Deleuzean elaboration of the body without organs and absolute deterritorialization, this brought up some interesting points that are perhaps closer to Deleuze’s stance on this point.

After a very interesting, although somewhat unprovocative paper by Levi Bryant, the idea of absolute deterritorialization came up (I have just noticed the Levi has posted the paper on his blog here, hopefully I’ll have time to look at it in a little more detail over christmas as the discussion of sonorous individuation is something quite central to much of the work I’m doing at the moment). Although Deleuze frequently refers to either the impossibility or the danger of absolute deterritorialization, a point also raised in ATP where Deleuze and Guattari point out that deterritorialiazation is not to be carried out with a sledge hammer but carefully and slowly so as to avoid it ending in death, this is seen as something to be attained, a ground of pure unmediated self reflexivity, intensity, spontaneity and so on. For Deleuze:

The ethics of intensive quantities has only two principles: affirm even the lowest, do not explicate oneself (too much). Difference and Repetition p.305

We see here the presence of the warning or the threshold that appears throughout much of his work, at least in what I have read to date, that there is a necessary minimal degree of explication or stratification. If to improvise is in some sense to begin learning again, to enter a problematic field in order to become supple, to bend in response to the environment which is emerging around you, to engage in a process of deterritorialization, it is nonetheless important to retain a grasp upon a territoriality of one sort or another in order to assert an impulse, to be able to climb back out or progress from what has been created without it resulting in collapse. There must in some sense always be a minimal degree of stratification or mediation to act as a catalyst for creative action.

Also in the friday morning session, Sally Jane Norman gave a discussion of theatrical repertoire ranging from the masks of ancient Greek tragedy to the gorilla appropriation of cctv as seen in the work of the Media Shed (although this wasn’t here actual example). Although this is probably a terribly crude summary of her presentation, I interpreted it as saying that from masks to surveillance networks, understood as as mechanisms of codification, varying degrees of mediation have acted as catalysts for performance and action throughout the history of theater and performance art. The Video Sniffin’ projects run by the Media Shed are an example of how an awareness, assumption an internalization of mediation, codification and restraint often steers us away from the illusion and/or danger of freedom as an absolute deterritorialization in the absence of such explicating forces.

There is a complexity to Deleuze’s discussion of deterritorialization, intensity and destratification that is often overlooked in arts based discourses. Although—and this probably benefited the discussions—these Deleuzean concerns weren’t directly referenced, an understanding of the complexity of these issues was expressed in many different ways in response to the all too familiar claims of attaining a BwO like state in performance.

As I said, a rough summary a bit of a ramble but this was an interesting few days and I thought I’d throw out a few observations, hopefully for further discussion.