“In improvisation, there is only one time – The time of
inspiration, the time of technically structuring and realizing the music, the
time of playing it, and the time of communicating with the audience, as well as
ordinary clock time, are all one. Memory and intention and intuition are fused.”
---Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
I am currently in Amsterdam, exploring the improvisation techniques used by Thomas Johannsen and The Genetic Choir. While this weekend's workshop will focus on rhythm, I attended a workshop yesterday focused on writing about improvisation. This is a timely topic as I continue to collate my thoughts on improvisation work with my choir as well as my own work with Collapss.
The workshop attendees were a small group of women, many of them dancers, and was led by Thomas. We approached writing about improvisation through factual, descriptive, and non-linear means by improvising together and writing about our experience.
After warming up through a series of improvisations that explored the concept of phrase, we broke up into groups of four. One group improvised while the other observed and then we wrote about our experiences. I should emphasize that these improvisations incorporated dance, theater, and some vocalization, depending on the background of the performers. The improvisation in which I participated was primarily dance.
Many themes arose in our writing and discussion, but one that stood out to me was the concept of time. As Nachmanovitch mentions in the quote above, there is only one "time" in improvisation where the work unfolds through intention, memory, and intuition. I suggest that within this one time exists many different "times" of each performer and that this is different from the "time" perceived by the observer.
An observer wrote in my notebook: "Time. I like time. I like having time to watch and see. Time to let what I see arrive. Very little action is needed, yet I realize I am looking at strong performers. Their presence fills the space before any action".
There are so many elements of time described here:
-presence which fills time
-action within time
-time to watch and see
-time to let what she sees arrive
This sense of time is so different from the "time" and "timing" of a performer. One of the performers in the same improvisation commented about listening to the phrases of the other performers and waiting for the right moment to add. She timed the beginning and ending of each phrase, sensing movement and listening, so that the time of her entrance would add rather than interrupt.
The multi-layered nature of time is fascinating. There is only one time, but each of us can lose time, stretch time, speed up time, suspend time within the same performance. How do our perceptions of time affect each other in performance? Do those perceptions affect the audience in a perceptible way? Does time have energy? Do our experiences of time create energy?
I would love your thoughts on time in the comments below!
