Improv Dance and Live Music

Today I attended my first Improv dance jam at the Detroit Revival Project: Improv Dance and Live Music hosted by ArtLabJ and featuring ConTempus, ArtLabJ Dance, Harge Dance Stories, Pure Existence Dance, and 5 local composers (including Marquez-Barrios and Daniel Tressel) who wrote Detroit themed pieces for this project.

It blew me away.

The compositions were marvelous pieces of music and made me proud to know that these were local Michigan and Detroit composers and musicians!

The music had been written ahead of time and rehearsed, the dancers (8 of them) heard it for the first time this morning before performing to it live this afternoon and sharing with the audience. It began with just the music as the dancers listened from chairs in the audience. Then they slowly, as they felt moved, worked their way, with chairs, into the performance space between audience and musicians.

Throughout the following musical pieces, the performers worked in duos, trios, conglomerates, and solos exploring the music and letting it inspire their physical work alone and together. I know this all sounds rather vague--to be fair, how do you explain the barrage of an hour of improvised dance and music that has, in true performance fashion, evaporated into the ether of memory??

Stories rose and fell as the dancers interacted. They weren't as clearly event driven as actors' improvisations, instead they were relationships based on feeling and movement. Mirroring was huge. Sometimes two dancers would mirror each others movements--for example, one young woman tried to manipulate the movements of another woman who was seated on the floor, she was unsuccessful in bringing the woman to her feet so she joined her, just to her left facing upstage and began to mirror her actions. Soon the two were working together to build a kind of mobile mirrored duet which then broke as they inserted separate variations and reformed and broke again as they finally moved to their feet. Another example, another young woman stood on a chair facing a group of three or four dancers stage right repeating variations on a hand raising gesture, almost as if she were speaking or directing or grabbing their attention. Behind her, another dancer began to mimic her movements, creating a tender following relationship.

The hand raising gestures were a motif that carried throughout the hour of improvised dance. While resting in chairs on the side, dancers would frequently continue this motif in variations--quick up, held up, up down up, whipped up, flopped down, both hands, one hand and the other, etc. Their hands  would often guide them back into the center of the performing space.

Two of my favorite duets were Adriel and Sam, the two gentlemen, and Adriel and Kara. Adriel and Sam played a kind of rotational duet of jumping and twirling in which their movements conversed sometimes mirroring (you click your heels, I click mine or Pa-de-chat and Pa-de-chat) and sometimes pushing each other into new actions, walking to running to turning to twirling. Eventually the girls broke in on this by crawling their way in across the stage.

Adriel and Kara began by weight sharing and carving around each other's negative space, horizontally moving vertically. They repeated a gesture in which she flew him in airplane and he pulled up from the ground onto his knees (this doesn't really describe the image--gah!). The relationship was rocky as they tried to figure out and adapt to each other's movements. Kara's slowly became more and more forceful until she was throwing him to the ground and finally walking on him and away from the duet. Adriel pushed away alone and was finally joined by Jennifer Harge, another of the female performers, and the two of them moved gently through some kind weight sharing. This soothed my heart as an audience member as well as the relational hole Kara left in the dance.

As a question: Physical offers were a HUGE part of this performance. Dancers making offers as soloists as duos and trios. Dancers accepting or rejecting offers made through the group. In Improv and in acting accepting or working with offers gifted to you is a huge part of collaboration. It's part of trust and part of best practice. Kara, and a couple other dancers, made impositional offers. Pushing other performers or entering a previously established grouping to change it or moving another performer from one place to another. It was interesting to watch the dancers respond.

Jennifer Harge was one who sank into the ground or continued her action within the imposition. This frequently created even more interesting offers because the initial offer was not rejected, but it also wasn't accepted. Jennifer created dialogue. In one piece, part of Nina Shekhar's POSTCARDS for Solo Piano (2014), Jennifer used a jerking lunge switch as a movement both in place and across the stage. Twice actors took a hold of her torso to move in another direction, as they had with other dancers, each time, instead of moving in their direction, she let her movement be made more difficult by the additional dancer. The resistance and tension this created was a powerful complement to the music, which had a jerking, atonal feel. One of the dancers who had held her let go and picked up the motion mimicking and varying it into the next set of dance motifs.

In another instance, Kara began pushing dancers out of chairs by their faces and taking their chairs to build something. One dancer began to help her push them out. One dancer kept returning to sit to make it difficult. Another dancer began to rearrange the chairs after Kara put them down. The combination of these actions was a fascinating relational story. I felt frustrated at Kara for pushing and at Sam for adding that kind of energy, but the other dancers responded with their own physical offers.

So my question then: offering and responding to physical offers. As an improvising actor, the rule is always "Say Yes" but does yes always mean "I will do what you suggest"? What kind of "Yes or Yes and" stories do you have that challenge the idea that saying yes means being a follower? How can we enrich collaboration?