What are you looking for?

Recently I’ve been meeting regularly with a friend - Ashley - and together we’ve been improvising. The style of improvisation isn’t in the vein of the more popular theatresports, but rather is a form of improvisation in which a performer constructs their performance before an audience from whatever starting point they find when they begin. The skill of the improviser is then to develop an interesting, structured, and ultimately satisfactorily engaging performance from that point.

Ash and I are meeting and improvising together for a variety of reasons, particularly the shared desire to be better improvisers, as well as simply to be better performers (the skills involved in improvisation are basic to many styles of performance). Most recently we've been working on text; we've been improvising narratives, characters and contexts.

Last night we had our first audience since we’ve been working together – a very select audience of two. One of these two isn’t particularly enamored with improvisation and so afterwards pressed a few salient questions on us. In essence, she questioned what it is that an audience receives when watching improvisation. What are we giving them? It is our choice to step onstage without anything, so what interest is this to an audience?

It is true that I find perfomances based solely on the display of virtuosity somehow soulless. Sure, acrobats, musicians, actors and vocalists can train themselves to achieve amazing feats. But if I can't really understand why they are performing those feats, here, now, and with this particular audience in this place, then I find I’m often left a little cold. If the virtuosity is used to illuminate some thematic that I find resonates with the here-and-now, or raises pertinent questions about some aspect of the human condition then I find it has a definite reason to be. Does improvisation deliver this in performance? Or is it the process of improvising, and the way the art-form exists within a community of participant-interpreters, that provides each particular performance with a larger resonance? Am I simply engaged in a cheap and energetic form of therapy?

So, with all this in mind, do you go and see live performance (theatre, dance, etc)? If so, why? What do you want? What are you after? Do you ever get what you're after?

[Photo: BAAM - Lynda Ng]