The Improvisation Studies Reader: Spontaneous Acts
- Editor: Caines, Rebecca
- Editor: Heble, Ajay
The Improvisation Studies Reader: Spontaneous Acts
- Editor: Caines, Rebecca
- Editor: Heble, Ajay
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About
Improvisation is a performance practice that animates and activates diverse energies of inspiration, critique, and invention. In recent years it has coalesced into an exciting and innovative new field of interdisciplinary scholarly inquiry, becoming a cornerstone of both practical and theoretical approaches to performance.
The Improvisation Studies Reader draws together the works of key artists and thinkers from a range of disciplines, including theatre, music, literature, film, and dance. Divided by keywords into eight sections, this book bridges the gaps between these fields. The book includes case studies, exercises, graphic scores and poems in order to produce a teaching and research resource that identifies central themes in improvisation studies. The sections include:
- Listening
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- Trust/Risk
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- Flow
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- Dissonance
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- Responsibility
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- Liveness
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- Surprise
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- Hope
Each section of the Reader is introduced by a newly commissioned think piece by a key figure in the field, which opens up research questions reflecting on the keyword in question.
By placing key theoretical and classic texts in conversation with cutting-edge research and artists' statements, this book answers the urgent questions facing improvising artists and theorists in the mediatized Twenty-First Century.
Contents
- Introduction
- Part 1 : Listening
- 1. Improvised Listening: Opening statements - George Lipsitz
- 2. On Listening - Jean Luc Nancy
- 3. Improvisation: Silence before words - Jacques Lecoq
- 4. Going Fragile - Mattin
- 5. Music, Language, and Cultural Styles: Improvisation as conversation - Ingrid Monson
- 6. Interview - Peter Cusack
- 7. Deep Listening Meditations - Egypt (1999) - Pauline Oliveros
- Part 2 : Trust/Risk
- 8. Improvised Trust: Opening Statements - Ellen Waterman
- 9. Improvisation - Konstantin Stanislavski
- 10. Impro - Keith Johnstone
- 11. Thoughts on Improvisation: A comparative approach - Bruno Nettl
- 12. Group Creativity: Musical Performance and Collaboration - Keith Sawyer
- 13. The Theatre as Language: Theatre of the Oppressed - Augusto Boal
- 14. Community Arts Practices: Improvising being together - Petra Kuppers
- 15. "Paradise Now": Notes - Judith Malina and Julian Beck
- 16. Chicanas' Experience in Collective Theatre: Ideology and form - Yvonee Yarbro-Bejarano
- 17. Spontaneous Combustion: Notes on dance improvisation from the sixties to the nineties - Sally Banes
- 18. Collective Creation - Alan Filewood
- 19. Cobra - John Zorn
- Part 3 . Flow
- 20. Improvised Flow: Opening Statements - Susan Leigh Foster
- 21. A Theoretical Model for Enjoyment - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- 22. Graphic Score - Anthony Braxton
- 23. The Impermanent Art - Merce Cunningham
- 24. Improvisation and the Ensemble - Michael Chekhov
- 25. Theory of the Derive - Guy Debord
- 26. Flow, Layering, Rupture in Hip-Hop - Tricia Rose
- 27. Improvisation and the Making of American Literary Modernism - Rob Wallace
- 28. Graphic Score (Hearing Visions Sonores) - Germaine Lio and Nicholas Loess
- 29. Essentials of Spontaneous Prose - Jack Kerouac
- Part 4 . Dissonance
- 30. Improvised Dissonance: Opening Statements - Jesse Stewart
- 31. Phantoms of the Other: Fragments of the Communal Unconscious - Rustom Bharucha
- 32. Bebop as Cultural Alternative - Daniel Belgrad
- 33. Happenings: an introduction - Michael Kirby
- 34. Other: From noun to verb - Nathaniel Mackey
- 35. Play Like a Girl: The queer laughter of the feminist improvising group - Julie Dawn Smith
- 36. Causing a Scene with ImprovEverywhere - Charlie Todd
- 37. Improvising Digital Culture - Paul D. Milelr (DJ Spooky) and Vijay Iyer
- Part 5 . Responsibility
- 38. Improvised Reponsibility: Opening statements - Daniel Fischlin
- 39. Gittin To Know Y'all: Improvised music, interculturalism, and the racial imagination - George E. Lewis
- 40. Interview - Fred Frith
- 41. Kinship, Intelligence and Memory as Improvisation: Culture and performance in New Orleans - Joseph Roach 42: The Changing Same: R&B and new black music - Amiri Baraka 43: By Any Means Necessary - Malcolm X
- Part 6 : Liveness
- 44. Improvised Liveness: Opening statements
- 45. Liveness - Philip Auslander
- 46. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - Gil Scott-Heron
- 47. The Present of Performance - Hans-Thies Lehman
- 48. Interview - Pierre Hebert
- Part 7 . Surprise
- 49. Improvising Surprise: Opening statements - Rachel Rosenthal
- 50. Playing - Richard Schechner
- 51. Taken by Surprise - Susan Foster
- 52. Seven Aspects of Spontaneity - Viola Spolin
- 53. Yoruba Play and the Transformation of Ritual - Margaret Thompson Drewal
- 54. Play On: Collaboration and Process - Tim Etchells
- 55. Step Across the Border - Nicholas Humbert and Werner Penzel
- Part 8 . Hope
- 56. Improvised Hope: Concluding statements - Robin Kelley
