Hi Fiona,
I agree that there's a difficulty in even beginning to cross-over from a
listening to a reading perception. The listening does indeed still have
linear time - although need not be experienced as linearity. It's hard to
go backwards and forwards with listening - even on the most remote
interactive digital players.
Not to get completely away from an oversimplistic sense of what Nate
mentioned as the shift of inflections, registers, tropes and trajectories
in some of the PRODUCTS (particularly the solo products, although the
grouped dynamics can still be heard in this way of event by event don't you
think? they're not discreet but can be perceived as articulation through
time in that word by word translation). I've just been re-listening to
'Chologogues' - Toop, Burwell and Figueras for example and David Toop's
flute blows cut from one to the next to form 'sentences' (?). Much as our
experiences on hearing John Zorn in London for the first time with just
bird calls and a bucket of water, several reeds and mouthpieces in his
mouth like a flock of birds, but the articualtions precise and resonant
with intent. Felt much like speech to this listener.
I haven't seen the Poetry Project Newsletter you mention. Where can i get one?
Love to read all of that - and what you said in particular re:
expenditure-based improv versus improvised
composition within a (time)-frame
a difference I readily recognise. I can't talk for other's strategies,
other than to contribute that when Steve Benson, Allen Fisher and myself
performed the improvised play 'Assumption Table' at Chisenhale Dance Space
in 1984 (it's published in Sulfur 18) we met and 'rehearsed' some
strategies. These included:
- creatively misunderstanding what someone else had said
- deliberately disagreeing or contradicting someone
- restating what someone else had just said but kind of as in a translation
- non-sequitor
- telling 'lies'
Steve's thing of listening to either himself (in earlier pieces) or
extracts from other writers (more recently) at the same time as trying to
improvise talking in performance fascinates me. Also his rigour in
transcribing documents to include everything - every um and ah, every
awkwardness (his embrace of syntactical stumbling, turning it and tuning it
into a refined strategy - almost approaching denial from another
direction) is salutary.
Myself, I've used improvisation as a strategy inside what i do (both
musically and performatively and linguistically), rather than as a banner
that i walk behind. I value it as a tool and a resource. Of course
improvisation, rather extemporisation, is going on in the playing of Back
fuges and the reading of whatever. That's a welter of subtlety beyond
description here right now.
Improvisation can be too subject to habit and previous negotiation as much
as to ontological essentialism. Neither do it for me. Those ways lie the
mystical, the shamanic, the pure. Improvisation can be too full of 'having
something to say'. Which is why i like this sense i get with Tom Raworth of
an emptying out of registers of experience through and into language - a
poetics of conscious practice.
Most of the improvising I've engaged with has been within pre-scripted or
partially scripted, where the gaps (like a musical cadenza) can be
negotiated in a more or less extended leap (allowing for the fact that
something altogether more interesting than where one had mapped to go might
engage). A form of dance across the floor from one point to another. Those
can be gaps between words or bbetween letters within words or . . .
Another focus for improvisation in my own practice has been generation of
materila onto tape, either in longer or briefer spans of flow. What governs
such flows though? States of Attention, balances between external and
internal (even how these are defined and perceived and received), speeds of
absorption and reflection, site, navigation of habits, negotiations of
distraction, acceptance and engagement with more than one focus (something
i thought you worked with gorgeously in 'Recognition' at the CCCP), embrace
of interference (again how such is considered).
hope some of this rings bulls or bills or balls or bells
love and love
cris
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