Musical Improvisation and the Co-Creation of Everyday Pedagogical Spaces for Social Change

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 11:25 am
  In Roundtable Session: Emancipatory Movements Toward Justice and Joy: The Role of Improvisation in Transformational Learning (Table 28)

Abstract

We draw on data from a participatory design research project that invited a collective of five Chicago-based improvisational jazz artists to use the tools of research to reflect upon their routine activities and co-design (Ishimaru et al., 2018) activities that are consequential within their discipline (i.e., concerts). Improvisation – attuning to and building on existing structures in activities to chart new courses of action – is a kind of relational work linked to ideologies, identities, and power (Philip, 2019; Sawyer, 2006, Wright, 2019; Zapata et al., 2019). Similarly, consequential learning involves changing participation across temporal, spatial, and social scales in order to make valued and transformative contributions to the conceptual practices of communities (Hall & Jurow, 2015; Jurow et al., 2016). We focus on how individuals collaborate and improvise in order to engage in a process of cocreative expression which simultaneously resists social injustices and offers alternative possibilities for being (Fischlin et al., 2013). Building from the idea that “[i]mprovised musicking is a critical form of agency, of embodied potential that is inseparable from other practices that call upon us to be purposeful agents of our cocreated, lived reality” (Fischlin, et al., 2013, p. xv), we examine the “pedagogical acts'' within musical improvisation that create spaces for transforming social relations and imagining more just worlds (Heble & Waterman, 2008).

Working with audio-visual recordings from over two years of co-design meetings and two public jazz performances, we address how artists created embodied, affectual spaces that support relational shifts and open possibilities for social justice. Using interaction analysis and micro-ethnographic methods we examined how collaborating artists drew on a diversity of resources to facilitate learning in the moment-to-moment of activity, across time and place (Erickson, 1982; Goodwin, 2018; Jordan & Henderson, 1995).

Our analysis shows that artists routinely talked about sociopolitical contexts that influenced their craft (e.g., redlining, elections) and improvisation as a practice that shaped the development of their own personhood, including their spiritual development and critical consciousness. Analysis of video revealed how the artists’ aesthetic and sonic choices created multisensorial spaces that asserted their presence as sociocultural actors. This was visible in one artist’s choice to bring African textiles to the performance. This artist also explicitly called on “the ancestors,” invoking space-time relations. Another artist decided to both play an instrument and paint during the performances, embodying the ways navigating nepantla (Anzaldua, 1999) guides her representational practices in real time. Artists began the second concert by walking in procession while playing bells and singing. These actions invited the audience into a sacred space of embodied reflection.

Beginning our analyses from the artists “context of creation” (Nicholls, 2006, p. 2) allowed us to understand how they cocreated a space for improvisational music and how their performance created a space for social transformation in the here and now. This paper has implications for how practices from musical improvisation can be drawn upon to create pedagogical spaces that are culturally meaningful and that shift relational dynamics in the here and now toward justice and joy.

Authors

• Ananda M. Marin, University of California - Los Angeles

• Brenda Y. Lopez, California State University - Fullerton

• Lindsay E. Lindberg, University of California - Los Angeles

• Shivani Dave, University of California - Los Angeles