A Portrait of Responsive Structure in Improvisational Choreographic Pedagogy

• In Event: Practicing the Possible: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Improvisation Toward Remedy and Inclusion

Abstract

The beauty of improvisation is that almost anything can emerge from nothing. With a “yes, and” or “no wrong answers” stance to improvisational activities, it can seem that improvisations lack structure. And yet, ask almost any dancer and they’ll quickly tell you that the prompt, “just dance,” will most likely yield uninteresting choreography. Structure, constraint, and rules act as consequential elements for improvisation, especially in the domain of dance. Thus when trying to understand improvisational activities as learning contexts, understanding the role these elements play becomes crucial. This paper looks at how a choreographer pedagogically structured a dance-science improvisation activity in response to and with a group of dancers that consisted of middle schoolers and a scientist.

The context for this paper is the Choreographing Science project, a design based research project (Brown, 1992; Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) that created interdisciplinary and intergenerational dance/science research labs that brought together middle school youth, scientists, and choreographers to foreground choreographic modeling as a practice for intergenerational scientific inquiry. In this paper we share an analysis of an improvisational dance activity, Liquid Architecture, resident choreographers Xan Burley & Alex Springer brought to our project from mentor Doug Varone. Liquid Architecture entails having dancers respond to drawings or images by representing the images with tableaus that use everyone in the group, in this context the images were 6 figures from both partner scientists’ research. We used methods of Interaction Analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995; Hall & Stevens, 2015) to attend to the interactional order of cycles of proposals and responses (both verbal and physical) between the choreographer (Xan) and dancers and amongst dancers themselves (Author, 2020).

Throughout the group’s engagement in the liquid architecture activity, Xan maintained a tight hold on the structure of the activity, directing the dancers’ actions with a fast pace that kept up with the pace of the dancers as they generated movement ideas and picked up any lulls in their activity. While Xan gave a high frequency of directives to the group, directing them to form a specific tableau about every 15 seconds (Figure 1), this did not seem to impede the dancers’ ability to make creative movement proposals in response. In fact, in the moments when Xan was extremely specific in her proposals, the dancers' responses opened up more expansive movement possibilities within their choreography.

The structure that the pedagogical practices described in our analysis provided, create an important portrait of artistic pedagogy that supported learners to break out of traditional sedentary forms of thinking not common in science learning environments (Keifert et al., 2021) and maintain the ability to continuously think physically. In addition, we demonstrated structured pedagogical practices that resisted two constraining binaries: (1) adult centered versus child-centered pedagogical binary (Vossoughi et al., 2021) and (2) I versus you binary (Hall, 1996; Hahn & Jordan, 2020). Improvisational pedagogies can resist these binaries and help describe how maintaining a responsive relationship between educators and learners can be productive in supporting collective inquiry that amplifies the intellectual and creative dignity of learners.

Author

• Lauren Vogelstein, Teachers College, Columbia University