PhD Thesis – Sharon Smith – Practicing presence
It’s not what you do its the way that you do it. The practice of improvisation - its proximity to writing and its usage as a practical organizing tool with which to ‘practice presence’.
This chapter will focus on the teaching and practice of Katie duck, writing into and out of the conference ‘practicing presence’ which was organized by myself to provide analysis material for this PhD Thesis, and which happened in November 2001. This conference was organized in order to, amongst other things, highlight the practice of improvisation explicitly, through the workshops and practice of Duck and Quartet Electronic he, a London based improvised music group, and to examine improvisation implicitly within the set and conceptual works of Larry Lynch, Jo Cripps, Grainne Cullen, Mina Kaylan, Lone twin and The Max Factory. I will contemplate Ducks practice as a possible technology of the body, whose understanding of which will enable that body to engage with and negotiate their own presence’1.
My writing stems from participation within and observation of Ducks work, as her student and later as a member of her improvisation company Magpie. Duck has been published in various articles and interviews to which I will refer. Her theories though remain largely unpublished and unwritten, existing almost solely within the discourse, which occurs through her practice and through direct contact with it and with her.
There are relevant writings that I will quote here which although are not speaking about improvisation directly, are alluding to the laminable space in which Ducks practice is sited. I will use these quotes to support and reflect the poetic thrust of Ducks work , which is ultimately live: which can be written around, but which cannot, in itself, be written.
My motivation for writing through Ducks work is not only due to it’s formative influence upon my own position as a performer and a performance maker, but also because her theories of improvisation offer a practical tool for the practice of ‘presence’ for the
performer. Ducks practice is rooted firmly within the field of dance specifically. I wish to write Ducks theories into the broader concerns of all bodies that put themselves into their own work.
I am writing about Ducks work as an explicit practice of improvisation. This is in order to then illuminate improvisation implicitly, as it exists in all live performance: as a writing of the space between the performer and their text-activity: as an act of language.
“Theatre is an art of abstraction analogue to music… to be simultaneously speech and song, poetry and action, colors and dance. To say it in all one word as did the ancient Greeks: music”. (Copeau - 1962)
Ducks work is specific to site. She only works with structure in so much as she considers venue, public, length of performance, interval etc. and works from there. Context then is her only informative for structure. Katie began improvising in 1973 with the Great Salt Lake Mime troupe. The Troupe was made up of modern dancers from the University of Utah, local Jazz musicians, and a clown. The troupe was constantly traveling and performed in diverse sites: street, theatre, studio etc. The public was diverse also. This expropriation and response to context is formative within Ducks improvisation practice now. An audience is invited to observe how theatre will be made through a sharpened focus upon choice and chance, responding solely to its living and its fixed environment. Her questions follow ‘a curiosity to understand the nature of the body and an addiction to communicate to a gathered crowd’ (Proximity/Austria).
Duck describes herself as ‘an experimental dance artist’. She describes her compositions as ‘articulations within one continuous research’. Ducks ‘art’ follows one line of questioning. These questions are asked within practice, and this practice continues and becomes her performance. Her performances conduct experiments of ‘presence’ and the present’ and are presented as such to her audiences under the title of
‘improvisations’. Explicitly then, Duck improvises. Her practice is process - experiments. As she physically authors the actions she makes, her body and its negotiation with chance visibly make her choices. Chance, also physically constructed by
structures set in place (venue, festival etc.) becomes what the work is about. Duck is against ‘authorship’. She speaks often of self-annihilation in her practice. She is against preservation.
“I would like that what the public realize when they leave a performance of mine, is that they have been witnesses to something that I promise never to show or do again. I would like that they understand in their own lives that. Just because we remember where we live it does not mean that we will arrive there. Life is as much of chance as it is of order”. (Duck - Proximity/Austria)
Duck also describes her attraction to improvisation explicitly as being ‘a direction which would keep her away from suburbia, ‘I do not want to live in suburbia in my art or in my life or any aspect of my being. Perhaps it is because I hate suburbia that I love to
improvise’. (Proximity/Austria) This remark is typical of Ducks purposefully ambivalent and poetic mode of communication about her practice. For her explicit practice of improvisation as performance disturbs the ground on which modern dance was built,
and which for her, contemporary dance still sits. Its economy and value structures still depend on the authoring positions of Choreographers, Directors, Dramaturges and Narratives. Improvisation, for Duck, is political because it disturbs these positions. There is no singular choreography, direction and design or narrative super imposed upon, or preconceived before the performance happens. Here Duck becomes part of the discourse of Post Modern Dance2.
The arrival of improvisation into the world of dance happened in the early 1960’s3. This happens within the broader historical, theoretical shift from ‘modern’ to ‘post modern’ art. The revival and rediscovery of Dada literary texts supported the movement. Ducks practice in particular supports Tristan Tzaras’ statement: “simultaneity is born of improvisation, lightning like intuition, from suggestive and revealing actuality. A work is valuable only to the extent that it is improvised, not extensively prepared. This was the only way to capture the confused fragments of
interconnected events encountered in everyday life, which, to us, was far superior to any attempts at realistic theatre”. 4
Fine Art and Literature turned towards performance as a conceptual tool to expose and explode the nature of themselves as object: as product. This shift towards process saw the entry of performance into art not with a desire for ‘theatre’ but with a desire to imply real
time into art work, to foreground a live/living art, which saw process-as-product, and which then left ‘traces’ of time based activity. Focus shifted from notions of ‘beauty, virtuosity, perfection’ to conceptual art work, a mark made by default from some
activity or process. Hence, the existing containments and fixities through which not only the conventional artwork, but also much theatre and performance established
itself needed to be challenged. This dismantling of hierarchical structures, again immersed in notions of authorship is evident in the post modern dance movement.
“You have to listen to the space … as if it were an old (dying) animal, in order to understand your role. You cannot create a solo: you can only be left with one that you are now responsible for executing in time. If the choreographer can change roles after so
many years of power and prestige in the dance field, our heroic hang-ups and our search for the masterpiece will go straight out of the window. This is tough for the big industries of dance to do. This is real ‘the dinosaur is dying’ stuff. The structure is in for a huge renovation once improvisation is practiced, realized and part of the way choreography
is placed and aligned within dance and in music. Dance as a time art is one of duration and therefore improvisation is the most intensive view one can possibly take on the art form for what it actually is’. (Duck - proximity/Austria)
When Duck improvises she refers to what is ‘danced’, to what is ‘written’ as choreography. The production of meaning is located in exactly the same place as it
would be should this choreography have been pre determined, set and rehearsed before the performance happens. The difference is, and what is important for Duck is that authorship has been surrendered. The audience knows that the ‘choreography’ is instantaneous; the dancers are making it up as they go along. The audiences are invited into, and are part of the textuality of space and time, the same space and time in which the performers are writing the work. Weather the work ‘looks’ improvised or not is really
not important.
Back in the ’60’s, modern dancers no longer wished to be tools, to perform a representation, or the result of somebody else’s vision. These dancers wished to retain authorship over their own bodies. And not only this. They began experimenting publicly, removing the ’show’ from their highly ‘trained to show’ bodies. Authorship was pulled into question even further. Attention turned away from modernist abstraction and a
concern with movement form within a highly codified system, to an expanded field of movement that ‘removes the body from the gaze and returns it to its activity,
the condition of always doing something’5. The experiments were concerned with the activity of the body - in - the - world, not just in the ‘neutral’ space of theatre. In the work of the Judson Church the body became ‘dynamic not posed’ 6, situated rather than positioned. Technical training became highly problematic and is discussed further in the chapter on ‘Technical Training and notions of getting better’ within this thesis.
Improvisation occurs then, as a tool with which to begin addressing the phenomenological, kinesthetic, social, psychological, living, choice making body.
This point marks the beginning of a body that seeks to know itself and to present itself as knowing. It is alert to and always in its environment. Rick Allsop, in his lecture ‘rethinking Physical Culture’7 describes the bodies post modern shift as a movement
which ‘leans towards an open field of poetics that rejects the closures of modernism and suggests that the processes of art are not divorced from the processes of nature and our relationship to it.’ It is within this open field of poetics that Allsop introduces here that I will return to Ducks work specifically. Ducks practice studies the interdependency of space, time and body putting the body as the negotiator and dynamic marker of space and
time. Acknowledging that the field of improvisation is vast it is writing through of Ducks position within it that I wish to pursue.
For Duck, improvisation does not design space. ‘It is not by improvisation that I can alter aesthetics. I can only alter aesthetics by dancing and by selecting whom to dance with. In my feeling aesthetics is up for question, not for answers at this time’. (Proximity/Austria). I would like to highlight through this quote that improvisation is not dancing. Improvisation is an approach to performing. Although this whole chapter necessarily writes through a dance practice, because Duck is a dance practitioner, I am interested here in her improvisation techniques and how they contain a relevant consciousness for all live artists.
When Duck is teaching she does not impose or design what the performer will do. She does not tell the performer ‘what’ to do. Duck focuses on how a performer will arrive at the ‘what’ that they do. What is practiced is how best one might prepare and deal with the anxiety of performing, with the traumatic moment between the performing self and the eventual ‘text’. I must note here that to separate these two factors is slightly unnatural and I do this for my own ends. Ducks work is within the field of dance. Also she makes choices about whom she works with for her own reasons: to be able to engage with her own questions, about dance, dancing, and the body. Certainly, when reflecting upon the Practicing Presence conference I can say that although the aim of the conference was not to analyze the work, but to analyze the artists’ position with their work, what came to light was that the artists’ position in these cases does form the work: informs what it looks like, and what the eventual text becomes. I believe that Ducks approach to improvising is transferable, out of the field of dance, and useful to non-dancers who perform. I see her improvisational techniques as a potential performance technology. For this reason I am
pulling her theories away from her practice, away from Dancing. Through Ducks techniques it is possible to analyze and to practice the social play of individuals who are sharing the same space and time. These bodies are of themselves positioned and politicized as they fall under the invited scrutiny of witnesses. The performing groups set within a chosen or given environment or situation act and react according to
the rules of their own bodies. These bodies contain knowledge. This knowledge includes whatever physical training body has had, but more importantly is the total sum of that bodies experience as a social being. These bodies are opinionated. It is within the explicit practice of improvisation that one might misunderstand oneself to be ‘free’ to make choices. And it is here that the individual’s relationship to and existence within structure becomes paramount: becomes what is significant.
Referring to Merleau-Pontys’ Phenomenology of Perception, the body cannot be removed, or examined out of, or away from its context: the condition it is in. In this sense, there is no body - in - itself. Merleau-ponty states that the body therefore is not in - the - world, but is of - the - world. For the practice of Katie Duck it seems necessary to arrive in the practise space a ‘ready made’, and to perceive ones own body within and of the situation of that space and time. Merleau-ponty is useful here as he states: ” The perceived thing is not an ideal unity in the possession of the intellect … it is rather a totality open to a horizon of an indefinite number of perspective views - which blend with one another according to a given style, which defines the object in question”.8 Duck, as someone whose body is central to her practise, is in a perpetual state of submerging her subject-body into and through space and time: not to think or to know the body, but to perceive the body as a movement through and a dynamic within space and
time.
Improvisation as a practise then foregrounds the bodies transparency. Because there is no text-activity provided, predetermined, or designed, the body is fully exposed. I believe that the practise of improvisation makes equal the bodies patterns and does not and should not ‘prefer’ one technique or pattern over another. In a sense, Ducks approach to
improvisation democratizes the technologies held within bodies.
It does not feel appropriate for me to speak about Ducks practise through a dance language. Duck doesn’t just dance, she speaks poetry, clowns, sings, but most
importantly she improvises.
Ducks practise of improvisation explicitly, brings us to a possible discussion then of the implicitly improvised nature of all performance acts. There is a semantic problem here, which relates to the aesthetisiced practices of improvisation explicitly. Maybe a better word for this phenomenon as it moves from explicit to implicit is ‘writing’. Here we can
connect Ducks theories directly with post structuralism notions of ‘writing’ and ‘written’. To help illustrate the interconnectedness of these two concepts, improvisation and writing; I am drawing on conversations I have had with the writer and performer Larry Lynch.
At the practicing presence conference, in the discussion held in-between the artists and the audience, Larry Lynch suggested that a more useful word to use to describe the implicitly improvised moment of performance, would be ‘writing’. So, we might align here the word ‘writing’ with the word ‘improvisation’. There is a strong theoretical and/or
critical framework that presents writing in a way, which is useful to us. I am putting the word (written) next to the action (performed) ‘what gets done’. I am, then, putting the act of ‘writing’ next to ‘improvisation’: the doing.
In Roland Barthes essay Grain of the Voice (Roland Barthes image music text (London: Fontana 1977) 182 He describes Grain signifiers: Barthes gives this name to the signifier, which he identifies at the interface between sound and language: where the resulting
practise resists predicative interpretation: The grain of the voice. This we shall know as the pheno song.
Barthes borrows Julia Kristevas usage of the Geno song and the Pheno song and describes the geno-song thus: “All the phenomena, all the features which belong to
the structure of the language being sung (in this case, the dance being danced, the activity being performed, the text being spoken), the rules of the genre, the coded form of the mellisma, the composer’s idiolect, the style of interpretation: in short, everything in the performance which is in the service of communication, representation, expression,
everything which it is customary to talk about, which forms the tissue of cultural values (the matter of acknowledged tastes, of fashions, of critical commentaries), which takes its bearing directly on the ideological alibis of a period (subjectivity’ , ‘expressivities’, ‘dramatics’, ‘personality’ of the artist.) (Roland Barthes Image Music Text (London:
Fontana 1977) 182 Ducks practise addresses the geno song. The performer, in practise arrives with an ego that exists within a geno-song. The performer is put into an analytical view of their own expressivities, dramatics, personality etc. Their subjectivity is their departure point and is indeed a point from which, in order to truly grasp Ducks principles, they, and she, must absolutely depart. So, in the first case, I believe that the geno song, as Barthes describes it, is our starting point when studying improvisation with Duck.
It is not something we ’strip away’, it is what we ‘put on the table’.
Duck approaches teaching in the same way as she approaches her own work with Magpie. Magpie carries with it an aesthetic. Because it is inherently collaborative, not just between the performers, but also the lighting designer and the musicians, what a Magpie will look like is dependent on the total sum of its parts. This could be said of all live performance, but the difference is that the work is not pre determined or hierarchically designed. Duck improvises because she hates aesthetics.
” When art is analyzed by aesthetic, art becomes a frozen instrument”
(interview - summer 2000)
Duck describes teaching improvisation to a group of dance students in Spain: “when I went to Madrid, I worked with these kids…I did select some ballet dancers, that I could relate to from my own background, but when we practiced, it looked nothing like Magpie…the aesthetic was very different…aesthetics are a problem. For me, aesthetics get in the way of learning. Get them out of my way, otherwise I can’t see those kids in Spain can I? I want to see soul, and when I can, it is magic”. (Interview - summer 2000)
When Duck says that she cannot ’see those kids’, she means that, if she becomes distracted by what they are doing technically, or by what they look like, she will be distracted ultimately by her own ‘taste’ which refers to her own choices, experience and future. Her aim is to get ‘those kids’ working together, realizing themselves as part of a bigger situation which is dominated by time and space, and which is ruthlessly
unconcerned with aesthetics or by the aspirations of the individual (herself included). Ducks method of improvisation provides a forum whereby an individual approach/relationship to ‘body’ clashes with other approaches and relationships. Performers can research in this forum, looking at themselves in difference to others and a public can witness this. Spectators of improvisation are able to analyze different approaches towards ‘body’ side by side in a single context. The works seeks to expose conflicts in-between performers relationships with their bodies and on a broader level
exposes the conflicts in-between funding bodies and dance communities, highlighting the confusions there in. Everything to do with the performers geno song comes into play. It is with this cultural, trained, social body that we must contend.
Because a work is explicitly improvised, it is understood by both performer and witness that what becomes ‘written’ has been done so out of a negotiation with the present, out of an informed spontaneity and negotiation with the live moment. An inducement of the subject that is not measured by the performer from this basis insulates that body with a
false sense of ‘meaning’. A meaning which is happening to the performer, but which does not exist in the context in which it is being ‘lived’. If the body does not realize itself as part of a textual space, is positioning herself as an author or a controller of meaning. That body will remain functioning within their relationship to their own geno-song.
Ducks practise searches to escape the geno-song, the grained signifiers of the voice emerging “from within language and in its very materiality” (ibid) inducing “a signifying play having nothing to do with communication, representation (of feelings), expression,” (ibid) but being rather the process of the body inhabiting language. She searches for this in order to begin demanding its renegotiation, its submersion into the acknowledged dominate arena of time and space: of context. What Duck wants to bring into play is the pheno-song: the grain of the voice. Not just of the individual, but of the ensemble.
“The song must speak, must write - for what is being produced at the level of the geno-song is finally writing.” (Ibid) 185
Duck attempts to provide her students with an understanding of the difference between the geno and the pheno, between what has become and what is becoming. Duck cares less about what becomes, and pulls attention constantly toward how it becomes: towards becoming.
I am drawing Barthes notion of the grain into Ducks practise of improvisation in order to renegotiate her practise into broader issues that surround the performing body. In his idea of ‘writing aloud’ (Roland Barthes The pleasure of the Text (Oxford: Blackwell 1986) 67 Barthes refers to the grain of the voice and then to the grain of writing, to the same theoretical ends. I am extending the idea of ‘writing aloud’ to include the bodily practise of improvisation. Barthes concludes that within the possibility of writing aloud, the voice that is writing, (and in our case, the body that is improvising), be as fresh, supple, lubricated, delicately granular and vibrant as an animals muzzle,” (ibid) 67 and that “to succeed in shifting the signified a great distance and in throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body of the actor into my ear: it granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it comes: that is bliss”. (ibid)
The biggest challenge that one has when they begin to work with Duck is an immediate sense of self-consciousness. One is asked to enter a room and to not know future. One is putting oneself in a very vulnerable place. All that is going to happen is you - in space and time - making choices. The irony is, that however set a piece of work may be, the truth is that we never really know its future. “…All performance is improvised whether you play something classical in a string quartet, or whether you play something (explicitly improvised), it’s just about a different set of limitations” (Tim Steiner, practicing presence conference 2001). Improvisation illuminates the uncontrollability of live performance, because it has to happen in time and we can never know the future, no
matter how well planned, or scripted or ’set up’ we are. There is the feeling that one can hide behind something set, that this makes someone ’safer’. This is absolutely the lie that I wish to expose in this chapter.
When Duck says she wants to see soul, maybe we can also understand that this is not the soul of an individual, or some sort of ‘true’ manifestation of their ’self’, but it is the bliss to which Barthes refers. It is the body ‘writing aloud’.
For Duck, “the performer has to be able to be in constant process with choice and chance”. (Proximity /Austria). Choice and chance are always present factors within performance. Ducks improvisation methods highlight these elements and approach them
purely: head on. When one enters an improvisation they realize they have choice. They simultaneously need to reckon with Desire, Ego, Expectation (their own, the
audiences…) etc. If we can imagine a performer dealing only with Choice, we can imagine them dealing with themselves only. Choice without chance is not something that interests Duck. “A performer who improvises dance or music using only choice as their
time structure will eventually loose any perspective of the space”. This is simple to understand. If one makes a choice to cross a busy road, if one does not consider the road, and place this choice in time, then there is a strong possibility that one will get
flattened by an oncoming car. A performer who only makes choices is also, to use the same example, only walking. There is no acknowledgement of context and so no play, no relationship to it. Duck finds this, and I agree whole-heartedly with her, just less interesting. This is why Chance is such an important innovation for the improvised performance, and why Chance is a necessary element to be acknowledged within all performance. Chance means giving time to choice. To make choices in time. If chance informs choices that are being made, we may more safely assume that the whole room is informing these choices. The mind of the performer is submerged into the mind of the room. Choice then, is a certain ‘freedom’ (from imposition) and Chance can be viewed as a Tran formative process. Aesthetics arise out of chance. Meaning arrives out of chance also. If chance is fore grounded as the dominant factor with which to negotiate time and space, then the witness is invited to interpret ‘meaning’ on this basis only. What the
student of Duck learns is that they themselves do not behold meaning. They are not the story. They are part of a story and they are a story teller.
“In the way I work, the dancers need to loose the self. The expression of the self is of no value when improvisation is the structure. It is odd how improvisation leaves the whole piece to choice and how we identify choice as the liberation of the ’self’. We can believe that choice is what we are doing but actually choice is there without me or anyone else doing it. (Duck - Proximity/Austria)
Merce Cunningham worked with John Cage in the early 1950s to develop chance operations9. They drew up elaborate charts indicating qualities of time, sound, space and movement, and tossed coins to determine their choice and order in performance. This was the beginning of the so-called postmodern aesthetic and an interest in the creative process for its own sake. Duck is influenced by Cunningham and by Cage, by the way they both worked with chance as a compositional structure and the non-linear complexity these
introduced. Chance as structure also led to collaborations by different artists in different
fields. Chance procedures then provided an access point for interdisciplinary activity. A fore grounding of Chance as an element enabled different techniques to share the same space and time. ‘In Cages music composition, he leaves time to the choice of the musicians and sets the melodic and/or sound areas. In Cunningham choreography he leaves space, direction and the order of the movement combinations to the choice of dancers and sets the movement and movement phrases. Providing choice is how we can create moments of chance. If there is no choice given to a performer then the relativity that ‘chance’ implies cannot happen’. (Duck - Proximity/Austria)
What Cage and Cunningham introduced into arts practise was the ability to see everything that the body does potentially as dance and to hear all sound potentially as music. Once chance is implied there is an acknowledgement of, and re-defining of ‘the mistake’. There is no longer something that should or should not happen. We can consider every element as an equally present and functioning phenomenon, ignoring nothing. The self, and the creative act are submerged within and presented as dynamic accents within time and space. Art is serving as a frame through which to see and hear life in perpetually new ways.
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Sharon smith