"Knowing-in-Connection: Improvisation as Praxis for Life and Art"
Apr 17, 2025
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Join Barbara Bogatin, a mindfulness-oriented cellist, Luc Petton, a choreographer blending dance and nature, Stephen Scott Brewer, a teacher exploring language and creativity, and psychologist Letícia Renault as they dive into the world of improvisation. They explore its profound connections to ethical interactions, emotional expression, and collective creativity. The group discusses how mistakes can spark growth, the interplay of individual agency and group dynamics, and the significance of presence in artistic expression. Discover how creativity can thrive through disruption!
Selfhood is perceived as a dynamic process that fosters interconnectedness, encouraging an ongoing exploration of personal and collective identity.
Improvisation and participatory sense-making highlight qualities like listening and surprise, essential for meaningful creative collaboration and social connection.
Disruption and playfulness in art allow for innovative breakthroughs, transforming mistakes into valuable opportunities for growth and deeper expression.
Deep dives
The Nature of Self as Process
The concept of self is explored as a fluid process rather than a fixed entity. It emphasizes the importance of keeping the notion of self as an open question, allowing for an ongoing quest for understanding. By perceiving selfhood as a dynamic experience, individuals may find inner peace in the recognition of their interconnectedness with all humans on the planet. This perspective encourages a suspension of definitive answers, fostering a deeper contemplative engagement with one's personal and collective identity.
Improvisation and Participatory Sense-Making
The interplay between improvisation and participatory sense-making highlights the significance of qualities like listening, surprise, and kinship in creative practices. Questions arise regarding the balance between agency and surrender, and how emerging actions can arise from both effort and spontaneity. The dialogue underscores that creative practices, such as music and dance, serve as conduits for deeper social connection and understanding. Techniques like mindfulness can enhance one's ability to participate meaningfully in collaborative creative endeavors.
Embodying Creativity Through Connection
The conversation emphasizes the health benefits of contemplative practices in enhancing one's creative expression, particularly in music and performance. Various guests share their experiences of integrating music, movement, and mindfulness, revealing how being present in their bodies enriches their artistic expression. The dialogue specifically addresses how performance can embody emotions, offering a means to connect with an audience on a profound level. This highlights how internal contemplative awareness can translate into external artistic communication.
Disruption as a Catalyst for Innovation
Disruption is framed as an essential element of creativity that leads to innovative breakthroughs. Participants reflect on how breaking habitual patterns can foster new perspectives and approaches to learning and interacting within various artistic contexts. The importance of playfulness is underscored, as it creates a safe space for individuals to explore and express themselves without fear of judgment. Through this lens, errors and unexpected outcomes are celebrated as opportunities for growth rather than failures.
Shared Experiences and Healing Through Art
Art, particularly music and movement, is recognized as a powerful medium for healing and bridging gaps between diverse human experiences. Guests discuss how performances can evoke empathy and shared understanding by reflecting emotional realities, thereby fostering communal connection. This dialogue points to the transformative potential of art to address collective suffering and joy, creating spaces for mutual support and expression. The overarching message is clear: engaging with art can deepen our relationships with ourselves and others, contributing to broader societal healing.
This conversation was a rich and potent gathering of creative minds, whose lives and work have long orbited practices of improvisation, co-creation, and participatory sense-making: cellist and mindfulness teacher Barbara Bogatin, atypical choreographer and dancer Luc Petton, pianist and teacher of teachers Dr Scott Brewer, and our wonderful co-host from Core Enaction, Semester 4, Dr Letícia Renault. From beginning to end, we dwelled with the many qualities that improvisation has in common with participatory sense-making: listening, becoming, and letting be; play, surprise, and épochè; interdependence, kinship, and attunement. The questions that emerged in the conversation turned out to be many of the same questions that concern all living beings who participate in the intricate process of making worlds together.
How can we cultivate the fine balance between effort and emergence, making happen and letting happen, agency and suspension?
Is there such a thing as a pedagogy of creativity and intuition?
What new grammar, syntax, and vocabulary does improvisation afford us for moving through the world?
How can we maintain a connection to our interiority while also expressing art publicly? How do we arrive in a zone of ‘pure communication’?
What might be said for the generative possibilities of breakdown and mistakes? Might we take a playful attitude toward our fallacies? Can we use them to disrupt the mechanisms of habit?
What is the relationship between contemplative practice and creativity?
What do creative practices, such as dance, music-making, and language teaching, have to do with our ethical way of being in the world? Could certain improvisational attitudes — such as decentring the self or suspending judgment — help us interact across differences? How does improvisation affect our sense of intersubjectivity, and our ability to participate in a collective organism?
How do these practices inhabit the body? What can be said of the importance of touching and being touched, of being changed by the imprint of others? How can we activate the “full orchestra of the body” (Luc Petton)?
