Knowing-in-Connection: Improvisation as Praxis for Life and Art

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)?

More about our guests: Barbara Bogatin, Dr Stephen Scott Brewer, Luc Petton, and Dr Letícia Renault. A couple examples of Luc Petton's work: 'Light Bird' teaser and 'Swan' teaser.

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