On 18-19 March 2021, I attended The Improviser’s Experience: Knowledge, Methodology, Communication, a conference kindly organised by Jonny Best and Irine Røsnes. I delivered a performance paper titled ‘Between Focus: Liminality as a Productive Site for Collaborative Improvisation’ which commented on my work Between Focus from 2019. Abstract below:
‘Between Focus explores how liminality can be used as a productive site for collaborative improvisation. Foregrounding the phenomenological experience of the pianist and dancer, the guided improvisation invites interpretation of the piano as an ‘object-in-itself’ and a component of the environment, acting as a creative nexus of ‘betweenness’. During the performance, focus shifts between the performers, their techniques, the ‘object’ and the space. This is reflected in the constant transition between collaborative exploration of the piano and active interference, between mental engagement and passivity. Building on a range of literature, from van Gennep’s Rites of Passage (1909) to Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968), this method of improvisation contributes to understandings of liminality by demonstrating and capitalising on the fragility of performative focus. The ‘betweenness’ of understandings, and subsequent communication, is the productive site of the work — instability is the ‘master’ state from which stability might arise.’