From the dance floor of a tango club to group therapy classes, from ballet to community theatre, improvised dance is everywhere. For some dance artists, improvisation is one of many approaches within the choreographic process. For others, it is a performance form in its own right. And while it has long been practiced, it is only within the last twenty years that dance improvisation has become a topic of critical inquiry. With The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Dance, dancer, teacher, and editor Vida L. Midgelow provides a cutting-edge volume on dance improvisation in all its facets.
Expanding beyond conventional dance frameworks, this handbook looks at the ways that dance improvisation practices reflect our ability to adapt, communicate, and respond to our environment. Throughout the handbook, case studies from a variety of disciplines showcase the role of individual agency and collective relationships in improvisation, not just to dancers but to people of all backgrounds and abilities. In doing so, chapters celebrate all forms of improvisation, and unravel the ways that this kind of movement informs understandings of history, socio-cultural conditions, lived experience, cognition, and technologies.
Introduction. Improvising Dance: A Way of Going About Things
Vida L Midgelow
Section 1: Life worlds and Ethics
1. Life Practices
Ann Cooper Albright
2. Ethico-aesthetic practice of improvising: relations through motion
Fiona Bannon
3. Reflections on dance improvisation and its dynamic interrelationship with everyday movement
Libby Worth
4. A Philosophy of the Improvisational Body
Sondra Fraleigh
5. Chance encounters, Nietzschean philosophy and the question of improvisation Philipa Rothfield
6. Moving in medias res: Towards a phenomenological hermeneutics of dance improvisation
Nigel Stewart
Section 2: Attunement and Perception
7. I notice that I'm noticingEL
Sally Doughty
8. Embodied Consciousness in Improvised Performance
Nalina Wait
9. 'Mass may be the single most important sensation': Perceptual Philosophies in Dance Improvisation
Malaka Sacro-Thomas
10. Rethinking Improvisation from a Daoist perspective of Qi-energy
I-Ying Wu
11. Exploring Uncertainties of Language in Dance Improvisation
Louise McDowall
Section 3: Habit, Freedom and Resistance
12. Improvisation and Habit
Gary Peters
13. Unpredictable Maneuvers: Eva Karczag's Improvised Strategies for Thwarting Institutional Agendas
Doran George
14. Movements of freedom: performing popular liberty in the early cancan
Claire Parfitt-Brown
15. Valorizing Uncertainty: Chance, Totalitarianism and Soviet Ballet
Janice Ross
16. The Emancipation of Improvisation
Larry Lavender
Section 4: Memory and Transmission
17. Improvisation and Argentinean Tango: On playing with body memories
Susanne Ravn
18. Dancing Life
Norah Zuniga Shaw
19. What Remains
Robert Bingham & Stephanie Hanna
20. Improvisational Practices in Jazz Dance Battles
Jane Carr and Irven Lewis
21. Twelve Days in Tarbena: an evolutionary approach to moving through silence and sound to speech in Ruth Zaporah's Action Theater training
Robert Vesty
22. Intention and Surrender
Stephanie Skura
Section 5: Agency and Transformation
23. Transcending Boundaries: Improvisation and disability in dance
Sarah Whatley
24. Artful humanising conversations: Improvisation in Early Years dance
Kerry Chappell and Lizzie Swinford
25. Instinctive Connections: Improvisation as a research methodology in health and care settings
Lisa Dowler
26. Somatic Sensing and Creaturely Knowing in the University Improvisation Class
Ali East
27. Improvising Happiness: Belly Dance's Evolution through Improvisation
Barbara Sellers Young
Section 6: Interconnectivity, emergence and technologies
28. Dancing the Interface: Improvisation in Zones of Virtual Exchange
Thomas DeFrantz
29. Programmed Improvisation Inspied from Autonomous Humanoids
Amy LaVeirs
30. Contact Improvisation and Embodied Social Cognition
April Flakne
31. Modelling Improvisation as Emergence: A Critical Investigation of the Practice of Cognition
Colleen Dunagan, Roxane Fenton, and Evan Dorn
32. Towards a cognitive theory of joint improvisation: The case of tango argentino
Micheal Kimmel
Section 7: Ecology and Environments
33. Improvisation and the Earth: Dancing in the Moment as Ecological Practice
Tamara Ashley
34. Dancing the Land: An Emerging Geopoetics
Melinda Buckwalter
35. Scoring and Siting: Improvisatory Approaches to Site-Specific Dance
Victoria Hunter
36. The Dancer, the Philosopher and the Tramp
Hilary Elliot
37. Audience Improvisation and Immersive Experiences: the sensuous world of the body in the work of Lundahl & Seitl
Josephine Machon
Section 8: Techniques, Strategies and Histories
38. Lost in the Footlights: The Secret Life of Improvisation in Contemporary American Concert Dance
Kent De Spain
39. In the Moment: Improvisation in Traditional Dance
Anthony Shay
40. Playing with the Beat: Choreomusical Improvisation in Rhythm Tap Dance
Allison Robbins & Christopher J. Wells
41. Moving Sound: New Relationships between Contemporary Dance and Music in Improvisation
Anna Sanchez Colberg & Dimitris Karalis
42. Mens Agilis Corpore Agili
Ivar Hagendoorn
43. Embodiology®: A Hybrid Neo-African Improvisation-as-Performance Practice distinguished by Dynamic Rhythm
Sheron Wray
