Improvisation: ? motions for living texts

• Main Author: Frey, Connie Jean
• Other Authors: Oberg, Antoinette A.
• Format: Others
• Language: English; en
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: Drama in education; Improvisation (Acting)
• Online Access: https://dspace.library.uvic.ca//handle/1828/9759

Enjoining improvisation as chrysalis for dissertation creation, I draw upon immediate responses, surprise, familiarity, and diverse knowers. Being engaged with improvisation as topic and methodology reveals my assumptions and vitality. What matters is my decision not to primarily describe experience as much as express from experiencing. And I acclaim my readers, valuing others' felt experiencing. Along with shaped expressions of my present-time improvisations, improvisation as variously conceived in education, culture, and other meaning-making is reviewed. Throughout this text, intertwining in my ongoing awareness, are feminist, nonlinear systems, hermeneutic, and postmodern theories. Improvisation—approached intentionally—is not reducible to knowledge acquisition nor learned accomplishment. Shaping expression improvisationally activates unbidden responses, events, and textual artifacts. Generative structures include creative dialogue, impressionistic writing, explication, poetry, and letter-writing, along with spatial design and invitations for participation. Improvisational structures and possibilities invite the protean manifestations of themes. Improvisation calls discipline into play, requires paying attention to what is happening with possibilities. Discipline abides with freedom. Constraints—what's a river without banks?—are associated with shaping expression while freely generating movement, sound, concepts, or concrete forms. Improvisation :? Motions for Living Texts is organized in four sections. The first section considers kinesthetic, or movement, improvisation and related awareness, or felt life. The creative work and pedagogy of Barbara Mettler and Viola Spolin are introduced along with Eugene Gendlin's philosophy of experience. The second section elaborates my transition from moving to writing as an improviser. In the third section, meaning becomes expressly engaged and associated further with Gendlin and with diverse proponents of improvisation. In the final section perspectives on language intersect articulation of “living in situations,” where knowing remains in motion. Overall this improvisational discourse valorizes experience as well as knowledge, participation as well as accomplishment. === Graduate