Genesis of a collective improvisation

In my opinion, there are entire theses to be written on the interaction of all the exciting phenomena that occur within a collective improvisation session or a participatory performance such as we can experience in a workshop or, as recently inIconicumduring the festival at the Generator, in public. It was a real first from this point of view.

We had previously tried this approach with the members of the founding workshop of this process (7 years of experimenting and experimenting), but the result had left many of them dissatisfied, if not downright uncomfortable with having to conduct their experiments under the gaze of a "non-participant" third party. We were in the infancy of the practice of this method and a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then; in particular my own practice of the so-called "guided" or semi-improvised performance, which has been refined and increased thanks to the research and creative work that I am able to carry out The Generator.

If I am not myself writing a thesis on the subject, I am nevertheless very stimulated to devote several articles to the subject of these phenomena which fascinate me and whose future study I sense as a well of unfathomable enrichment in the matter.

What is matter?

Presupposing that at the origin of the creation of any universe there must be a big-bang, I try to bring together the conditions of alchemy necessary for a maelstrom to form. The most familiar practitioners of this method, but also new participants who are very spontaneous and come from different backgrounds, naturally create this movement that is conducive to drawing and including any proposal in its heart. The primary aim is invariably to build a machine to maintain and produce a form of collective energy in other words, a generatorThis could lead one to believe that there is no real chance in the course of this quest.

The machine has every right to hiccup, stall, restart

Each new experience gives rise to the emergence of a singular prototype, comparable to those that made possible the beginnings of the automobile or the conquest of the air. The "failure" or feeling of failure, should therefore in no way be seen as a problem, at the risk of harming the highlighting of a much more ambitious objective than that of a "successful" show which, I would say, anyone interested in the stage should know how to produce without difficulty with a little experience.

But it turns out that this is precisely where the problem often lies: in the thirst to manufacture "beauty", a shrub hiding the dense and deep forest of unknown forms, apparently incomprehensible to our codified understanding.

There's no mystery to it; if you want to do the agreed thing, do the "beautiful" thing according to the idea you think you have of it; that way you'll be sure not to discover anything.

By doing so, you will deprive yourself and your audience of a very special subject to think about and to feel.

Qualities of the raw material

The material obtained during our workshop experiences is spontaneously found, albeit in less elaborate forms, in participatory performance. It has the advantage of being presented first in a fluid form, through which bodies, energies, sounds, words, looks and acts must be made to swirl sufficiently quickly for the inherent will of each person to give meaning to it to let go. This famous and much abused "letting go" is not taken by me, in this case, for an empty word. There is, not a will to break or to bend, but a dissociation to operate.

Our maelstrom must be a real centrifuge before it can transform and generate any energy whatsoever. It is therefore in the "chemical" sense of the term that we must understand the use of the verb dissociateThe aim is to obtain a separation of the constituent elements of the psyche according to their density, in order to be able to use them more efficiently afterwards.

In the same way that the centrifugation of blood makes it possible to obtain plasma, white blood cells and red blood cells separately in distinct layers, the concentric excitation of the forces in presence under the effects of permanent external stimuli (sharp indications, music sometimes, collegial playful training, progressive outpourings of emotions, agitation of the bodies...) pushes to organize spontaneously the dance and the awakening of the senses out of their contexts standard.

The word is out. Indeed, it's all there: in those devious as well as protective and constant ideas that we have of life, of ourselves and of others.

It is important, if you want to follow me, not to see any moral judgement or scale of value behind what I say, between what would be normalized and what would not be. I do not believe in the superiority of one over the other, each thought process having its interest and its various utilities depending on the situation. In the work we are doing, it is simply imperative to get rid of as much as possible of the outer layer that constitutes what we call "personality" in a daily social environment.

Like a crust hardened by the accumulation of the irritating effects of our friction with a world that does not go, far from it, at the rhythm of our desires, this surface apparent to all is above all the fruit of reactions to solicitations, disappointments and various aggressions, rather than a personal creation inspired by the movements of our heart.

I am using here on purpose, heart and not spirit or desire because I believe that it is truly in the last place that creative intelligence and animal impulses can be freed from our own diktats.

At this point, we are still not ready to really access it. These are just the instinctive beginnings of the work. There are still a few crucial steps missing before the obvious sense of our playground emerges in everyone's mind.