Improvisation Practices and Dramaturgical Consciousness: A Workshop

Abstract

In re-presenting on the page a dance workshop, this article draws attention to what I describe as a dramaturgical consciousness within improvised dance performance. Developing this particular consciousness entails a reconfiguration of the dramaturgical and the improvisational, which allows us to understand them both as embodied practices that play with memory. The workshop takes the participant/reader through a series of activities designed to activate a sensibility through which distinctions between action and intellect, inside and outside, and past and present are productively blurred. As a practical workshop, it requires the purposeful activation of embodied thinking while foregrounding the importance of memory, perception, and composition as the bases of a dramaturgical consciousness in improvised dance performance.