Exhausting Improvisation: Stutterances

Abstract

Reaching the halfway point of our discussion, this chapter will examine what might be one of the most contentious topics in the history of Western philosophy and dance criticism and at once an important question raised by the concept of “choreographing problems”: can dancing be equated with thinking, and if so, under which conditions and terms? The topic of the relationship between dance and thought is further complicated by claims related to improvisation, the mode of generating dance movement in the moment of its execution, with which the so-called thinking body is often identified. Before we try to answer this question on the basis of exposing the problem-method of Weak Dance Strong Questions (WDSQ), a few preliminary remarks about the context of dance improvisation and its theory are needed to better situate the scope of the topic “improvisation” and the problem that WDSQ poses to it.