In closing of the Carpet Season of this year, I propose an unusual gathering:
Let’s have a look together at the subject of leaving traces of writing about our work. How can that be done, in a subject as wide as interdisciplinarity and as fluid as improvisation? Which type of writing is useful/effective for our own process and which types of writing are effective for sharing with others? How can we find the words that are full and clear enough for developing the craft of instant composition together?
Bettina Neuhaus & Maria Michailidou will meet with me on Thursday, 11 June, and we invite anyone who was involved in Carpet Sessions before to join us. We’ll play, perform and write in still to be defined order and interlacing…
Bring your favorite writing tool (laptop, paper+pen, smartphone, typewriter… 😉 ) and your performer’s presence.
Results will be published in our ever-growing Improvisation Knowledge Base.
If you would like to be there, please announce your presence by writing a comment to this post.
11 June 2015
13:00-17:00
What are the Carpet Sessions? / Where is the studio?
We plan another sessions like this for the beginning of the season after the summer. (first or second Thursday of September – if you’d like to note it in your agenda already).
See you either for this, or next week for the open session of (Dis)connecting the Dots (4 June), and otherwise: Have a great summer!
Interdisciplinary Instant Composition 
Funny how things happen. Maybe not for a reason, but certainly as happy co-incidences. Meeting in this case in my brain and body… Last week I spent researching my current relation to (contact-) improvisation with a group of great colleagues in Bern. Nothing but time and a big studio and all our bodies and minds geared to dance and be mindful about it and to speak on the hyper personal and the more general aspects of it to us at that moment.
In several conversations people asked why I never write about my work. And it makes me go: “Damn, I’m so crap at it. After about three sentences I either think it’s with woolly socks up in the clouds or it sounds totally presumptuous or so and so has written about this so much better or I have some other judgement that makes me freeze and return to ‘just’ doing the dancing, living what I think and feel about it, quietly working away in my corner. It just isn’t the dance and I can’t find a tone that has the same myriad shades of experience and is as fluid…”
But I do definitely have a desire. So thanks for organizing, I’m coming, and when I take off my shoes I’ll place my self-judgements alongside them in the hallway. And I’ll aim to embody the writing and see how it may co-exist with the dancing…
Great! 🙂 thanks for sharing your thoughts, Natanja, and see you on the 11th!
What inspiring thoughts Natanja! It is definitely a challenge to translate various modalities of artistic work into words; maybe because we are overshadowed by the tendency to make them into linear structures, thinking that this is how to best communicate (very proper, very academic). I love words, and how they stand for something, but I do get trapped in the same thought process and forget often how to use the improvisational aspect of writing, of using words in a flowing, perhaps disjointed way, like random feathers falling out of the sky – they don’t have to be made into a recognizable bird (at least not right away 😉 ) So, I’m inspired to come too! And, Margot van der Linden is coming & I haven’t seen her in years… looking forwards (backwards, sideways, upside down….)
I will be there Thomas!