Is there such a thing as IMPROVISED ORGANISATION? (and is it desirable 🙂 ?)
How can we as improvisers approach organising things (collectively)?

This page is meant to discuss the ways in which we create the support/circumstances for improvisation practice to happen. So we really mean hands-on production work: planning, emailing, getting people together, doing PR. But also: organising the flow of a festival or gathering.
(if you are interested to read about the organisation of an improvised performance itself, that is discussed elsewhere: look under Context and Structures)

Next to that you can see improvisation as a daily personal attitude, improvisation work always involves some degree of organisation. How do we go about this? Are we forced to use the traditional forms of organising, or are there (already?) alternatives that stay closer to an improvisation perspective?

For example, with the WhatIIIF festival, the real-world counterpart to this digital knowledge base, we are experimenting concretely with the form of an improvisation festival (or conference):

Can the programme/schedule of a festival or a conference about improvisation come about improvisationally, once the most basic frame (dates, time, space) are set?

What is further needed to ensure clarity/quality of the time that we spend with each other?

It is interesting to observe that the challenges of improvising a program of researching/working together over a few days has similar issues than the issues discussed under CONTEXT and Basic Agreements for Improvisation performance:

After having set the basic agreements (time, space, people involved), there is the question how many explicit agreements we want to make about how the program will unfold, and how much we use the implicit agreements that are present from the history of all the people involved (and for example experiences of previous conferences/festivals) and the tacit agreements that are generated through working together organically?

How much do we want to make explicit, how much do we leave open and unspoken?

How do we create with each other a frame in which each of us feels safe, supported and challenged?

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Quote from WhatIIIF2019:

SIMPLICITY FOR 10 MINUTES

As we improvisationally organized our improvisational festival, we added a threshold of simplicity of 10 minutes between each block of activity. It was a reminder to trust the simplicity, trust the doing of little, the small repetitions, not producing, not getting louder or more active.

How to keep it simple? “Either do one thing, or don’t do anything. But do that thing with all your heart, simply.”