Challenging or questioning the strict division between our daily/common reality and performance is something that happens continually in contemporary art practice.

The conventions of how to ‘mark’ what is performance and what is not differ per discipline, but each discipline has developed various ways of looking very subtly at the relationship between real life and art and challenging their audiences in their perceptions.

When it comes to improvisation performance this theme tends do be an even more poignant issue, as an open structure of performance invites automatically “that what is really happening” into the piece. But still there are various ways in which performers mark that they are performing rather than just being their private selves, dealing with reality.

What are our strategies as improvisers to define/challenge/explore the boundaries between ‘performance’ and ‘real life’ in any given performance? What are general issues that need to be addressed with a group of interdisciplinary improvisers to gain clarity about this issue?

Some aspects:

In and Out of the Piece

Real/Performance Time

Defining the Space