THE COLLECTIVE IMPROVISATION IN THE PUBLIC SPACE

 

About improvisation :

To improvise is above all a question of freedom. Improvisation teaches us to be free, because it forces us to take decisions, to make choices, to keep them up, to develop them. Improvising is taking responsibilities. It is facing the wind of panic linked to doubt and uncertainty, to the absence of mastery and control. It is taming fear and the fear to get fear. Improvising is also destroying, hijacking or putting oneself in contradiction with codes, norms and all that we learned. Improvising, is struggling, above all against oneself, but also against frames and systems that prevent us to create. It is a way to rebel, to take up arms. Improvising is also playing and taking pleasure. It is the return to oral traditions and the withdrawal of writing and school. It is proof of a creative cheek.

    But improvising is above all the appearance of the research, the assertion that everything is moving,  constantly transformed. Improvising is refusing to know in advance what is going to happen. It is opening possibilities, spaces and times to create. Improvising is saying that identity is moving, malleable, mutable and in the throes of being constantly created and re-created, never frozen. Improvising is looking for one's originality and uniqueness in the here and now of time and space.

    However, improvising is not innate. Improvising has to be worked, as freedom has to be learned. And improvising needs the norms, the frames and the codes from which it escapes. Freedom without coercion is boring. Improvisation needs go and returns between knowledge and ignorance, between mastery and non mastery, as the audience needs at the same time to be reassured and surprised. Improvising is being in contradiction with all that we learned, and to use it at the same time. It is not only counter-culture or refusing the academic knowledge, but the accumulation of culture that allows to find one's singularity. Improvisation is being at the same time on and off the stage, listening all that happens around us as we are in a state of creation. Improvisation is the turmoil of newness, without the hysterical excess, it is restraint and moderation. Collective improvisation and social action :

    Collective improvisation is for us the reflect of what we call social art. We try to create uncertain spaces and times, in which everything is to invent from dialogues, from each one's involvement, from each one's values, in a responsible shared co-existing euphoria, using and sharing one's freedoms.

    A successful collective improvisation needs much work, acting artists need to get common references, to know the history of arts, to know each other, to listen to each other, to get marks, guardrails, for their own techniques that they can employ and share.

    Everyone is a master of the game. He must be able to assert himself, to take decisions, to propose, follow, give up and to be available. It is important not to enter the compromise without struggling. A dialogue is above all arguing. In a dialogue with more people we must be able to go on and to know at the same time where the others are and how they evolve. We also play together to create rules, to hijack them, to make them evolve, which draws a beautiful parallel with our social action.

    Playing together is also a question of rhythm and tempo, which is not just true in music, but in every discipline. The rhythm is a symbol of the time, the action in the present turned toward the future. We sometimes run afoul of the difficulty to be very short or very long, and to go further than our limits.

 

Our shows :

    Our shows work on and around collective improvisation. Between 10 to 15 artists, free, responsible, each one with his own techniques (team members coming from an array of different disciplines ), listening to each other, to the environment and conversing in this singularity.