Improvisation vs. Composition

The Master of Improvisation

My ex-girlfriend studied dancing in a prestigious dancing academy for 4 years and specialized in a movement called Improvisation. A dancer goes up on stage without a pre-planned choreography but only with awareness to what is present at the moment, and that turns into the framework of a “composting in the present”. The dancer experiences the moment and improvises according to the current need, insight and intuition and not according to pre-planned dictations of composition or of the crowd’s expectations.

One of her teachers, a master of improvisation, turned to one not by the “practice of improvisation” for many hours everyday, but rather because she had practiced for many years her self-awareness pertaining to her body, every moment and for that she used a tool by the name of: “Dancing”, just as others use meditation. Her self-awareness first as a human being and as a result as a dancer, is tremendously greater than of other average dancers or superficial human beings, who plan their dances, who program their lives to become an anticipated stream of events, when only God-Crowd supposedly doesn’t know what it is that they’re up to. But indeed, we all know what awaits at the end.

The Slave of Composition

Opposite to this woman there is another teacher, a knowledgeable woman in the true sense of the word, full of wit and information as a ripened pomegranate, a strict and fixated woman, who claims that improvisation dancing isn’t art at all for the simple reason that it is impossible to have a dialogue over the presentation since the dancer cannot recreate his dance. And I say: so what? You can also not recreate your birth; does that mean that it wasn’t nonetheless, an unfathomable work of art of the Creator? You can also not accurately recreate the last dump you took; does it make it less of an integral portion of the throbbing art of nature?

Freedom in Composition is Freedom of Choice

The freedom of composition is to fall in place of the innate order of things and learn to become a mediator, a translucent tunnel to the ultimate awareness, thus to express the real nature of composition which is in order but unbound by the perceptions of “order”, which are a burden on creativity and shackles to the mind.

Improvisation is feeling free and secure not knowing what your next move is going to be, but knowing that whatever it might become it will fall right into place because you are not interfering.

Freedom is not Chaos

Does this mean that I think that everyone and anyone can go up on stage, start some dancing bullshit and call it art? No, that’s not what I mean. Not everyone are improvisation dancers just as not everyone who outsmarts with random keyboard hits is an author or whom hides behind vague paint spots and purposeless brush strokes is an abstract artist.

But any truthful and sincere attempt to portray the wonders of the universe and human psyche and the harmonic chaos and infinite gentleness within them could be art, even if superficially all that is visible would be instinctual, wild, unbound and uncommunicative raw coincidence. The indicator is probably whether the creation occurs out of and embodies self-awareness and also what is the motive that emerges from this self-awareness.

Improvisation as the Portrait of Self-awareness

It is possible to recognize if and when that self-awareness had penetrated the entire mass of the work of art to all its aspects and created harmony and structure which are derivatives of the work’s supreme order and language, which in turn are contained within its concept.

This harmony and structure might be so authentic and intense, as to exceed the boundaries of the contemporary art consensus and of the thought and logic patterns that derive from it, and therefore not be recognizable by the establishment or even comprehensible at all. However they necessarily do constitute art because they realize the creator’s self-aware consciousness. It is the same as when the lack of our insight does not turn nature into a clumsy, confused and coincidental phenomenon but rather emphasizes the greatness of Creation of the Divine spiritual awareness.