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[35] improvisation as radical Politics Dance Research Journal 35, no. 1, 2003. if richard Bull and Cynthia Jean Cohen Bull (that is, Cynthia novack) were both alive and dancing these troubled days, they would no doubt be responding to the current political crisis by staging an evening of improvisational dance at their Warren Street Performance loft in downtown new York City. Maybe their traditional Saturday-evening performance would be a special event culminating a day of various performative actions connected with the recent antiwar demonstrations in urban centers across the world. i can envision the piece that they might have made with their longtime collaborator , Peentz Dubble: a multilayered synthesis of sound collage (no doubt richard Bull would have enjoyed sampling and deconstructing the various pro-war declarations of george W. Bush), combined with improvised text and movement critiquing the government’s readiness to justify imperialist aggression. Perhaps there would be various kinds of physical collisions—a certain clipped gestural franticness. Eventually, this chaotic field would crystalize into a haunting stillness. Either during the performance or in conversation afterwards, Bull would most likely invoke his first antiwar dance, War Games, created in 1968 in protest of the Vietnam War. in his witty and ironic manner, he would enter the debate over SUVs staged in the New York Times, commenting dryly on the fact that the loft’s performance space is barely big enough to park two of these tanks on wheels, ironically suggesting that we pay attention to the fact that four-wheel drives are replacing the arts in the twenty-first century. imagining an improvisational dance created posthumously—calling up the dancing ghosts of Bull and novack—might seem an odd way to begin a book review, but it is due to Susan Foster’s intriguing blend of history and homage in her latest book Dances That Describe Themselves: The Improvised Choreography of Richard Bull, that i am able to invoke the improvisational spirit of Bull’s work.Written in memoriam for her good friend Cynthia novack (who, before her death, had started a book on Bull—her dance partner and husband), Foster’s book intersperses commentary from novack’s writings on Bull, as well as observations from dancers who worked with Bull, throughout Foster’s own analysis of the cultural context that shaped his contributions to the dance field. This is a most personal form of scholar- improvisation as radical politics 339 ship; which is not to say that it is overly subjective, but rather that it carries the weight of untimely deaths. in the beginning of the book, Foster describes her approach as participant-observer, and there are sections throughout the book (some of the most lively debates) when she successfully morphs into one of Bull’s most fabulous personas to channel the voice of the “Dance That Describes itself.” At times performative, at times thoughtful, this book is built over a river of loss and love that runs throughout much of Foster’s writing. Foster’s personal connection to richard and Cynthia does not stop her, however, from bringing her intellectual acumen into play—stretching a history of Bull’s work into an examination of the historical roots, aesthetic networks, cultural influences, and theoretical implications of late twentiethcentury improvisational dancing. First with his colleagues and students at new York University and SUNYBrockport , and later under the auspices of the improvisational Dance Ensemble at the Warren Street Performance loft, richard Bull crafted an approach to improvisation based on exposing and then manipulating the process of composing a dance. Bull’s work provides an enlightening counter example to common assumptions that situate improvisation in opposition to composition. The notion that improvisation is a spontaneous creative expression of individual physical pleasure, drawing on “intuitive” experiences of the body, is usually promulgated by dance educators not terribly interested in improvisational as a performance genre. Compositional decisions are made continuously when performing improvisation with a group, coordinating space, rhythm, and text. As Foster argues throughout the book, Bull brilliantly deconstructed the implied binary of form versus freedom, critical analysis versus spontaneous discovery, mind versus body, to formulate a sophisticated dialectic of structure and invention within his improvisational scores. in this sense, Anne Flynn’s comments about her participation in Bull’s 1970 piece Making and Doing are quite telling: “i never really understood why people viewed improvisation as mindlessly doodling around. Dancing in richard’s pieces demanded an incredibly high degree of concentration and taxed short-term memory . . . The consequences of...

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