Composing While Dancing: An Improviser’s Companion, and: I Want To Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (review)

Improvisation is an elusive subject. Despite the fact that much late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century dancing is deeply intertwined with a variety of improvisational practices, there is a regrettable paucity of books dealing with this slippery and yet seductive topic. Even though there has been a veritable explosion of dance scholarship over the past three decades, the written texts dealing with movement improvisation are still limited to various how-to manuals for dance educators or books that deal with one particular individual without situating their work within a historical and aesthetic context. There are, of course, a few memorable exceptions, such as Susan Foster’s delightful and brilliant exegesis on the work of Richard Bull (Dances That Describe Themselves: The Improvised Choreography of Richard Bull), but these are few and far between.

Fortunately, 2010 was a banner year for dance improvisation, producing two new books: Melinda Buckwalter’s Composing While Dancing: An Improviser’s Companion and Danielle Goldman’s I Want To Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom. Melinda Buckwalter is a dancer, writer, and contributing editor to Contact Quarterly. She has personally studied with many of the twenty-six dance artists whose teaching and performance work she documents in her “Improviser’s Companion.” Danielle Goldman is an assistant professor at The New School, and her contribution to the literature on improvisation is an academic text that began as her dissertation in the Performance Studies Department at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Both books reflect the specific orientations of their respective writers: one is interested in getting more people moving and improvising, and the other is interested in building an intellectual analysis of the notion of “freedom” in dance improvisation via a series of case studies. Understandably, these books are directed to pretty different audiences, and it is unlikely that there will be much cross-over between those two readerships. This is unfortunate, for it is high time we close the gap between the language of practitioners and that of theorists in order to begin a dialogue within improvisation that includes both the kinetic pleasures of the moving body and the valuable insights that critical theory can bring to practice.

On its back cover, Composing While Dancing promotes itself as a “practical primer to the dance form.” By introducing the life work of twenty-six artists whose teaching and performing focuses primarily on improvisation, Buckwalter highlights the importance of this multifaceted exploration in contemporary dance. Her user-friendly, “how-to” approach is underscored not only in the enthusiastic tone of the writing—punctuated by exclamations such as “If you aren’t already, start improvising!” (5)—but also in the manual-like organization of the information. In addition to sections dealing with various approaches to space, time, music, shape, and image, there are short biographies of the artists, a glossary of terms, and a section at the end of each chapter featuring “practices for future research.” These simple step-by-step instructions [“How is time passing for you right now? Think up a movement practice for yourself that might shift the way you feel time. See if it works . . .” (73)] are surrounded by short tidbits of personal and poetic reflections in her self-described “Field Notes” and “Interludes.”

Each chapter is primarily composed of short segments that document the practices that fit within its thematic rubric. For instance, in the chapter on “Dancing Takes Shape,” we are exposed to glimpses of the work of Anna Halprin, Deborah Hay, Eiko and Koma, Steve Paxton, Richard Bull, Keith Hennessy, Nina Martin, Penny Campbell, Susan Sgorbati, Mary Overlie, Lisa Nelson, Prapto, and...