A solo performance/lecture by Vida L Midgelow.
She eats her words, ingests knowledge, animates her dead self and dances everywhere and nowhere, whilst speaking about improvisation and the un/disciplinary in an ever so slightly ridiculous set of circumstances in which she struggles to stay on script and often fails to achieve the planned outcome.
She asks: What is the potential of improvisatory knowing? What are the recurring features of improvisation in dance performance? What are the critical, fluid, emergent and situated modes of knowledge that are operating within an improvised context? What if improvisatory practices were considered as a way of going about things? For, as a generative, relational and temporal activity – improvisation is embedded in ‘the ways we work’ (Ingold 2007:3). Through leaky excessiveness disciplinary bounds are broken, as improvisation is understood here as un/disciplinary practice that proceeds toward a productive (un)knowing.
Moving between lecturing, dancing and other performance modalities this presentation uses the form a performative lecture to illuminate the significance the improvisatory, in and beyond dance, to reveal the epistemic work it embodies within our contemporary knowledge economy.
Key Note and Invited Performances: Leeds University May 2015 / Nottingham Dance4 June 2015 / Auckland University New Zealand Aug 2015 / Sao Paulo University Brazil Sept 2015 / Middlesex University Sept 2015 / Attenborough Arts Centre Leicester 2016 / Regina University Canada 2017 / University of Copenhagan Denmark 2017.