“Remember, you have a body”: developing presence with instrumental musicians through kinaesthetic methods in higher education improvisation pedagogy

Description

Abstract
As evidenced in Ruth Zaporah’s Action Theater: The Improvisation of Presence (1995; see also Nisker, et al., 1997), the development of presence is often foregrounded as a central tenet of improvisational practice in the performing arts. Particularly in stage disciplines, improvisation demands a heightened and honed relationship to presence grounded in the body, as well as relational co-presence; it is from and in a state of embodied presence – present, and attentive, to the sensorial here and now – that improvisers create.
In music, although metaphors of body are utilised in well-known improvisation pedagogy – such as in the Deep Listening methodology of Pauline Oliveros (Oliveros, 2004) – and although the body is finding renewed significance in music discourse (Shlomowitz, 2016; Craenen, 2014; Walshe, 2016; Torrence, 2019; etc.), its kinetic affordances are still ordinarily demarcated as secondary to the sonic within improvised music’s hierarchy of expressivity (McPherson, 2023). Dedicated music improvisation pedagogy therefore rarely focuses on presence as embodied and as full-bodied – encompassing the physicality and corporeality of sounding from a human body – in favour of delimited focus in the sonic domain.
This paper will explore the ongoing application of socially oriented, kineaesthetic teaching methods within improvisation pedagogy for instrumental musicians delivered in higher education contexts. It will draw on my experience of developing and delivering improvisation modules and short courses for undergraduate and postgraduate musicians of diverse genre-backgrounds in England and Scotland, and will centre issues of sociality, co-creativity, and kinship as entangled across body-instrument and body-body divides.

Period	10 May 2024
Event title	3rd INTERNATIONAL SCENARIO FORUM CONFERENCE 2024: Presence in Performative Teaching, Learning and Research
Event type	Conference
Location	Dublin, IrelandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International