Environmental Reciprocity in Improvising Practice

Although it is a practice of making ‘in the moment’, following Donna Haraway’s assertion that “nothing makes itself, nothing is really […] self-organising” improvisation performance cannot be considered a means of making ex-nihilo. Rather, it is a practice of making directly in, with, and from the emergences of locality and context. Maintaining an orientation of openness to the shifting contingencies and pluralistic affordances of the here and now,4 improvisers navigate a complex engagement with the immediate conditions (sounds, sights, smells, textures, happenings, other beings, etc.) of the environments in which they work. Contemporary posthumanist philosophies, as well as postcolonial approaches to the natural sciences,5 have shown the affordance of deprioritising prevailing Western anthropocentrism in favour of reconstituting knowledge, disciplines, and artistic practices (etc.) to account for the vibrant and agential presence of the more-than-human. Thinking improvisation through and as ecology – integrating practical and environmental discourses – foregrounds the reciprocity between practice and place, between human and more-than-human, between linguistical-conceptual frames and the motile, agential activity of biotic beings.

This piece of writing offers epistemological and practical reflections on the ecology of sonic-inclusive improvisation practices, in relation to the more-than-human and to the complex dynamics of environmental spaces; it will draw upon my own work as an improvising artist based in rural Yorkshire/Lancashire, as well as upon critical comments by peer-improvisers whose work intersects with issues of ecology.