Humans, Heroes and Artists: (Re)Creating the Unexpected Situation

Life is difficult, never the same, always challenging acquired patterns of behavior and expectation, urging the human being to improvise. Improvisatory acts in everyday life are the result of unexpected situations, where the encounter between self and environment suddenly disrupts the banal rituals of life. Over time, experience and knowledge enhance ways to cope with unexpectedness, and to 'improvise' better, or even 'less.' In music, improvisation is often a situation of choice. The unexpected situation is created, set up, purposively leading to an improvisatory encounter between body and environment. The musician knows he/she will 'improvise' the next hour. But it can also resemble life, by way of sudden unexpected moments which the musician still did not 'set up.' Experience and expertise enhance the fluidity of improvisational acts in the arts. This paper seeks to explore these tensions between improvisation in everyday life and in arts: between 'urgent action' and 'play,' between determined and created situations. It will be argued that the shift is not radical, and the tensions but a matter of degree. The 'artification' of improvisation originates in everyday life by play, tactics (de Certeau) and experience (Dewey) and reaches an aesthetic and ethic level of kairos (Aristotle) in art, exploring actions of choice and risking failure by (re)creating unexpectedness. The artist, like the human being in life, but now from his/her own free choice, is challenged to leave security and encounter the unexpected. But isn't that also the quest of the hero