Making time together : an exploration of participatory time making through collective dance improvisation

We often think of time in dualistic terms: as a property that is inherent to the objective world on the one hand, and as the subjective apprehension of its passage on the other hand. Yet, rather than being a mere cognitive estimation of outer durations, the felt and observable temporality of our behavior has a complex form that implicates many timescales, reflecting the interactions between multiple inter and intra subjective processes. We thus propose that the shape of time as we experience it emerges from the dynamics of our interactions with others and should be described as the entanglement of our respective intrinsic temporalities (Laroche et al., 2014). Indeed, time, instead of being a mere property of the world or an intra-cerebral phenomena, is something that we « make together ». Our very sense of being in time is intertwined with those of others, making time a socially constituted dimension of experience and activity. Collective Improvisation (e.g. in dance, music…) has been described as the very practice of of temporality negotiation