Everywhere and nowhere: improvisation as an un/rans/disciplinary practice a performance lecture

A performance lecture by Prof V L Midgelow (Middlesex University, UK) What am I? she asks. In a solo performance/lecture Prof Vida L Midgelow 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. What am I? she asks. What is the potential of improvisation? 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 am I? she asks, What if improvisation cannot be known? What if improvisation is not a thing but an unseen process? 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. I am. I am three trillion cells (as Hay would say) A dancer The coffee I drank this morning A frog The sound of feet that pass along the corridor Between 3 to 7 seconds behind or maybe ahead of myself I forget I am a person trying to forget in order to remember Am trying to be here With you, with me. I am A professor of dance and choreographic practice, with responsibility for Research Degrees. I am a frog I am Alice I am women how had a rabbit A frog that cannot jump I am a women who slid down the stairs and fractured her ribs I am not making this up. I am. Not. Improvising. What am I? She asks. I am Improvisation. ____________ 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