How can improvisation contribute to the tomorrow artists' citizenship and to their cooperative skills as the urgent transformation of human behavioural patterns and values systems?
How do we prepare musicians/performers for the unexpected, when the challenges they will face depend not only on what they know but on how they think and in which way they cooperate?
It is useful to identify three interrelated levels at which Lab 6 can strengthen the social impact as many of the challenges to face in strengthening agency too are similar at individual, organisational and environmental levels:
- Individual - involving the development of performing artists/students/researchers via training to design and undertake, write up and publish research outputs.
- Organisational - developing the capacity of artistic research in HEIMs, think tanks, artistic research groups, and to interact with their community. The Lab 6 can profiled many different approaches for strengthening organisational capacity including: direct support to departments involved, and partnerships, network or consortia models.
- Environmental - addressing the incentive structures, the resource contexts in which artistic professional practice is undertaken and understood by policy makers and broader education providers and the wider society, so that approaches to strengthening the environmental impact include supporting governmental and parliamentary educational advisory bodies.
Moreover, the Lab 6’s characteristic about agency and expertise let participants be aware that when we tend to consider the improviser as an expert, as someone who has mastered their artistic practice and through improvising can discover new spaces of possibilities of their art.
The multi-dimensional empirical relation with the unexpected frames Lab 6’s participants within a state in which they lose the trace of the familiar path to an extent that allows them to consider that novelty is practicable and achievable.
The Lab 6, exploring the role and demonstrating the potential of improvisation in the artistic professional practice (in the broader sense of contents and contexts) leads participants to the unknown territory outside their expected individual framework.
This does not imply that the sense of agency is ‘lost’ or ‘given up’ but rather that improvisers exercised in highly trained ways because it is also extended in intersubjective relations of collaboration[1] and in fact improvisation is enacted mostly with co-performers, co-agents, and audiences.
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IMPROVISATION - AGENCY |
IMPROVISATION - SOCIAL IMPACT |
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Identify and involve all potentially affected groups and individuals with artistic professional practice |
Focus pertinent and significant issues and public concerns within artistic professional practice |
[1] Adam Linson and Eric F. Clarke. Distributed cognition, ecological theory and group improvisation. In: Clarke, Eric F. and Doffman, Mark eds. Distributed Creativity: Collaboration and Improvisation in Contemporary Music. Studies in Musical Performance as Creative Practice. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 52–69, 2017.