Deer in headlights

Deer in headlights.

Under a fleeting moment, when the opportunity for improvisation has risen in my life, I have a deer in headlights reaction. Not always, but I have. I've thought there's a disconnect between what I'm thinking and what I'm doing and that just paralyzes me. I either stand motionless or wheezing through it by action. But this doesn't come in ordinary chores though, it's only at moments that I am expected to do something, left on stage, when I have to become an expression of me.

At certain moments I've also thought it's an opportunity for becoming vulnerable for failure again and sometimes, just sometimes, out of protection, you just can't afford that luxury. You need to be strong to laugh at yourself as people are either laughing at or with you.

In my opinion that's how performers distinguish themselves from visual artists. Because they choose to act. Me? I have to think first, therefore into being and thus react accordingly. The downside is that a splitting moment defines many things, misunderstandings arise and even maybe something is lost in the way. 

There is so much I need to understand from improvisation, in my artistic process too. I think I have applied it without knowing how important it was. Thankfully, some of my projects are stemming from what I have been reading. More important, I think improvisation will be required in future politics, at least in a country like mine.

“How might an examination of the distribution of power in improvised expression provide models for social responsibility and action? Improvisation is viewed by many as facilitating direct intervention in political, social, economic and scientific discourses, promoting an awareness of intercultural and transnational discourses, and providing an atmosphere for the acknowledgment and articulation of difference that employ expressive means to challenge totalizing narratives that seek to reify notions of the role of creative expression in society. Building on these kinds of insights enables an examination of the potential for improvisation to aid in imagining new possibilities for interrogating power structures.”

The Condition of Improvisation, George E. Lewis. Columbia University