The Power of Improvisation

My thoughts today come from a book I am currently reading called "The Courage to Teach" by Parker J. Palmer.  I have thought a lot about improvisation and the need for it in life, but a part of what I read today helped the vision of its purpose in life clarify a bit more for me today.  It said, "Forced to listen, respond, and improvise, I am more likely to hear something
unexpected and insightful from myself as well as others."

Structure can bring about wonderful things, and continually reproduce an event or circumstance, but newness doesn't typically originate from comfort.  Comfort creates routine, which creates habits, which creates ruts, which creates similar flow, which deepens a whole which creates walls, which damns you from changing course.  This is where improvisation comes in.  As we go through life we have the choice to choose comfort or change.  When we choose change this requires an amount of improvisation, the willingness and daring to push yourself somewhere new where failure, success, and uncertainty lurk.  We don't know what will happen when we stray from a path, but why should that be bad?  We don't know what will happen if we try something different than what others have told us.  And we don't know who we will or can be if we don't challenge ourselves and spread ourselves wide open to experiences.  To improvise to me is to act or move according to ones true desires (which many times can be subconscious which pushes us to act on impulse trusting that feeling inside), or according to ones potential.  This requires setting aside fear to allow raw energy and creativity to take course, creating life in ways we never would have thought of, to live in manners we wouldn't have called natural, and to perceive our world from eyes we didn't have before.

With that life metaphor in place we can relate it to all arts (for a person's art and life parallel each other and create each other), but for me especially dance.  Coming to a place of improvisation in movement is a very vulnerable space.  To allow oneself to move in a manner without the bias of movement learned from the codified side of their training is a place of great discovery.  Returning to the quote above when the man allowed himself that place of improvisation he was more likely to experience that unexpected and insightful part of himself reflected in the subject at hand.  So it is with dance for within that allowance of improvisation one can find parts of themselves they didn't know existed, had suppressed, love or even hate.  They can also find an honesty that can be scary, for their mask is taken from them as their inner form comes forth.  But it is through improvisation that we find and inner landscape that we never had explored before.  And as we come to learn about that inner landscape we can allow it to flow in our art and in our lives.

A life is not truly lived unless the inner you gets to live it; this is done through improvisation.