Improvisation Manifesto

What if improvisation were not about getting free, finding flow, being authentic, or being charismatic, but about rupture—a monstrous negotiation with the forces that dominate from within and without? If dance has the social, political, philosophical, and spiritual capacity to destroy representation, to reimagine the now, then improvisation is its medium.

Improvising with the patterns and codes we are drowning in is a negotiation of impulses—past, present, and future—tearing across the body, folding shame into laughter, ecstasy into sensation, failure into form. To improvise is to articulate disorientation in relation to these codes, to turn instability into method, to weaponize expectation, and to reroute habit as technique. Improvisation dismantles the static subject.

Liz Rubin is like, hello, BDSM as generative because trauma is restaged all agentic and cracks open in the scene of its repetition. Improvisation works the same way, with what I call the drag of the real: replaying normal scripts, but different; staging hysteric obedience plus bad timing; letting scripted gestures deform into something unrecognizable, then dancing that uncertain thing and 5, 6, 7, 8! Once, at a big well-meaning Meg Stuart thing with way too much expectation, I fell in love forever with dancer-choreographer Mariana Teneger because she came on stage way too early and did the worst thing she could think of—for far too long —and it was amazing. Disruption and Destruction are the new two headed baby Republicans, see them dancing with cars minus humor. Awkward is the new punk, the new cool. Not the cold kind of cool, no, not that.

Georges Bataille would not shut up about his love of the “most unjustifiable way,” a mode of being and doing based on his concept of “expenditure” or “sovereignty.” The core idea is that some actions are valuable precisely because they are useless, non-productive, and defy rational justification. The limp-wristed sissy, the uncoordinated tourist taking a hip-hop class, the impossible comic figure, the junkie drive, the big baby, the bear scratching its ass on a tree—these are not caricatures but insurgent modes of undoing. Just what the doctor ordered to pry open subjectivity’s static grip.

Derrida quacked, “I improvise … I do not know who will speak when I speak.” This not-knowing is not a lack but a condition of excess: improvisation opens the voice, the body, the collective, to whatever monstrosity demands arrival.