[David Gere, Introduction]

xiii This book... suggests a range of ways to think about improvisation... the editors of this volume view it as an improvisor's intimate companion... to be literally and figuratively thumbed through and pored over while the dancer works in the studio... This book may not tell a dancer precisely how to move, nor precisely how to think; it may, however, goad a dancer to engage more lucidly in the process of improvisation.

xiv The body thinks. The mind dances. Thought and movement, words and momentum, spiral about one another.

xv Anna Halprin... was central in establishing an interest in improvisation based upon the model of child's play, as opposed to monolithic choreography.

xv Choices... These decisions must be made now. This moment... in improvisation choices must be arrived at without creative block or procrastination. There is not time for delay in improvisational performance. There is simply no time.

xv The thought of improvising in public may sound frightening to many of us, yet there is not a studio, theater, or university dance department in the world where improvisation is not being practiced every day of the week.

xvi The urgency of the deadline can serve as a potent prod to improvisation... Improvisation is everywhere in dance and, I would argue, everywhere, every moment, in the world. It is present in every action and in every pregnant moment between.

[Susan Leigh Foster, Taken by Surprise: Improvisation in Dance and Mind]

p.3 The improvising dancer tracks back and forth between the known and the unknown, between the familiar/reliable and the unanticipated/unpredictable.

p.4 The known includes any predetermined overarching structural guidelines that delimit the improvising body's choices... The known also includes an individual body's predisposition to move in patterns of impulses established and made routine through training... as well as the body's predilection for making certain kinds of selections from a vocabulary or a sequence of movements... Improvisation presses us to extend into, expand beyond, extricate ourselves from that which was known. It encourages us to be "taken by surprise." Yet we could never accomplish this encounter with the unknown without engaging the known.

p.4 The performance of any action, regardless of how predetermined it is in the minds of those who perform it and those who witness it, contains an element of improvisation.

p.7 bodily action constitutes a genre of discourse.

p.7 Improvisation involves moments where one thinks in advance of what one is going to do, other moments where actions seem to move faster thn they can be registered in full analytic consciousness of them, and still other moments where one thinks the idea of what is to come at exactly the same moment that one performs that idea.

p.7 Rather than suppress any functions of mind, improvisation's bodily mindfulness summons up a kind of hyperawareness of the relation between immediate action and overall shape, between that which is about to take place or is taking place and that which has and will take place.

p.7 Improvisation... assumes an articulateness in the body through which the known and the unknown will find expression.

p.8 Improvisation provides an experience of body in which it initiates, creates, and probes playfully its own physical and semantic potential. The thinking and creating body engages in action... This body, instigatory as well as responsive, grounds the development of consciousness as a hyperawareness of relationalities. Each next moment of improvising, full of possible positionings, develops its... significance as all participants' actions work to bring the performance into proper proportion or relation. During this playful labor, consciousness shifts from self in relation to group, to body in relation to body, to movement in relation to space and time, to past in relation to present, and to fragment in relation to developing whole. [JLJ - interesting, I would now define consciousness as a tool of improvising - a hyperawareness of piecewise interactions and a capacity to estimate the likely or typical results.]

p.9 Power circulates through the collective actions of such improvisation. It never has the opportunity to dwell in a specific joint of the body [JLJ - "place"], or alight at the site of a particular individual [JLJ - "entity"], or hunker down among a portion of the group. Power is repeatedly "taken by surprise" so that it can never embed itself within a static structural element that would allow it to flex into hierarchies of domination and control. In improvisation, power can only keep on the move [JLJ - wow. A concept of power that surpasses Foucault]

p.9 The recasting of power and desire that takes place during improvisation, the new conception of human agency articulated during improvisation, and the special identity of body discovered through improvisation - these are insights of critical importance.

[Kent De Spain, The Cutting Edge of Awareness: Reports from the Inside of Improvisation]

p.27 Improvisation... is, in a sense, another way of "thinking," but one that produces ideas impossible to conceive in stillness.

p.27 improvisation can be seen as a kind of tool for accomplishing some purpose. Tools, as an extension of our intentions, have a way of becoming invisible at times. You don't tend to think about the iron, or even the experience of ironing; you think about eliminating the wrinkles. Once the wrinkles are gone, you unplug the iron and leave.

p.27 improvisation is a way of being present in the moment, and your awareness of yourself within that moment both challenges and refines your presence in each subsequent moment... But how does this "improvisational awareness" work?

p.28 As an improviser/researcher, I am constantly searching for ways to delve into the specifics of improvisation... If you are only seeking a general understanding, then reflective thoughts gathered through spoken or written interviews are useful. But if what you want to investigate relies on "improvisational awareness" while moving, you need to find some way to access improvisational experiences right as they are happening, and then translate them into language that can be understood and analyzed by others. In other words, you need to find a way to transform an individual's experiential understanding into theory. The problem is how to access "real-time" experiences without disturbing or destroying the improvisational state in which they are occurring.

p.28-29 Because improvisation exists for the improviser as a movement-based somatic state, the challenge... and therefore the core of significance for this kind of research, resides in the real-time translation of experience into language, and the acknowledgement that such a translation can only approximate what is felt. In other words, what we can know or surmise about improvisational experiences must be based on a kind of echo that survives the constant disappearance of the improvisational "now"

p.37 Improvisation, as I understand it, is an attentional practice: the more you attend to movement and memory and sensing and intention, the more you play (improvise) with all of the elements of what we call living - and the more you come to understand that reality itself is based on the relationship between our attention and the world. You sense that attention is both selecting and forming your experience in real time, but that what is being selected and formed is not completely of your choosing, because the world is improvising too; and that dance, your interaction with the world, forms you just as you form the world.

[Simone Forte, Animate Dancing: A Practice in Dance Improvisation]

p.59 One of my teachers in art school, Howard Warshaw, once said that when working with subject matter there are always three points, or stations, that are dynamically interacting. That which you're looking at or referring to. The way you're perceiving or approaching it. And the actual thing you're making.

[Constance Valis Hill, Stepping, Stealing, Sharing, and Daring: Improvisation and the Tap Dance Challenge]

p.90 Improvisation is integrally related to the concept of the tap dance challenge as a performance practice that forces the dynamic exchange of rhythmic ideas... most generally, however, improvisation in the challenge is the act of responding spontaneously (to an opponent, musician, or member of the audience), in the moment of performance. If the challenge is the call to action... then improvisation... is the response... the answer to the call that is spontaneous, creative, and reactive, compelling the challenge... to look, to listen, and to respond in the moment, with any and all means necessary.

p.99 The call-and-response form of the challenge provides the framework for spontaneous interaction between performers, though this may not necessarily lead to the extemporaneous invention of new materials in the moment of performance.

[Margaret Thompson Drewal, Improvisation as Participatory Performance]

p.120 I propose improvisation springs from an ensemble of learned, embodied knowledges about the social world in which the improvisers operate, the techniques and skills to deploy them, and imagination.
 Performance, broadly defined, is the performers' exercise of learned, embodied skills and techniques to create a particular activity, whether it be dance, music, oratory, or even sports.

p.120 What is most critical about improvisation is that the past is already manifest in the embodied techniques that ground it... improvisation is an interpretive strategy for negotiating the present as well as the embodiment of skills and techniques that have withstood the test of history. Improvisations are thus synthesizing practices that apply embodied knowledge to new situations. They are hybrid and nomadic.

[Nancy Stark Smith, Life Scores]

[Ann Cooper Albright, Dwelling in Possibility]

p.259-260 I believe the potency of improvisational practices today lies... in understanding how to encourage a willingness to cross over into uncomfortable territories, to move in the face of fear, of what is unknown. This willingness is made possible by the paradoxically simple and yet quite sophisticated ability to be at once external and internal - both open to the world and intensely grounded in an awareness of one's ongoing experience. "Dwelling in Possibility" refers to this dual experience of being present "here" in order to be able to imagine what could happen out "there."

p.260 I claim that improvisation can give us the skills we need to deal with many of the social and aesthetic issues of the twenty-first century.

p.262 an ability to respond, an ability to be present with the world as a way of being present with oneself. This is the fruit of attention, a mindfulness that prepares one for improvisation.

p.262-263 Part of the work (and play) then is learning how to deal with these situations openly, with curiosity and not determination. Improvisation trains one to react without ever being reactionary, to regard a change of rules as an opportunity rather than a disappointment (or failure).