[Scrap Yard Challenge - Junkyard Wars]

p.11-12 it is precisely Adorno's insistence on the material demands of the work that allows him to dialectically demonstrate the very conditions for the "disobedience," "independence," and "spontaneity" that are necessary for any improvisation worthy of the name.

p.12 Turning now to the work's becoming or emergence, the initiation of a work requires the marking of an unmarked space

p.13 [Heidegger] The artist is the origin of the work. The work is the origin of the artist.

p.13 The marking of a space... sets in train a movement, an emergence or occurrence that, while producing an artwork, is also the originary and originating gesture of the artist too.

p.16 The scrap yard challenge for the improvisor is to create something new within the decaying site of the old.

p.16 [Heidegger] Preserving the work means: standing within the openness of beings that happens in the work. This "standing-within" of preservation, however, is a knowing. Yet knowing does not consist in mere information and notions about something. He, who truly knows what is, knows what he wills to do in the midst of what is.

p.17-18 Improvisation in the pejorative [JLJ - tending to belittle] sense, however, is bogged right down in the mangled or decaying debris that constitutes both its temporal and spatial horizon. Success for the scrap yard improvisors does not depend upon the transcendence of or liberation from the dead weight and waste of history but, rather, on the ability to find new and novel ways of inhabiting the old and revivifying dead forms through a productive process of reappropriation that promotes improvisation more as a means of salvation and redemption than of creation: re-novation.

p.18 [Johnstone] The improvisor has to be like a man walking backwards. He sees where he has been, but he pays no attention to the future. His story can take him anywhere, but he must still "balance" it, and give it shape, by remembering incidents that have been shelved and reincorporating them... he not only generates new material, but remembers and makes use of earlier events that the audience itself may have forgotten.

[Freedom, Origination, and Irony]

p.23 Improvisation is now a form of health, an exercise in healthy living.

p.24-25 [Marcuse, Eros and Civilization] Schiller states that in order to solve the political problem, "one must pass through the aesthetic, since it is beauty that leads to freedom." The play-drive is the vehicle of this liberation... These ideas represent one of the most advanced positions of thought... the reality that "loses its seriousness" is the inhumane reality of want and need, and it loses its seriousness when wants and needs can be satisfied without alienated labor. Then man is free to "play" with his faculties and potentialities and with those of nature, and only by "playing" with them is he free.

p.26 The art of improvisation is the art of making something happen and, as such, a liberation-from the absence of the work.

p.28 By installing free play into the very heart of human understanding [Kant] is able to offer a model of "common sense" (sensus communis) that assumes rather than strives for individual liberty, albeit as an idea... rather than... an ideal

p.29-30 within the framework of collective improvisors there is what might be called an acute awareness of awareness. The dancer Susan Leigh Foster, writing on improvisation, speaks of "a kind of hyperawareness of the relation between immediate action and overall shape, between that which is about to take place and that which has and will take place." ...Foster's account assumes from the outset that the improvisor enters the "relational" space as an agent already free and ready to play, armed with an awareness that is ultrasensitive

p.36 the absence prior to the work... concerns the absence of planning, the risk taking associated with an unguided journey into the unknown where "anything can happen." Future plans are of course based on past successes

p.37 free-improvisation... its primary aim is not to produce works. Its primary aim is to produce beginnings.

p.38 [Derek Bailey] Most of the time... I think an improvisation should be played and then forgotten... It's either good or bad but if you listen to an improvisation over and over it just gets worse... It's something that should be heard, enjoyed or otherwise, and then completely forgotten. [Eddie Prevost] ...For many of the people involved in it, one of the enduring attractions of improvisation is its momentary existence: the absence of a residual document.

p.39 Gerhard Richter writes that "the making of pictures consists of a large number of yes and no decisions and a yes decision at the end," which is, no doubt, true for the painter (and much improvisation) but not for the free-improvisor whose work is never intended as an end but as a beginning. Thus, the free-improvisor can only say "yes" if the working of the work is to be sustained beyond the instant of its origination.

p.42 the artist... must gather together... originary demands in a work that must not only break with the past in the moment of its beginning but also be sustained into the future. That is, the intensity necessary for the artwork to begin must be carried over into the work itself.

p.42-43 Put another way, to be logically consistent the artwork (and particularly the freely improvised work) should rehearse the intense interpenetration of singularity and universality through an incessant self-interruption that constantly opens the work up to another beginning, and another, thus protecting the homelessness of the productive imagination from the conceptual structures that would limit its play.

p.43 How can the disruption that is production, its spontaneity, surprise, its originary interruption of the repetition of the same take on the consistency or density of a work without sacrificing or betraying the logic of its production? Notwithstanding Kant's famous injunction that aesthetic judgments should always be cast without the determining concept of an end, for the artist there will always be an end: the work.

p.43 the artwork and the artist are understood here to originate in freedom, a freedom that is always already there cognitively but only given aesthetically to those who develop a feel for this freedom and who gain a sense of its universality.

p.50 [David Gere] There is not time for delay in improvisational performances. There is simply no time.

p.51 What would a successful improvisation be? ...success should not be measured against a consensual goal... that drives the work ever urgently toward a communicative conclusion. On the contrary, an imputed consensus is the origin of the work, but one that is destroyed by the working of that work... The care for the work... is a care for the work's beginning, not it's end; as such, it will be ever ready to destroy the work in an attempt to preserve what Heidegger describes as the openness of that beginning.

p.52-53 [Constance Valis Hill, Stepping, Stealing, Sharing, and Daring: Improvisation and the Tap Dance Challenge] More often and most generally, however, improvisation in the challenge is the act of responding spontaneously (to an opponent...), in the moment of performance. If the challenge is the call to action, the putting forth of a rhythmic statement by the challenger, then the improvisation (or more importantly, the improvisatory imperative) is the response (and not only an "Amen") - the answer to the call that is spontaneous, creative and reactive, compelling the challengee (who in turm becomes the challenger) to look, to listen, and to respond in the moment, with any and all means necessary

p.55 [Maurice Blanchot] We enter into thought... only by questioning. We go from question to question to the point where the question, pushed toward a limit, becomes response

p.59 Johnstone's primary concern is with the "art of making things happen," the happening of the artwork, which for him means regarding every moment of a performance as anticipatory, as the beginning of a future yet to come. As he says, players are "working well" when "they're giving the audience the 'future' that it anticipates," which is not the same as giving them what they expect.

p.60 Improvisors are "working well," Johnstone continues, when they "care about the values expressed in the work," which... should remind us... that the "values expressed" in free-improvisation concern above all the value of ensuring that things continue to happen.

p.60 the virtuosity of the improvisor should not be measured in terms of technical mastery but, rather, in relation to an ability to create or mobilize strategies that keep the work happening... To fail "gracefully" is to fail successfully. It is to recognize that such failure is necessary for the work to continue.

p.70-71 The work may or may not begin, but if it does (it will) it cannot be the thoughtless beginning that kicks off the performance of a composed work at the appointed place and time without further ado. Nor can it be the thought-full beginning that, in its overdetermination, will only risk tentative or provisional beginnings on the understanding that everything can always be taken back, erased and rethought and then begun again... and again, or not at all

[Mimesis and Cruelty]

p.82 Improvisation requires a powerful memory: memory of the parameters of an instrument, of the body, of available technology, the parameters of a work's structure and one's place within it at any one time, the parameters of an idiom, a genre and its history, its possibilities.

p.89 Ernst Schoen once praised the unique nobility of fireworks, the only art that does not want to endure but is content to sparkle for an instant and then fade away. Perhaps this is a model for critically interpreting the temporal arts, i.e. drama and music, in terms of the reification that is constitutive of them and yet degrades them.

p.97 Improvisation could, perhaps should, be a beginning but in reality it is usually just a continuation.

p.97 Although we might accept that most improvisation is governed by a set of underlying formulae that, once recognized, must temper our unbridled celebration of improvisation, novelty, and freedom at the level of practice, this should not be allowed to obscure the fact that an artist's or performer's relationship to the structures that constitute their aesthetic horizon is by no means as static or as predictable as some critics seem to assume. Even if we assume, with Boulez, that most improvisation is predictable, this should not obscure the fact that such predictability can itself be the product of an active engagement with given codes of aesthetic practice and not merely with their passive acceptance.

p.97 [Johnstone] The improviser has to realize that the more obvious he is, the more original he appears.

p.98 The much-heralded hyperawareness of the improvisor should... extend to the more fundamental issue of beginning and continuation of the work.

p.98-99 And as we have seen before with Kant, it is the taking up of the standpoint of the universal other that introduces intensity into the artwork.

p.99 Although it might be true that much improvisation is more fixed or predictable than many improvisors would like to admit, this does not change the fact that such work can have immense impact nonetheless.

p.101 The mimetic act does not copy the world, it copies other mimetic acts

p.103 Improvisation is about ad-hoc invention of ways to do the stuff we already claim we do. It's reactive and backward looking... Improvisation seeks to solve the immediate delivery, without creating something re-usable.

p.104-105 it is precisely innovation that constantly creates the need for further innovation, innovation that insatiably consumes itself.

p.107 Derek Bailey: A lot of improvisors find improvisation worthwhile, I think, because of the possibilities. Things that can happen but perhaps rarely do. One of those things is that you are "taken out of yourself." Something happens that so disorientates you that, for a time, which might only last for a second or two, your reactions and responses are not what they would normally be. You can do something you didn't realise you were capable of. Or you don't appear to be fully responsible for what you are doing.

p.114 [Susan Leigh Foster] Improvisation presses us to extend into, expand beyond, extricate ourselves from that which was known. It encourages us or even forces us to be "taken by surprise." Yet we could never accomplish this encounter with the unknown without engaging in the known.

p.115 [Susan Leigh Foster] 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. The moment of wavering while contemplating how, exactly, to execute an action already deeply known, belies the presence of improvised action.

[Improvisation, Origination, and Re-novation]

p.118 It is the ability of the improvisor to inhabit the given, to make a home and play within it, thus parading an apparent freedom beyond the reach of nonimprovisors, that validates much that passes as improvised art.

p.135 "Being in the moment," the catchphrase of so many improvisors, speaks of an occupation of the now that, in its hyperawareness of the presence of the present, aspires to an obliteration of the past in the name of a future always about to happen.

p.139 Noteworthy here is Kant's observation that two "primary properties" of genius are originality and exemplarity, a concatenation that is intended to signify the ability to originate exemplary rules for others to follow.

[Conclusion: Improvising, Thinking, Writing]

p.147 no one is suggesting that philosophy "knows better" than practice, just as there is no arrogance implied or intended in the suggestion that philosophers can create a concept of improvisation without the help of practicing improvisors. Indeed, is it possible to think of improvisation outside of its practice? Perhaps not, but then this begs the question as to what constitutes improvisatory practice.

p.150 The orator does not think before speaking, nor even while speaking; his speech is his thought

p.154 To act, to think, to speak "without delay," such urgency requires the skills of an improvisor

p.156 In at least one respect all hermeneutics [JLJ - the theory of interpretation] contains an element of improvisation to the extent that any part of interpretation requires a degree of trial and error in the pursuit of an explication that will bring full understanding of the text.

p.158 [Gadamer, Truth and Method] The word "Spiel" [play] originally meant "dance." ...The movement of playing has no goal that brings it to an end; rather, it renews itself in constant repetition. The movement backward and forward is obviously so central to the definition of play that it makes no difference who or what performs this movement... It is the game that is played - it is irrelevant whether or not there is a subject who plays it. The play is the occurrence of the movement as such

p.158 In Kantian terms we must have... a feeling for play before we can play.

p.161 As with Kafka it is the ever-multiplying detours of thinking - the incessant interruption of the desired continuity... that produces the work, and which can only be sustained as the working of the work while this mode of distraction remains in force.

p.162 In many ways a methodology might be understood as the "straight line" that will eventually lead us to our goal by alerting us to the fact that we are always in danger of going astray. But methodologies nevertheless allow the possibility of error and can even encourage risk taking, but such improvisatory prowess... is performed secure in the knowledge that such a curvature of thought is always measured against the teleological straightness that the methodology provides.

p.162 a method of progressing has no need to attach itself to a "position."

p.163 [Blanchot] Truth would dispel error, were they to meet... To err is probably this: to go outside the space of encounter.

p.163 erring does not just happen; it requires a method, a "mode of progressing" that in a sense resembles the production of detours or the creation of diversions and distractions.

p.166 in truth... this work is itself a work of improvisation throughout, a fact that is not worn as a badge of honor but suffered as a curse.

p.167 Clearly, thinking can take time, not in order to get things right... but to ensure that the infinite detour of error and erring remains productive, which, in turn, means that the task of thinking is always outside of itself, outside of the moment, outside of the work.

p.167 No doubt (and in all seriousness) improvisors could learn a great deal indeed by reading Heidegger and those who have been influenced by aspects of his thinking - Blanchot, Deleuze, Derrida, Levinas

[Placeholder for: Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 1969, 1993, 2003]

p. 108 We, believers and non-believers, are less in the habit of doubting than questioning. We enter into thought, and especially our own, only by questioning. We go from question to question to the point where the question, pushed toward a limit, becomes response - the response then being, according to a famous expression, no more than the question's last step.