Improvisation and Consciousness: Some Recent Links

This presentation looks at links between improvisation and consciousness with reference to theatre and performance as reflected in recent work. It explores improvising and the improvisatory as a state, a process and a mode of production. ‘Making things new’ implies a condition allied to the origination of form, in tune with a generative capacity. What kind of consciousness (or perhaps Consciousness) might this be? Might it constitute a kind of ‘group mind’ and a reduction of ‘self-consciousness’? What are its psycho-physiological and ecological parameters? Is it a kind of ‘field awareness’, and is its crucial impetus a key mode of will or decision? I will touch on work by Gary Peters, Adam Kahane, Samuel Beckett and others in order to signal some of these dimensions.