Dana Reitz

Extract

Improvisation has always had a shaky reputation in the dance field. All too often, it's been shown up as a license for playing around, a grand and ultimately disturbing notion of freedom. Some dancers never get beyond reproducing movements they've learned, simply jumbled around in a satisfyingly lawless way. During the 1950s most dancers and choreographers of any consequence associated improvisation with the windy impressionism they had encountered in children's classes or even in college dance departments (“be a cloud”). The Judson Church choreographers of the 1960s, however looked on it with some favor — particularly as the individual's unplanned working-out of a predetermined task — and there have always been some, like the contemporary Japanese dancer Min Tanaka, who improvise in performance because, clearly, anything other than a response to the immediate climate (interior and exterior) would be unthinkable.