Volume 16, Number 1, 2025 Emergent and Convergent Scholar-Practitioner Worlds: Improvisation and Social (In)Justice Mondes émergents et convergents entre chercheurs et praticiens : improvisation et (in)justice sociale

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Every issue of Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation opens with a short piece of music related to the issue.

For issue 16.1, we're pleased to present the song “Liberdade e controle - Fragmento 3” by Orquestra Errante (used with permission). You can listen to the piece through the button above or via Bandcamp through this link.

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This is a reflective account of a transcultural practice through improvisation, stemming from a background in jazz. Musical intersections emerge when aspects of culture and heritage are examined against improvisatory codes and traditions. As a result, a transcultural encounter is developed through the author's search for new modes of expression beyond the construct of a jazz vocabulary. Drawing on traditional Malay practice of the rebab, the paper will examine the social and spiritual rituals that prescribe and parallel those in the jazz tradition, interacting with traditional values while innovating its practices. Through this, a double-consciousness is shaped to question which culture does one belong to when improvising and what responsibilities might we hold up to our heritage and identity.

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This reflective correspondence on improvisation and sociality was initiated via a shared Google Document in Summer 2023. It juxtaposes entangled ideas and propositions drawn from the doctoral projects of both authors on issues of identity, mobility, and community within and around free improvisational practice. It forms part of a conversation in progress.

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Recent scholarship examines how improvisational pedagogy can model ethical social practices and relations (Heble and Waterman 2008). A parallel strain of literature highlights the importance of decolonizing Western knowledge systems through more global pedagogies (De Lissevoy 2010; Nakata 2012). Little work, however, considers the role of improvisation in decolonizing the institution. In this essay, I examine the role of intercultural improvisation as a critical decolonial pedagogy and practice within the neoliberal university through an auto-ethnographic reading of my experience as performer in the ImprovisAsians! 2017 Festival. Hosted by Asian Improv ARts, a pan-Asian musical collective dedicated to Asian American activism and community building, this week-long festival brought together artist-scholars of color for a series of collaborative performances and discussions on the campus of San Francisco State University, the generative site of the 1968 Third World Liberation Front Strikes (TWLF). Almost fifty years later, this institutional space was my entry point into what Asian Improv artists Francis Wong and Hafez Modirzadeh describe as their “sound come-unity,” an ethical collective built and sustained through musical sound. Following George Lewis’ call for an improvisational pedagogy as critical methodology (2008), I explore the musical intimacies and listening strategies of this particular “sound community” within the context of discourses on academic diversity and inclusion. I argue that intercultural improvisation serves as a site of fugitive planning and collaborative study with the potential to decolonize institutional epistemologies.

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Improvisation can be perceived as a great secret of life itself, an unattainable artistic practice, or perhaps just as an easy way out when something goes wrong. But is there more? And how can improvisation also be a way in, for the artist, for the researcher, and a disposition for living? This article unfolds as a duoethnographic journey of improvisation in music and dance. In the dialogues between two researcher-artists—one coming from the subject of music and the other from dance—discussions arise about another that inspire the other's history and lifts what their stories affect in art education, education, and research in general. In the article, we investigate how different framings of improvisational encounters might make space where space is not always obvious. We touch on different ways of understanding improvisation and how improvisation can connect with life in a broader sense, holding on to Fischlin et al's statement that “improvisation matters” (243). Could it be that improvisation is something "more" than what we now give it credit for? Are we longing for an improvisation pedagogy for life itself? Through such questions, we offer thoughts on how pedagogy and life are entangled, and how longing for more improvisation might lead us in and out of teaching, artistic co-creation, and situations in life to provide space for inclusion.

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This essay and its accompanying images and videos include documentation of, and reflections upon, the musicalligraphics project: a live collaborative performance of improvised music, improvised calligraphy, and improvised spoken word. Analyzing the footage of these various performances, the authors examine the ways in which our improvisatory choices influenced one another across artforms and sensory modalities. In keeping with the collaborative nature of the project, we have adopted a flexible authorial voice in this paper that oscillates between our individual perspectives and shared insights. Through this discussion, we consider the challenges and opportunities of cross-discipline collaboration, founded upon our experiences collaborating extemporaneously through spoken word, music, and calligraphy.

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This work delves into the convergence of arts-based community making, social sculpture, and kinship practices within a socially engaged artistic framework. Exploring concepts like accompaniment, Haitian notions of konesans and balans, and examining kinship beyond human connections, I propose arts-based kin making as a collaboratively imagined and enacted set of practices.

Drawing inspiration from Project Row Houses, notions of kinship and other scholarly works, this work aims to address both human and species loneliness amid the ecological crisis. Arts-based kin making emerges as a collaborative practice, fostering empathy, connection, and social connection through creative expression. I envision these concepts as intertwined elements guiding my practice toward redefining our relationship with the world.

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This article discusses the author's journey of facilitating improvisation workshops in Mexico, starting in 2007. The text first provides personal context, as well as context related to the emergence of a local improvised music scene in Mexico City in the 2000s. The text goes on to expound the underlying ideas that function as guidelines for the workshop, and the various strategies that it employs in its ever-changing methodology. Originally written in Spanish, this English version includes a new section that provides follow-up reflections four years after writing the original text was written.

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Through this article, I seek to demonstrate how much the activities developed by Orquestra Errante for more than ten years at the University of São Paulo were consolidated as a practical and theoretical proposal for reflection on issues related to new decolonial epistemologies. These decolonial perspectives emerge as a fundamental theme for the urgent review of political pedagogical projects at universities that can help and enable the confrontation of colonial cultural dependence and economic exclusion and inequality in Brazil.