Acknowledgements

I want to express my deep gratitude to Sten Rudstrom who, by my side at the computer, diligently corrected and polished every word, sen­tence and paragraph. Sten taught me to hear and create a beautiful sen­tence. He challenged me to clarity and guided me to completion.

I thank Maria St. John for those innumerable interviews with the tape recorder and her organizational and conceptual genius. I thank Ruth Mathews for her flow charts, her challenges and her faith in me as her teacher.

I'm grateful all the folks who patiently trained with me knowing that where we were going was a mystery to all of us.

I thank Barbara Green, Dadie Donnelly, and Frank Werblin for read­ing pieces of the manuscript and encouraging me to go on. I thank Will Smolak for his friendship and his fierce search for freedom, Joan Kennedy White, who co-created some of the early improvisational teaching and performance investigations during the raw and bumbling years, Molly Sullivan, who showed up for those early classes when no one else did, Stephen Heffernan, for the talks out in the clover field, Al Wunder for being my one and only improvisation mentor, Terry Sendgraff, for shar­ing two studios, many struggles and much love, Cynthia Moore, who was willing to risk performing improvisationally with me, Bob Ernst, for being my improvisation partner for many years and sharing his musical chops and actorly talents with me, Tony Montanero, who first said "Make it up." Nancy Stark Smith and Lisa Nelson who generously provide a forum, Contact Quarterly, for improvisation publications, and again Nancy for prodding my philosophical psyche, Rinde Eckert, Susan Griffin, Mary Forcade, Ellen Webb, and Rhiannon for sharing their masterful talents with me in performance and for showing confidence and appreciation in my work, and to Robert Hurwitt for his critical understanding and support when some of us were trying to figure out what improvisation performance was all about.

I thank my sons and daughter, Eric, Emily, Zac, and Jake, for allow­ing me to parent them untraditionally and at odd hours. Without their adaptable natures and good heartedness, particularly during those late night mailings and production emergencies, Action Theater would not have happened.

The most recent photos in this book are the work of my friend and most gifted photographer, Jan Watson. I am truly grateful for her patient and discerning eye. Other photographers whose work appears on these pages are Greg Peterson, Dianne Coleman, Sabine von der Tann, Annie Bates-Winship, and Roberto Cavanna.

I am indebted to the students and colleagues who appear through­out this book, either in photographic image or anecdote. I hope this book warms their hearts as they have warmed mine.

Finally, I thank Lindy Hough, my editor at North Atlantic Books, for her encouragement, support, understanding and love of dance and theater.

Foreword

by Barbara Dilley

The first time I saw Ruth Zaporah perform my mind stopped. I had to give up figuring it out. Each moment unfolded from the moment before, flavored with outrageousness and with haunting familiarity. I watched her face, eyes, mouth, hands; heard her voice move from lan­guage I knew to speaking in tongues. And I "knew" what she was reveal­ing: I "knew" how it was, with her, and with me She was showing me something I already "knew" yet saw as if for the first time. Ruth is a mas­ter improvisator.

The art of improvisation is rooted in many world traditions; the ragas of India begin with the musicians tuning their instruments to the vibra­tions of the room and of the audience; the venerable clown traditions are full of improvising with audiences and telling stories that make fun of the locals; the shadow plays of Indonesia and Bali create current polit­ical satire and up-to-date town gossip from the Ramayana epic; the troupe of actors in Hamlet improvise their drama so as to expose a murder.

Here, in the States, our mighty tradition of jazz, unique to our African American history, has inspired a new understanding of musical soul. Songs become structures and playgrounds for hearts to soar to the stars then drop back into the chorus for one last round. These expressions of human vastness and every day magic arose for one reason—the love of it; that wild taste of delight that comes from making it up, on the spot, feeling the connection to hearts and minds across time.

Improvisation has long been part of the training of artists of all per­suasions:

"Let go."

"Play with it."

"Don't think."

"Use what you have."

"Make it up as you go along."

This is the language in classrooms, studios, and stages where teach­ers pass on the secrets of creativity. At The Naropa Institute, where I teach and where I first saw Ruth perform, teachers such as Allen Gins­berg, Anne Waldman in poetry, Meredith Monk, Naomi Newman in the­ater and Art Lande and Jerry Granelli in music call forth the muses of creative imagination through the practices of improvisation. They offer unique structures and different languages but it all points to the same moment—when communication electrifies the air.

In the past thirty years, there has been an increase of improvisation by performing artists. Not only the jazz musicians but actors, dancers and performance artists have chosen to create games and structures that hold their intent together with the spontaneity of the moment. Since the 1960s when all the frontiers of consciousness were explored for their creative power, the act of performing improvisation became a guaran­teed ride full of this wild taste of spontaneous delight. Everything was asked of you, moment by moment, over and over, again. Both artists and audiences felt the atmosphere when this surge of creative revelation flowed between them. Those of us who were trained in traditional forms of dance and theater were released into delicious rule-breaking. We sud­denly found the mother lode of our creative power by putting ourselves in situations of risk, and uncertainty, and fearlessly staying awake. Impro­visation is, as Gertrude Stein says so well, "Using everything, beginning again and again, and a continuous present."

Most of everything I have today in the way of improvisational "chops" comes from the years between 1969-1976 spent evolving out of Yvonne Rainer s "Continuous Project Altered Daily" into The Grand Union, that great circus of improvisational performance. Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, David Gordon, Nancy Lewis, Douglas Dunn, myself, and others from time to time began the extraordinary saga of making it up as we went along, over and over again. After a few months of getting together dili­gently prior to a performance, we gave up rehearsing altogether. We just "began" when the curtain went up and the lights went on. I remember being shocked during performances by actions that my comrades made, only to recognize that the impulse they had followed had also been mine and I had repressed it. The next time, I opened to that impulse and ran with it. And my friends followed my lead. Such kinesthetic joy!

Only after this first flush had passed were we to struggle to under­stand how to proceed. "Trying" to be spontaneous is a horrid and grossly self-conscious experience. Everyone who values the insight and challenge of improvisation meets this monster. It is Ruth's gift to us in this book to create a training that gently, but firmly, points out this dilemma and then teaches us how to move through, even use it. I can hear her now, "That's it. That's it. Just use it. Whatever it is. Use the energy. Ride it."

Nothing offered those of us fascinated by the art and practice of impro­visation a language and an understanding of this process of perceptual spontaneity like the teachings of meditation and awareness practice from the Buddhist tradition. It's an intriguing story. From the beginning of the twentieth century, teachers of the great wisdom traditions of the east have brought their insight into the nature of mind and the phenomena of the senses to this country. Buddhism is a magnificent philosophy and has a tradition of deeply studying the mind and sense perceptions. Buddhist philosophy posits a sixth sense perception—the perception of mind and the process of thinking—to add to the basic five perceptions of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. It gives us a language to investi­gate the experience of impulse. Buddhist meditation is a mind training. It trains us to discriminate, to pick up and put down the myriad impulses that enter our bodies every day. We slow our thinking and perceiving down and watch/feel our world arise, dwell and disappear. The experi­ence of our world becomes vivid and energetic. As a discipline, medita­tion always asks us to come back to the breath, to return to the body and to listen to the body, to what it is "saying," what is being experienced, right now. By disciplining our awareness of these six perceptions, we hone and sharpen the tools we play with when we improvise.

Awareness is simple. Just notice, without bias, what is happening. "Pay attention." Rest the mind and let the senses be noticed. It seems easy. Everyone gets the idea. But it is hard to do. Over the decades, teachers, fellow practitioners and their books have investigated the practice of awareness. Agnes Martin, the brilliant, eccentric painter who fled New York in the late 50s wrote an essay about taming the dragon called Pride so that we can get to the creative expression we long to make. We can get the idea of awareness practice, but, day by day, hour by hour it can be impossible to "rest the mind."

With brilliant simplicity, Ruth brings her study and practice of aware­ness to the unique disciplines of Action Theater. She creates exercises with exacting clear intention that we can try out in the living room or kitchen. Here, the insistence on "bare attention" of the subtle shifts in body/mind dynamics and all its energies, its inner and outer landscapes, transforms our all-too-human foibles into breath-stopping insights and raucous humor. We take delight in making fun of ourselves. By follow­ing these exercises, we learn to be less afraid. We work side by side with others, exploring both the darker landscapes and the ridiculous risks of a fool. Ruth captures the nuances of perceptual experiences and invites us to play—for ourselves, for our creative delight no matter what use we make of it, and for others, whether we walk out the door with a splash of insightful humor or climb up on the stage to sing the blues.

For those of us who enter the teaching arena clutching our carpet bags of tricks and mirrors and minor illuminations to cull the creative spirit, Ruth describes a journey of discovery in "no-nonsense" language, and with deep intuition about human nature. These tools for the teach­ing art are woven into a tapestry of joyful disciplines, not only for per­forming artists but for each of us, living out our days full of missed opportunities for the wild delights of the unexpected, the delicious play of "making it up on the spot"—of improvising.

Barbara Dilley

Dance Movement Studies

The Naropa Institute 1995