In “The Rules of Art”, Pierre Bourdieu (1996) expounds extensively on what he calls an economic logic of (literary) arts production, a thinking within the field inextricably linked to its society’s economy and production processes. Bourdieu theorizes that this “logic” is “obeyed” by both ‘high’ culture literary artists and these artists on the margin (i.e. ‘low’ or popular art), who use the arts, through what he calls “poetics” (dialetic with social structures often hidden within poetry, creative writing, etc.) , in challenge to various social constraints. Bourdieu reveals the margins and the mainstream are not separate “fields”. The margin is as much a part of a field and its associated market, as the center/the mainstream itself. The marginalized are fully participative, even collaborators in the field of production irrespective of their recognition of such complicity. And this misrecognition is what allows marginalization to be centralized, consulted, and even co-opted/appropriated both at its own expense and for the profit of the center, of the mainstream.
Nevertheless, economic logic is often reshaped as much as it shapes fields of production, including those marginalized within the field. Defying “logic” is both a highly effective responsive challenge as well as a typically misrecognized complicity within the field. Improvisational artists defy both description and critique in the impromptu challenge to the logistics of artistic production and consumption. Creating in the moment, without detailed mapping and (from an audience perspective) with unknown intentions, resists the very vocabulary, labeling, and categorization that would commodify it; thus, it refuses and perhaps, confuses our capitalist sensibilities. More mainstream formulations of sponsorship and marketing are troubled with its packaging. Many consumers may be confused by its language. It seems no one can read or advertise these forms except the artists themselves. The result: control, a sense of empowerment over one’s art making, audience, and profit. Improv artisans seem to have successfully snubbed the snobbery of critics and the pressures of institutions–corporate or academic–while thumbing their noses at the expectations of organizations and audiences alike.
What a lovely and appealing practice and sentiment to those seeking creative challenges to capitalism (or at least symbolically so, at artistic aesthetics and “virtues” of hegemonic cultural capital), at least for Western and/or White artists. But what of non-dance artists and those whose everyday lives are socially stratified onto the margins by race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, and economic class? What are their roles in this field? Although we can easily argue for the commonality of a dominant capitalist cultural logic in the U.S. (and here in Chicago), we can also argue that this logic includes stratification and its resulting exclusionary/prejudiced/discriminatory praxis structured with the aforementioned scaffolds of identity. If all this stands as given, then what logic must be obeyed for the inclusion of these artists? Which sectors are effectively defied? And in what ways might the central logic be reshaped/redefined through sustained inclusion? Must there be new sectors of logic created and established? Must older/outdated sectors of central logic die or at least be deemed illogical beyond continued utility?
These tensions and proto-resistances often seem to be primarily between artists and canonical production practices and firms, that is ideologies and the institutions sustaining them. But this tug-of-war persists among dancers themselves. Competing aesthetics, representing cultural, ethnic, racial, gendered, sexual, and economic diversity, reveal in their wake, a battleground determining the very definition of dance, of art, of legitimate, “classical” movement raised to the level of “art”, as that done by white/anglo Western bodies (and even those bodies are held to typically impossible and excluding standards, themselves another aesthetic). This silent and salient presumption extends to the realm of improv dance, as it still lives within this larger field of dance. The “other” bodies and their “doing” often seem to be constructed as simply moving, only legitimately dancing and improv’ing when motion and technique are concentrically located between Anglo-European vernaculars and stereotyped expectations of acceptable (often along the spectrum of highly athletic, sensual, sexual, and “wild”/“animalistic”) movement from marginal bodies. Therein, improv dance, especially by white dancers may be seen as a challenge to the aesthetic of exclusivity while nevertheless implicitly (complicitly?) maintaining/developing dialogues with classical standards. However, improv dance among “other” bodies can be seen not only as challenge/complicity but also inclusion/innovation: not only integrating the kinds of bodies in motion (or in defiance of established paradigms thereof) that can exist throughout the field, but also adding/innovating movement codes quite possibly not-yet-known to the center while exploding and reorganizing existing field codes, aesthetics, and mechanics/mechanisms. Improv dance, itself, may then be viewed as a field response to the entries and experiments of “others”, a spectrum of response praxis that certainly includes, for one, reestablishment of “classical” forms that both block and limit the scope of (physical and economic) entry, and use Anglo-Euro-based/centric cognition and vernacular as an arsenal for improv’s arbitrary mystery: a psycho-social-economic mode of aesthetic protection, and a nearly impenetrable force sh/field of white/Western vernacular and praxis preserving classical aesthetics AND redesigning them to block, absorb, and compete with the innovation and entry of “others”.
But Othered innovation and entry is not limited to dance or even to improv performance. What Others “know”, that is the particularized logic of a marginal and entry/innovation aesthetic, is that the audience is as crucial to the field AND to the aesthetic as the performers themselves. For what is the function of performance in an empty-seated vacuum? How can the viability and value of performance be measured without consumption? I argue that part-and-parcel of the logic obeyed on the margins and by conditions of othering that both render Others as onlookers, as a forcibly created audience (and consumer) and decentralize their bodies and production then marginalize them to recentralize them at-will and in-disguise, is that the audience is not just spectator, prompt, or prop, as positioned in much of White/Anglo/Western discourse, but actually co-collaborators, whose vernacular has not only already been co-opted/appropriated for performance through the shared and sheer lived experiences of performers as (at some point and at various points) members of that audience (often already recognizing themselves/their stories through the performer) and thus all this archived in their bodies, but also continues to be cultivated in creative processes, in the doing of performance, and in the feedback following performance.
The value and position of audiences for “classical” forms generally and amplified by classical extensions living in Western improv seems limited to watching and critiquing within an hegemonic aesthetic, even when discussing improv and especially so: to articulate the discomfort and unfamiliar, audiences often draw from the familiar, the well-known, the predominant, the center, the hegemonic. In other words, these dominant modes of improv dance utilize these same collaborative forms but referencing the singularity of the prevailing performative logics. Herein lies a spectacular variance in logics, at very least, evidence of a co-existing, even competing or critical logic. For audiences of improv featuring Othered bodies AND for the Others performing, articulations of the critical or conversations in the talk back not only reference hegemonic familiarities but those of multiple layers of difference and marginality. These valencies of difference/marginality are both performed and read in the improvisational moment and then subject to reading and the performance of critique in the post-performance conversation, that is, in the talk back. Heretofore, improv’ed dance that actually gets to occur between a diversity of performers constitute the performance of competing ideologies and logic even if only symbolically. The performances often become representative of these competitions between audience/critics and performers, between members of the audience, especially one that includes a diversity of Others and finally between formal reporting/journalistic critics (and indeed between them and everyone else) who act as gatekeepers to the realm of “authentic” culture and aesthetics, as experts on culture, and a pathway to more centralized notions of success and access to greater economic support.
Improv from the margins, that is, performed by bodies historically on the margins of this society, can trigger a highly complex reading of and conversation around what the performance means, what Improv Dance is and can be (and the same for dance overall), when dominant logics are defied and new ones are introduced, rather newer sectors of existing ones are being activated, whose and what aesthetics structure audience interpretation and the degree to which audiences complicitly collaborate. Moreover, improv performed by and/or including historically marginalized bodies also represent and can come to mean real differences in critical and economic success and support, among formal critics, venues, and private funders yes, but especially among attracted audiences who are themselves living symbols, testimonies to such popularity and success.
Audiences (all members, laypersons and critics alike) are also arbiters, mediators of meaning, value, and capital, though simultaneously getting lost in this scuffle between creativity and production. While a breath-taking display of resourcefulness and artistry, Western forms of improvisation can be quite alienating to voyeurs, however, faithful. What does this mean? Where am I in this supposedly interactively audience? Or am I merely prompt and prop for artists? Because the imbalance of knowledge about the degree of improv and interaction weighs heavily in favor of collaborating performers, particularly, those creating the idea of the performance, this relationship between consumptive audience and improv artist is already and decidedly a power struggle. Audiences seek/fight for understanding, for meaning, for the discovery of its place in this “interaction”, perhaps only finding some solace in the talk-back, graciously given by artist and sponsors wherein supporters are allowed to express pinned-up feelings, confusion, personal interpretation…and to find out whether or not they got it right, if one was close.
Audiences fight for and are given the opportunity to be critics sans the gate keeping of organizational affiliation and framing. Imagine and consider the addition of social stratification, experienced and existing within and outside the fields of art, to this already rugged terrain of dance performance and interpretation. How might existing and layered Otherness of audience members (as well as performers) skew classical precepts, and alter perception and interpretation of improv’ed dance? How might the mere presence of these bodies in the performance space as audience and/or performer impact the presence, precepts, and perceptions of more hegemonic bodies in performance and in the audience? What feedback might marginalized audience members offer more hegemonic bodies and spaces of many improv dancers? And how might this interactivity be received? How might we view field expansion to include marginal perspectives and aesthetics as an empowering act for the field, for an entire audience, and for those already posing improv as challenge to the limits of the classical?
As these artists (irrespective of positionality) improv for progressive innovation, for greater control of creative integrity, they demonstrate (using audience presence) to more “pop” artists and sponsorship that they have what it takes to bring in bodies, to create capital and institutions independently, without being subject to more standardized dance critique that would, ironically, either place the work in the “center” with everyone else OR threaten to even more radically marginalize the works into (or even beyond) Othered oblivion–beyond exoticism, even infamy (these still productive/profitable field positionings) and approaching the discreditable (not serious or “real” dance at all; yet not “Other” as such position would be relatively contrasting to norms around dance, even Improv for dancers symbolically dominant). Even therein, competing logics–between audience and artists–do not really compete at all, and take place within an illusion of (that is, in Bourdieulian misrecognition of) marginalized artistry. Audience members are critics by design of artists (therefore empowered and privileged) who desire to remain community-based yet distinctive enough from communities to still be considered “artists”. This distinction, though largely created in the acting of performing, is also forged through improv’s disassembling, indeed, redefining of a unified language of production, consumption, and critique. The struggle for a more active voice in their art making distinguishes the artists, who maintain certain controls and ideas of awareness from an audience who seeks these but can only be given them (as talk backs) by artists.
But, as the logic of socially stratified-marginalized artists already knows and practices, the audience not only binds improv artists to the field, but to the very center of it, mandating complicit obeisance to/of economic logistics. Audiences pay, fill seats, offer feedback to artists, other viewers, and sometimes, employed critics and mass media; all significant functions for both the livelihood AND the creative inspiration of artists. To some extent, audience satisfaction and feedback, however delimited by artists coerces even the most abstract artists to obey the larger economic logic of the field. Slick advertising and even convenient scheduling and pricing of performances, for instance, must be regularly practiced to attract the very consumption for artists to cyclically present their productions, to maintain the very performative/expressive dialectic with artistic fields and larger arts market that will prove/reinforce its marginal currency, and essentially, eventually to profit from the work, even if only to retain/maintain resources to continue it.
It is abundantly clear that even many white improv artists may not make a comfortable living. And yet there exists a discourse believing in its own independence, in its “community” linkages, believing itself different from, but misrecognizing its duplicity in this economic system. Here, an invaluable logic of socially marginal aesthetics, can reveal and, thus, help remedy, the maintenance of authoritative power over an audience built by hegemonic improv mechanisms that construct mysterious (in process and of discourse) and vague meaning, unilateral audience interaction, and omnipotent beneficence of the of the talk back, and can reveal that this misrecognition is also accomplished through facilitation of audience isolation/inaccessibility even while utilizing audience bodies as proof of the profit-potential of improv and of the viability of this form of marginal artistic discourse.
In short, Othered logic and aesthetics can recover the mutuality of power within audience-artist dialectics, a bind critical to expanding a sense of empowerment over production through the faculties of consumption, creating a truly community-centered and -focused praxis, cultivating a larger, invested and committed support base, and innovating/redesigning existing codes and aesthetics in modes that are less alienating, more inclusive, and constantly shifting in a dialogic flow that stimulates creativity and deepens dialogue.
This resistive facade of improv art as it stands, masks its deeply ingrained, even if rarely apparent (and thus questionable) sense of schadenfreude. This heartfelt and determined logic to defy categories, labels, and critiquing that seems to laugh at and take great pride in one’s search for articulation and description of performance, is exceptionally thick and palpable, but admirable and inspiring. And yet, missing something difficult to name though easily seen within audiences and onstage. One cannot help but leave improv performances with an equally deep sense of the difficulty in building such a layered, expansive logical challenge, and of the understanding somehow, that improv’s proto-resistance, despite and perhaps precisely because of this dichotomy of “mis/recognition” [my spelling here intentional] of the hegemony that still thrives within it, must be undertaken. For many of us who already live, let alone, watch and improv from the margins, this “other” logic, literally a poetics of poetics is deeply, even if ironically, empowering.
Work Cited
Bourdieu, Pierre.1996. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Stanford University Press.
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