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Teaching with Improvisation and Spontaneity

by Erica RichardApril 30, 2020 1:00:58 total runtime

Most of us go through life feeling like we’re not in control; this often makes us reliant on and even addicted to forms of structure and order, for comfort. As an artist and educator, I often find it hard to notice when I default to an insistence on control. In turn, I constructed a video playlist to inspire letting go and incorporating spontaneity into one’s art practice, teaching practice, or life.

Improvisation takes all kinds of forms, from process to product to performance. In the Art21 video titled Improvisation, Sarah Sze describes spontaneity as the interesting part of the process. She says, “You can spend a lot of time conceptualizing and thinking it over, and then it’s usually in the actual making and the process where there is something spontaneous. After all that planning, you had no idea what was going to happen—and when that happens is when it’s interesting.” The artists in this playlist draw on concepts from improvisation in various ways: Oliver Herring incorporates the unexpected and playful into what he calls “TASK parties”; Abraham Cruzvillegas activates the idea of autoconstrucción into self-portraits; many artists transform ideas into performance; and Marcel Dzama and the collaborators Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg describe how improvisation is part of the evolution of their intuitive processes into final works of art.

Read how Erica teaches with this playlist in her classroom.