Improvisation and the Creative Process: Dewey, Collingwood, and the Aesthetics of Spontaneity

Abstract

Improvisational performance has been neglected by many fields that study creativity and the arts, including both philosophy and psychology. Psychologists, for example, have focused on product creativity: activities that result in objective, ostensible products-paintings, sculptures, musical scores-which remain after the creative act is complete. Product creativity generally involves a long period of creative work leading up to the creative product. In contrast, in improvisational performance, the creative process is the product; the audience is watching the creative process as it occurs. My primary research interest is everyday conversation, and I began to study aesthetics and the psychology of creativity after I observed that everyday conversation is creatively improvisedthere is no script that guides a conversation. My empirical research has focused on three types of improvised discourse: improvisational theater, children's fantasy play, and everyday conversation.' In my theoretical writings, I use these improvisational phenomena to address several issues in contemporary psychology and social theorythe tension between structure and practice, issues of textuality, discourse, structure versus play, and heteroglossia.2 Thus my theoretical framework has evolved from the empirically grounded attempt to identify and characterize specific interactional mechanisms that are used to create a collective improvisational performance. In this paper, I will focus on some philosophical implications of my evolving analyses of improvisational group performance. In this discussion, I will make explicit the relationships between improvisational performance and product-oriented arts such as painting, writing, and music composition, by drawing on Dewey's model of art as experience and Collingwood's model of art as language. Improvisational performance is relevant to the empirical study of all creative genres for two central reasons. First, the creative process that goes on in the mind of a creator is generally inaccessible to the researcher, in part because it occurs in fits and starts, over long time periods. But an improvised performance is created in the moment, onstage, and can easily be observed by the researcher. Second, many improvisational performance genres are fundamentally collaborative. Observing this collaboration onstage is relatively straightforward, compared to the difficulties of observing the many forms of collaboration that contribute to the generation of a work of art.