Sipping Water: Reverie and Improvisation

Abstract

In 2011, Amanda Ravetz, Anne Douglas, and Kathleen Coussens worked with improvisation in the context of an experimental drawing process. Following workshops with artists Marina Abramović and Bronwyn Platten, the author wrote a score that involved sipping water slowly and drawing over an eight-week period. Drawing, performed for its own sake, produced a space of reverie. Interviews with participants and reflective notes made after work with the score suggest that beyond allowing us to focus on our bodily awareness, the experiment also brought to light ambivalent feelings about our prior training and existing skills. Interpreting these feelings as failure and loss, the paper draw links between reverie, illusion, and disillusionment and Gary Peters’ “ironic model” of improvisation (The Philosophy of Improvisation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. 94-6). However, where Peters avoids accounts of improvisation that focus on relationships between improvisors, the paper argues that reverie opens up a richly paradoxical space between improvisor and improvisor, as well as between improvisor and improvised, producing (shared) moments of rupture in which failure itself can signal new beginnings.