Can't Name That Tune

Can’t Name That Tune

Is free improv undertaken for the benefit of the performers or the audience?

Written By

Colin Holter

A question that I’ve heard more than a few times with respect to free improvisation is whether it’s undertaken for the benefit of the performers or the audience. I did a fair amount of improv as an undergraduate, and I’ve gotten back into it more recently under the aegis of ILLapse, the laptop ensemble at the University of Illinois. Although I feel that good improvisation is genuinely fascinating to observe, I have to confess that I might be guilty of that alleged improvisational self-indulgence. ILLapse found the most recent ILLapse improv electrifying, but did anyone else?

I can’t quite say what it was that set us off last night. Maybe the spirit of musical radicalism and theatrical insanity that supposedly once infused Champaign-Urbana returned, and we were possessed by it. When I visualize theater pieces from the glory days of the U of I, I see an aesthetic experience more or less congruent in energy, if not in material, with the last ILLapse gig. However, I wonder whether the smallish crowd of listeners we had attracted were as wild-eyed as we were. Somehow I doubt that they shared our fervor.

Another question loiters menacingly in the back of my mind: Would they have dug the performance more if it had been billed as a composed piece? In other words, how much of the audience’s perception of our show was molded by context (as opposed to the substance of the performance)? If they’d thought that one of us had been the sole mastermind behind the “piece,” in what ways would they have listened differently?

It’s a maddening, Heisenbergian dilemma because our spiel’s context and its substance are impossible to disentangle. We may review the video recording later in a sort of Zapruder-meets-high-school-basketball post-mortem; an interesting exercise might be to pretend we’re watching a fully composed theatre piece and gauge our reactions accordingly, or invite a few people who didn’t make it to the show, tell them it’s a written piece, and see what they think. In the meantime, I’ll content myself to be pleased with our improvisation and think about how to do it better next time.