The students on the Fine Art of Leadership course, lead by Daved Barry, are developing a theatre piece that will be used as an artistic intervention in the Danish organization Cultural Copenhagen. I was invited to teach some general points about how to work with art creation. I chose to teach about the use of scores and improvisation in developing performances.
A score is a set of instructions that performers follow when performing. For example, the manuscript used by actors or the written sheet music used by musicians. In dance, scores are used to frame and focus improvisations. They can be used as guidelines for improvised performances that are shown to an audience or in chorographical work with dancers, where material for a new performance is developed through a series of improvisations.
Here are the slides I used: Scores and Performances
It’s amazing to see how quickly and powerfully these techniques can work. Within a relatively short time, the class was able to try out and decide between numerous performance options that they’ve been considering (around presenting their observations to the organization they’ve been working with this semester). And the embodied perspective brought considerably more energy to the decision making process. Great stuff!