Improvisation, the 4^th principle of BraveSpace:  We invite awe and wonder as we inhabit the mysterious gap between knowing and not knowing.  We allow truth to emerge through us and recognize power as the ability to be with what is.

The key to improvisation is getting the thinking mind out of the way so a deeper responsivity can emerge.  In the beginning our minds need a structure or task—something specific and simple to do.  A later learning step is recognizing that whatever it is the mind is doing matters, but it often isn’t the most important thing going on.

Improvising is a divination process.  A core perspective of BraveSpace that we are not in direct control of most of what we do—that our identities are managing the ride of life as it comes through us.  We can thereby approach our bodies as spiritual texts given for us to interpret; texts that we don’t have the capability of writing ourselves.  Somatic movement, dance, meditation, breathwork, and touch experiences shift our state of consciousness.  These practices give us greater choice in how we participate with life because we learn to interpret what is given to us from multiple perspectives.  When we recognize the process of moving and feeling our bodies as a sacred mystery available within ourselves, a natural attitude of awe and wonder is likely to occur!  And, of course, this attitude is difficult to embody when pain or discomfort arises, whether physical, emotional, or otherwise.  This is when the mind steps in to save the day, often refusing to get out of the way.  We use rules, guidelines, and logic to direct our minds, manage our experience, and create maps of our perceived reality.  This kind of ‘knowing’ that occupies our minds is super important, and the principles of BraveSpace represent one such structural map.  Simultaneously we can recognize that the field of what we ‘know’ is infinitely smaller than the realm of the ‘unknown’ that operates through us.  The mystery we are divining in improvisation lies in the tension between these poles.  We can hold what is known loosely without abandoning it.  It is ironic that we can most often wonder at the oceanic unknown only from the shores of our knowing.  To improvise is to dance, sometimes quite literally, in the gap between the finite and the infinite.  The aliveness of this is sometimes terrifying, and it is extraordinary!

In many respects this gap between known and unknown is our most accurate place of residence.  We are always improvising because the conditions of our reality are always changing.  In the realm of dancing, the known might be a piece of choreography that I’ve practiced many times to the same piece of music.  The unknown could be a dance I do with no forethought or rehearsal.  We can look at these dances as having more in common with each other than not:  If the room is cold, I will move differently than if it’s warm.  If I ate something I can’t digest then I’ll be nauseous.  If I just won the lottery I’ll be happier than if my wife just requested a divorce, and in either case I’ll be hugely distracted.  There is also another very social element:  Dancing by myself is radically different from dancing for 10,000 people who are watching me, dancing anonymously with 10,000 people who also are dancing, or dancing closely with someone I am in an intimate relationship with.  If the stage lights come on too soon, and my partner fails to appear, it’s clearly time to improvise.  Choreography matters, but it’s only one part of the larger whole.  Interacting with varied conditions I cannot entirely predict or control, internally and externally, is dancing with the unknown.  

We are also always referencing what we know.  In considering Trans-Formation as a BraveSpace principle I explored the concept that everything we do is patterned.  We repeat patterns in phrases, from beginning, through middle, to end.  Beginning a phrase, unless there is an interruption, will bring about its completion.  In an improvisational dance I cannot help but use patterns my body knows.  Just like it is possible to differentiate one person’s walk from another’s based on their individual repeated patterns, it is also clear who is who when watching people dance an improvisational dance.  Now, go ahead and imagine a dance; any kind of dance will do.  We are referencing the known simply by defining this movement you are imagining as dance.  ‘Dance’ is a shared nomenclature that gives both I as the writer and you as the reader an understanding based on our previous knowledge.

To improvise, given these examples, is to be able to merge the known and unknown elements of anything towards an intention.  There are levels of scale in the shared ecology of self, other, and place that the improviser connects through their perception and action.  The temperature of the room, the social environment, our past experiences, and our collective intentions generate a particular moment of being.  As a dancer my intention when improvising is often exactly to let the physical and social environment move me—to put myself in service to it.  In sports the guiding intention is to win the game.  The movements have been practiced again and again, the needs and rules of the game directing how they are used.  The outcome of such an emergence cannot be pre-determined; that’s why underdogs always have a chance.    

The power given through improvisation, and particularly through the practice of improvisation, is to be able to adapt to continually changing conditions.  Improvisation increases resilience—the ability to rebound from impacts and maintain wholeness.  Improvisation is essential in creating places where we can take the risk of being vulnerable because the conditions given within us, through the divination of our own bodies and being, are consistently shifting as much as those outside us.  To know ourselves is a research endeavor with no endpoint.  Revealing ourselves is a process of discovery that only improvisation can meet with integrity.