Secretly Alive

In Secretly Alive, dance artists Mish Rais, Mirka Eliášová and Lizzy Le Quesne meet as editors to share the questions and discoveries of the three-year artistic research project ‘Improvisation as Choreographic, Authorial and Creative Principle’. The editors invited six renowned artists into the studio and conducted in-depth interviews exploring their embodied practices. Rosalind Crisp, Julyen Hamilton, Wendy Houstoun, Eva Karczag, Daniel Lepkoff and Nita Little share their diverging and converging journeys to improvisation, their views on pedagogy and instant composition, and their strategies and experiences of making and performing for the stage. The six interviews are accompanied by essays by each of the three researcher-editors considering dance improvisation‘s creative value and potential from different angles: as a choreographic process, a discipline of awareness and a site of relational experimentation. Revealing both histories of improvisation in Western postmodern dance and details of current improvisational practices through the reflections of six major artists, this book will be of use to artist practitioners, students, teachers and audiences of dance improvisation.