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This Makes Artists; This Makes Citizens

Imbedded in the rhetoric of freedom are ideas of agency, choice, equality, boundary, possibility, awareness, responsibility, change, ideology, and individualism, all of which, to me, seem more illuminating concepts in a discussion of improvisation than simply the word freedom. Danielle Goldman agrees. In her introduction to I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom, Goldman points to the slippery—and almost default—use of the term freedom in discourse about improvisation in the English language in general, and especially in American politics. Nevertheless, there is something useful about its imprecision to describe a practice that is not one, but many. We have one word, improvisation, which we use to describe a range of systems of practice and values therein. One of the many strengths of Goldman’s text is that she does not attempt to reduce improvisation to one set of ideas and ideals or to make a singular argument about it. She discusses a range of practices with respect, nuance, and care. The result is a thoughtful, layered, and readable text that (like the practice of improvisation itself) expands possibility for theoretical inquiry rather than falsely reducing it. As a dancer herself, Goldman’s compelling prose is underscored by a sense of familiarity and embodied understanding. Ideas unfold organically in a text that could likely be just as effective with another kind of organization, that is, each chapter is as independent as it is related to the next. Furthermore, Goldman neither writes specifically from her own experience, as do many of the evocative writings included in Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere’s Taken By Surprise1 or the practice-based journal Contact Quarterly, for example, nor does she write from an ethnologic perspective, like Cynthia Novack in Sharing the Dance.2 Instead, Goldman’s compelling historical analysis is subtly strengthened, I am sure, by her own physical and performance practices. As her profile page for the Eugene Lang College of the Arts at the New School states, a major tenet