After a few months of glorious improvisation twice weekly at VU solo residency, now I’m stuck. The first few weeks were really exciting. I was delightfully surprised about many different ways of moving in certain topics and somatically-informed approaches (see On Meditation and Improvisation in Pondering archives). My favourites are the embodiment of “brain” and “cerebrospinal fluid”,although it makes me dizzy, and eyes closed, just detecting sunlight coming in from the windows and follow it, play with it. It helps that I’m in a black box Theatre studio which emphsises the light coming in from two relatively small windows more than a nice and airy studio. Somehow I felt expansive, not at all claustrophobic.

But as time went on, I started to know more about movement that I’d come up, I was surprised less and less. Until last week when I was having a flu, I couldn’t muster the energy to reproduce those glorious movement. Do we have to feel good to do movement all the time? Why isn’t fear and doubt a part of the process too? If I try to emulate the feel-good moment, I’d also feel self-indulgent and certainly no longer surprised. Sometimes we performers want to feel that we do something productive which equates feeling good. We don’t want to feel unproductive. We dread that feeling. We almost don’t want to know that we have doubts about where the next movement is coming from, so much that we try to be positive about what we do. So we try to do more and more, generating more and more movement like a painter tries to pile more and more color onto his/her painting. Trying to fill in so much of positive space.

But I’m now curious about the negative space. What happens in that moment of doubt? In the last session, I tried to pause. I put on a 1-hr piece of music called Drive By by the Necks. I promised myself not to finish the improv until the end of the music. If there’s no urge, impulse or curiosity, I’d pause - that was my motto. If I fell into the well worn pathway of movement, I paused. Turned out, there’s very few moment that I actually stop moving. In that “negative space”, my body remained energised. Movement might be small, but I rarely stopped moving. It felt neither good nor bad.  I just started to get to know the negative space.

If the positive space is the moment when the body is occupied by impulses, curiosity, urge or something take it to move, the moment when the movement is more or less intentionally generated, the negative space is the opposite of that. The urge, impulses stop.  The intention is to pause. But as long as the body remains in the improvisation, energised, the “negative space” now is not really completely empty. Something is always going on...

Anyway, I was knackered with 1-hr improv...