A Selfless Art

Improvising means coming prepared, but not being attached to the preparation. Everything flows into the creative act in progress. Come prepared, but be willing to accept interruptions and invitations. Trust that the product of your preparation is not your papers and plans, but yourself.

Stephen Nachmanovitch, The Art of Is: Improvising as a Way of Life

I have thought (and written) a great deal about uncertainty in recent years, not because it was a new idea to me but because it had acquired a sharper, more personal dimension. Uncertainty, like human diversity, is a fact of life. It must be accepted, whatever I think of it. In fact, what I think of it is a crucial step on the path to acceptance. 

The difficulty is that, having accepted uncertainty, I have no better idea of how to act in the world. I’m especially conscious of uncertainty in the creative act because I am conscious of acting with intent in the world. And that is even clearer in co-creation, when I am working with others, and so have even less control over what might happen. Relinquishing the desire for control, accepting the uncertainty of outcomes, is a necessary step for any artist wishing to enter the space of co-creation. Unless I do, it is unusually certain that what will follow will not be co-creation but, at best, other people’s participation in my creative work.

But, as I say, accepting this is just the first step. What matters is what I do next. I have always put my trust in the process, a somewhat mysterious term even to myself, that I use as a shorthand for how I work. One of my aims in A Selfless Art is to make it less mysterious and therefore more understandable, accountable and, perhaps, imitable. 

Reading Stephen Nachmanovitch has given me another very useful term: improvisation. It is what I have always done, but without really thinking of it as such. And it’s true that Nachmanovitch and I have different understandings of the term because he, as a musician, uses it principally in a quite precise way to describe the creation of music in the present, alone or with others. 

My sense of it is broader. It applies to every aspect of a co-creation process, not only what happens when we are making art. Responding to unforeseen difficulties in the room, the equipment, or the relations between people all require improvisation. So does meeting the changing opportunities that arise from shared work, the shifts in power among stakeholders and many, many other things. 

Improvisation is a useful concept because it describes a response to uncertainty. It is a strategy, a way to guide how I act in the world. That is why, as Nachmanovitch writes, the product of my always careful preparation is not a workshop plan but myself.