The origins of the exploratorium lie in musical improvisation. From the very beginning, however, the focus has also been on interdisciplinarity and encounters between the arts with various performative approaches.
What happens in improvised encounters between the arts? What artistic relationships arise in the process? Saxophonist and author Simon Rose explores these questions in his new book Relational Improvisation: Music, Dance and Contemporary Art (Routledge, 2024). What is special about the book is that Simon Rose wrote ten of the twelve chapters together with musicians, dancers and visual artists from different backgrounds, all of whom actively collaborate with him. Accordingly, the starting point is an approach that focuses on lived experience and reflects the value of collaboration. Building upon the growing research into improvisation, the book explores contemporary transdisciplinary collaborations between improvised music and other fields, offering insights from a wide range of practitioners.
Among the co-authors are dancer Ingo Reulecke and visual artist Julie Myers, who will introduce the book launch and discussion with a joint performance with Simon Rose. In a panel moderated by Mathias Maschat, all participants will talk about the performance, their respective book contributions and some of the theses of the new publication in general.
The relational approach advocated by Simon Rose and his co-authors allows for the inclusion of improvisation’s scope and many levels. Considering the relationships of improvisation to emotion, space, embodiment and philosophy, it shows how improvisation, collaboration, and transdisciplinary artistic practices combine to generate new creative possibilities.
Simon Rose is a musician-composer, researcher and author from London who lives in Berlin. His research interest is in creative processes, interdisciplinarity and improvisation. Rose’s publications have presented themes of improvisation in: music, education, dance, art-as-social-practice, organisation, law, emotion, and performance. His doctorate thesis from 2013 was published in 2017 as The lived experience of improvisation: In music, learning and life (Intellect). Rose is an active baritone saxophonist with a principle interest in open form improvisation, he has performed and recorded regularly in diverse music collaborations and as a soloist and increasingly performs in interdisciplinary artistic constellations with dancers, visual artists and others.
Julie Myers’ work forms a response to people and place; exploring ways that people make sense of their environment through memory, personal experience and the representation of stories. Her practice includes film, sound, photography, installation and digital technology. She is a senior lecturer in fine art at Kingston University, UK.
Following dance training, Ingo Reulecke studied choreography at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Art, Berlin. Since 2005 he has been a professor in choreography at the Inter-university Centre for Dance (HZT), Berlin and was its director between 2006 and 2012. He frequently performs with musicians and other artists.
