My Thoughts on Choreography: Composition & Improvisation by Ayako Kato

One of my experimental choreographic approaches involves the art of improvisation. I have been perceiving improvisation to be the concept of yin-yang in Taoism: composition and improvisation cannot exist in a vacuum, but rather they include the other aspect in different degrees in the entity of a single dance work. In other words, when improvisation matures, it seeks out the form of composition and when composition matures, it seeks out the form of improvisation. Butoh master Kazuo Ohno observed that if one improvises the same thing one hundred times, s/he starts to see the truth in the movement. This means, if you practice to express or even to be a flower, after one hundred times of improvisation, you start to gain the essence, laws of nature, and principles of being the flower through and within the movement in the universe. Recently, while I was rehearsing my choreography, I experienced composition and improvisation overlapped like eclipse and became one. I conceive this moment is when I dance absolutely nothing else than IT, the entity of what I aimed to express/be, with honesty, rawness, and reality. Followed by the experience, I had a chance to observe the Open Rehearsal conducted by Riccardo Muti. The music was Mozart’s Linz. It was amazing to hear how meticulously Muti is suggesting how to play the musical phrases by using infinite metaphors for musicians to express them. He was spinning the superb absolute moment of the music through the vast and meticulous freedom/interpretation based on the composed score.

When the balance/unity is achieved through such attuned state of being, the true liberation emerges. When I create a dance work: choreographic, compositional and/or improvisational, I seek to encounter these absolute moments of being by navigating the multi ways of improvisation and composition to reach there.

In the past 20 years, besides working on choreographic projects, for some taking 5 years, I have been also performing long-form improvisation and worked with over 60 established music improvisers in the concert settings (2-3 sets of total up to 60-90 minutes or 1 set of 35 – 60 minutes). As a result, I accumulated a solid and unique approach to dance improvisation and the ability to present it as a work of art.

Particularly as a movement improviser with live music, I learned layered and multi-dimensional ways to internally and externally coexist, relate and control the distance with sound – including ignoring, leading the sound and crafting stillness all with awareness. The possibilities of relationships with sound/music are infinite.

Most importantly, when we improvise, reaching and maintaining a certain physical and mental state of being are must. Through somatic exercises, becoming an empty conduit with proper breathing helps us to keenly sense gravity and paths of energy, physically and mentally creating more room to heighten awareness. This opens up the possibility to make proper choices in the moment and in its relation to the past and future as well as to the space. Our choices are made based on experiences, knowledge, and ideas. Possibly, this is what we are referring to when we say “instinct.”

While moving in the space, it is important to gain 360 degrees of internal peripheral vision and external vision. Also grasping the conscious, subconscious and unconscious world of self as one helps to gain the freedom to move through it, and sense certain physical principles at work in the universe working in ourselves. When I achieve this stage, I am identical with the order of nature and almost transparent, or fully in collaboration with the space. I am both 0 % and 100 % of myself, balancing at the same time emptiness (non control) and fulfillment (control).

For me, improvisation is everything and nothing. It is an invitation to certain experiences or to a journey not unlike one you would undertake in a Zen temple garden: a landscape of yin and yang, all the motion, sound, and the cosmic ephemera. Improvisation is a serious and radical expression of “art of being.” For me, it’s Freedom, Order and Life Force.