The Improvisation Ensemble Member as "participant Observer"
JENNIFER KAYLE, APRIL 2019
Part of my intellectual awakening happened in college as a student of sociology and anthropology, probably born of a basic curiosity to understand people. This burning began much earlier in life, as the sense that people, in general, were fairly inscrutable, and especially my parents. I have a favorite aunt who remains a hero for “explaining” these people to me. Early on, she taught me something about putting on different eyes to look at people when you try to understand them. She had funny ways of saying things that made it easier to understand, e.g. “your father does not ‘do’love.” She had tight little phrases that communicated complexities – like that a parent could care for you as flesh of his flesh but wasn’t going to “do” the moves, the expressions and actions that would make this caring a felt reality.
My anthropology background made me especially curious to hear a 2015 podcast interview with an anthropologist, Mary Catherine Bateson. (For those who don’t already follow it, I recommend putting the podcast, “On Being with Krista Tippett,” in your regular rotation.)In addition to being an anthropologist, Bateson is the daughter of famed anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and a powerful thinker and author in her own right. I was pleased to be reminded of her book Composing a Life, which I still have yet to read! (Now it’s on the “read immediately” stack.) Among other intriguing perspectives, Bateson argues that composing a life is an improvisational process, that it is marked by constant change, has many seasons, and is a far better metaphor than our postmodern idea of “juggling” various identities and responsibilities. Whereas the metaphor of “juggling” produces anxiety, the idea of “composing a life” suggests a creative process where innovating and arranging the parts could be an art form. I immediately resonated with Bateson’s ideas based on my own experience and analysis that improvisation is indeed a life practice, and that an attitude of artful engagement and arrangement is part of what’s valuable about this life view.
In Bateson’s interview, she revealed ways that her anthropologist mother inculcated her into the ways of the “participant observer,” even at 8 years old, sending her on a playdate with a troublesome boy in order to gather information about his behavior. It makes sense that the usual divisions between work and life were blurred in this sense, leading her to propose that taking-on the participant-observer awareness is “a marvelous way to live.” She explained that the participant observer is fully engaged, but also observing, but also self-observing.
“So they’re participants, but they’re also observing, and they’re also self-observing…
I think there’s a huge benefit in being a participant-observer. There are people who are just observers and don’t engage with others. There are people that just engage and don’t think about what’s happening. And to learn to go back and forth between — or simultaneously be learning, observing, but at the same time be fully present — was a marvelous thing to learn.”
Nowadays, my ears are particularly tuned to pick-up on anything that sounds like ensemble improvisation, maybe described in a different language than the one I use in my artistic practice. The idea of the participant observer resonates with my early experiences, and my college studies, but also provides an interesting name for the integrated multi-attention that’s at work for the ensemble improviser.
One way to begin a practice session can be called “warming into working,” a phrase I learned from my mentors (see my forthcoming essay, “The Giants”). Dancers begin with an individual focus, sometimes with eyes closed; they gradually expand their attention to include the whole ensemble and the whole studio space. Though an individual improviser spends time connecting to her own world and point of view, she then builds on this connection by looking outward, noticing how her own (as we might call it) “movement culture” engages with another. As her work travels and mingles through the space, the improviser intentionally engages with whatever movement languages, customs, and protocols she can sense amongst her collaborators, logging the specificities through noticing and noting, inquiring and participating. It is a process at once engaged and observant. There is a necessity to be equally aware of outside and inside, observant and self-observant. There are so many practices that can teach you this dual and triple awareness, but I learned it through ensemble improvisation, and I appreciate how this particular modality is explicitly about engaging with “others” amidst uncertainty and complexity, especially in ways that employ an investigative spirit and an adventurous attitude about creating something together. Like Bateson, I also think this simultaneously engaged, observant, and self-observant capacity is a marvelous thing to learn, and a marvelous way to live.
There are other ways that the participant observer, at least in social science research, gets a bad rap. Some criticisms have to do with the “observer effect,” and other criticisms have to do with power and imperialism. The observer effect describes how the mere presence of an observer, and the fact of observing, changes the phenomena being observed. I know it’s a serious question and problem for researchers, but also, I wonder if it’s a trivial dismissal in some ways. Isn’t the observer effect ubiquitous? And does it erase the valuable understanding that couldn’t be had any other way? Isn’t this the way we know anything at all…through interaction via our own subjective lens? At this point, my philosopher husband interjects and we go down a rabbit hole of debating the dangers of absolute relativism… If everything is absolutely subjective and relative then there is no real meaning and no fact and no truth, and all of a sudden, you’re reading Foucault at 2am and taking up smoking. That is not what I mean to provoke. As I say below, we cannot completely transcend subjectivity, but the whole point of intentional exchange with others is to try to do so, and to expand one’s perspective. Those who reject outright the possibility of this partial transcendence, can be prodded with the question: “is your claim then also a merely subjective formulation?” If so, then under your own theory, I don’t have to pay it much heed. If it’s instead an objectively true claim, then you’ve just undermined your own theory. Read this part with the New Jersey Italian accent of my family: “What, only this guy can get out of his own head, but nobody else can?”
I have a tougher time with how the participant observer is tangled up with imperialist tropes, and the wicked brew of aggression and attraction that is exoticism. Picture the researcher, descending from the tower of knowledge to identify the “real” nature of strange and foreign people, formulating learned theories on why people do what they do, and how. And don’t forget, this researcher is soooo objective that her own enculturation is completely irrelevant, and surely isn’t coloring any interpretations. (Apologies for the sarcasm.) This is the opposite problem; there’s an assumption at work here that we can, in an uncomplicated way, easily be objective; such an insufficiently examined attitude toward the encounter then exacerbates the harm.
Nowadays, it’s widely acknowledged across scholarly disciplines and popular consciousness, that the observer’s personal beliefs and worldview affect perception and analysis. In my own field, I think immediately of Susan Foster’s book, “Choreographing Empathy,” in which she complicates the notion that we can really even see each other, let alone empathize, but also seems to outline ways that it’s possible and meaningful to work on it. I see a new level of awareness in our culture that identities and subjectivities cannot be completely transcended, but also that there’s a positive and a negative side to this, especially in discerning what we’re supposed to do about it. On the one hand, there’s a warning call to be more attentive, to call out what sounds like telling someone else’s story, or saying how it is to have another’s experience, even if the impulse is to support or empathize, and that this is an important awareness that goes a long way toward lessening oppression and appropriation, at the very least, mitigating the constant erasure of first-person accounts that could otherwise be told by the less powerful. On the other hand, I see a constructive impulse, a creative mining of subjectivities, observing and absorbing multiple standpoints in order to acknowledge and learn. We believe we can learn from attending to ever specific, individual experiences and points of view.
This is actually where I think the ensemble improviser as participant observer is likely in-step with current thinking, possibly addressing some criticisms by adding a 4th dimension to the role: mutual observation.
Ensemble improvisation training makes a big deal out of owning your own point of view and giving space for others and their ways of seeing; improvisation training makes an even bigger deal out of collaborating to make creative use of these differences, seeing them as generative. Backing up a step further, instead of the one-way investigation of an anthropological inquiry, everyone in a collectively established improvisation ensemble has the same information about the context of the interaction. They bring their own histories or proclivities, but all the members understand who’s looking at who (that everybody’s looking at everybody), and that the idea is to create together. Obviously, the goal of the social science researcher is different. The way I understand it, the social science participant-observer is motivated to conduct first-hand observation, in part, because it’s possible that there are significant inconsistencies between what people say they believe and do, and what they actually believe and do in practice. If you ensconce yourself in peoples’ ways of being, it may be possible to identify and analyze these differences. Nowadays, we might still believe in the reality of those inconsistencies between a person’s self-view and what can be observed about that person - what people espouse and their behaviors. But there are new levels of awareness concerning the value of transparent interaction, an out-in-the-open process of observing each other. It seems there’s more willingness to use a social process to reflect our observations back to each other, to address inconsistencies in a spirit of inquiry or repair, to practice reciprocity and shift the previously lopsided power dynamic. The idea of mutual observation maintains a core of the original participant observer idea, that it’s valuable to gain understanding through intimate, engaged, careful attention in each other’s presence. Likewise, it drops the idea that only some people get to observe, while others are subject to analysis without their full participation in the process.
An important point in common between the social science context and the ensemble improvisation context, is the requirement that the participant observer actively refrain from value judgements, from evaluations that approve or disapprove. I can certainly speak to the artistic context; an attitude that’s primarily sorting what’s happening into good and bad is rarely helpful to the process. Careful observation of both inner and outer states of affairs is generative and robust when liking and not liking, when applause and offense, are put on the back burner. While criticizing and evaluating are a part of us and it’s completely ordinary that these show up, we intentionally demote them from the usual status of executive decision-maker, and practice foregrounding other sources that calibrate our actions and reactions. This is not to say that like and dislike, attraction and repulsion are not at all useful. But there’s a way in which we can work with these reactions and also question them; we can notice what these assessments reflect about ourselves, more than what they may reflect about happenings “out there.” Of course, we could still recognize something that is obviously “wrong,” like aggression or manipulation in the ensemble workings. But aesthetically, another kind of productive discernment takes the place of the usually habit-driven evaluation, especially the kind that paralyzes the process. But, that’s for another essay.
A gift of the participant observer notion is that it’s perhaps important, and at the very least interesting, to sit for a while with the question “how do we live?” and only after gathering lots of information, conducting intimate exchanges, and practicing self-observation, is it most fruitful to move on to the question of “how should we live?” (An important question that we never get to ask if we believe in a completely subjective and relative view.) Actually, more than anthropology, ensemble improvisation taught me this order of business. Creative and constructive decisions and actions emerge out of careful observation that is simultaneously doing, watching, noting, reflecting, and inquiring. By exercising patience in this integrated process, I commonly experience unforeseen beauties appearing. The compositional outcomes that emerge can be delightful, but also, the mere experience of having your perspective widened by engaging with another, is also and often deeply satisfying.
I am so happy to promote and re-state and give more cyberspace to any serious thinker and writer who knows that improvisation is a complex and valuable practice. So, I’ll close with some thoughts from the scholar who inspired this essay:
Krista Tippett: You say, “Life as an improvisation, as an improvisatory art…”
Ms. Bateson: Exactly. Well, you know people think improvisation means you don’t practice. But I have a cousin who is a jazz flutist, and I know that jazz musicians practice improvisation by the hour. And improvisation is a high order of skill.
So often in dance, and as I have done here, we are called to look outside of our own discipline for meaningful and translatable theories. I imagine this is partly because dance is a younger subject of theorizing, and partly because dance is amenable to meditating on anything under the sun, knowing that creative steps are possible as a result. I greatly appreciate seeing an expert thinker reach into art, especially improvisational art, to theorize about how life is.
Before moving onto a different topic in the discussion, Tippett comments on Bateson’s proposal that mid-century women were composing new lives with new rules and new roles, but that it sounds a lot like today’s college kids who are walking into great uncertainty with fewer and fewer standardized paths to life and career. Bateson responds in a way that shows a clear understanding of improvisation as a life practice, and life as an improvisation. Reflecting on the lack of prescribed steps for today’s college graduates, Bateson says, “I think that’s the case. I mean, I think we now live with constant change. And so they’re on stage without a script.”
Given this predicament, what better capacity and strategy and attitude than that of the ensemble improviser as participant observer? This is where the questions “how do we live?” and “how should we live?” start touching – by suggesting we not only could but should be engaging deeply and carefully with even the most unfamiliar situations, observing each other with a sense of curiosity and inquiry, and practicing the meta-consciousness that sees the self who is seeing. To me, this approach to life is part practical strategy and part ethics.
I still get pretty upset when I feel like I don’t understand my fellow humans. But, after thirty-some years of practicing, I engage ensemble improvisation as a means to find out, and to let others find out about me, reflecting back what they see. We are cultivating sophisticated powers of observation and engagement to compose a life, moment by moment, together.
My anthropology background made me especially curious to hear a 2015 podcast interview with an anthropologist, Mary Catherine Bateson. (For those who don’t already follow it, I recommend putting the podcast, “On Being with Krista Tippett,” in your regular rotation.)In addition to being an anthropologist, Bateson is the daughter of famed anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and a powerful thinker and author in her own right. I was pleased to be reminded of her book Composing a Life, which I still have yet to read! (Now it’s on the “read immediately” stack.) Among other intriguing perspectives, Bateson argues that composing a life is an improvisational process, that it is marked by constant change, has many seasons, and is a far better metaphor than our postmodern idea of “juggling” various identities and responsibilities. Whereas the metaphor of “juggling” produces anxiety, the idea of “composing a life” suggests a creative process where innovating and arranging the parts could be an art form. I immediately resonated with Bateson’s ideas based on my own experience and analysis that improvisation is indeed a life practice, and that an attitude of artful engagement and arrangement is part of what’s valuable about this life view.
In Bateson’s interview, she revealed ways that her anthropologist mother inculcated her into the ways of the “participant observer,” even at 8 years old, sending her on a playdate with a troublesome boy in order to gather information about his behavior. It makes sense that the usual divisions between work and life were blurred in this sense, leading her to propose that taking-on the participant-observer awareness is “a marvelous way to live.” She explained that the participant observer is fully engaged, but also observing, but also self-observing.
“So they’re participants, but they’re also observing, and they’re also self-observing…
I think there’s a huge benefit in being a participant-observer. There are people who are just observers and don’t engage with others. There are people that just engage and don’t think about what’s happening. And to learn to go back and forth between — or simultaneously be learning, observing, but at the same time be fully present — was a marvelous thing to learn.”
Nowadays, my ears are particularly tuned to pick-up on anything that sounds like ensemble improvisation, maybe described in a different language than the one I use in my artistic practice. The idea of the participant observer resonates with my early experiences, and my college studies, but also provides an interesting name for the integrated multi-attention that’s at work for the ensemble improviser.
One way to begin a practice session can be called “warming into working,” a phrase I learned from my mentors (see my forthcoming essay, “The Giants”). Dancers begin with an individual focus, sometimes with eyes closed; they gradually expand their attention to include the whole ensemble and the whole studio space. Though an individual improviser spends time connecting to her own world and point of view, she then builds on this connection by looking outward, noticing how her own (as we might call it) “movement culture” engages with another. As her work travels and mingles through the space, the improviser intentionally engages with whatever movement languages, customs, and protocols she can sense amongst her collaborators, logging the specificities through noticing and noting, inquiring and participating. It is a process at once engaged and observant. There is a necessity to be equally aware of outside and inside, observant and self-observant. There are so many practices that can teach you this dual and triple awareness, but I learned it through ensemble improvisation, and I appreciate how this particular modality is explicitly about engaging with “others” amidst uncertainty and complexity, especially in ways that employ an investigative spirit and an adventurous attitude about creating something together. Like Bateson, I also think this simultaneously engaged, observant, and self-observant capacity is a marvelous thing to learn, and a marvelous way to live.
There are other ways that the participant observer, at least in social science research, gets a bad rap. Some criticisms have to do with the “observer effect,” and other criticisms have to do with power and imperialism. The observer effect describes how the mere presence of an observer, and the fact of observing, changes the phenomena being observed. I know it’s a serious question and problem for researchers, but also, I wonder if it’s a trivial dismissal in some ways. Isn’t the observer effect ubiquitous? And does it erase the valuable understanding that couldn’t be had any other way? Isn’t this the way we know anything at all…through interaction via our own subjective lens? At this point, my philosopher husband interjects and we go down a rabbit hole of debating the dangers of absolute relativism… If everything is absolutely subjective and relative then there is no real meaning and no fact and no truth, and all of a sudden, you’re reading Foucault at 2am and taking up smoking. That is not what I mean to provoke. As I say below, we cannot completely transcend subjectivity, but the whole point of intentional exchange with others is to try to do so, and to expand one’s perspective. Those who reject outright the possibility of this partial transcendence, can be prodded with the question: “is your claim then also a merely subjective formulation?” If so, then under your own theory, I don’t have to pay it much heed. If it’s instead an objectively true claim, then you’ve just undermined your own theory. Read this part with the New Jersey Italian accent of my family: “What, only this guy can get out of his own head, but nobody else can?”
I have a tougher time with how the participant observer is tangled up with imperialist tropes, and the wicked brew of aggression and attraction that is exoticism. Picture the researcher, descending from the tower of knowledge to identify the “real” nature of strange and foreign people, formulating learned theories on why people do what they do, and how. And don’t forget, this researcher is soooo objective that her own enculturation is completely irrelevant, and surely isn’t coloring any interpretations. (Apologies for the sarcasm.) This is the opposite problem; there’s an assumption at work here that we can, in an uncomplicated way, easily be objective; such an insufficiently examined attitude toward the encounter then exacerbates the harm.
Nowadays, it’s widely acknowledged across scholarly disciplines and popular consciousness, that the observer’s personal beliefs and worldview affect perception and analysis. In my own field, I think immediately of Susan Foster’s book, “Choreographing Empathy,” in which she complicates the notion that we can really even see each other, let alone empathize, but also seems to outline ways that it’s possible and meaningful to work on it. I see a new level of awareness in our culture that identities and subjectivities cannot be completely transcended, but also that there’s a positive and a negative side to this, especially in discerning what we’re supposed to do about it. On the one hand, there’s a warning call to be more attentive, to call out what sounds like telling someone else’s story, or saying how it is to have another’s experience, even if the impulse is to support or empathize, and that this is an important awareness that goes a long way toward lessening oppression and appropriation, at the very least, mitigating the constant erasure of first-person accounts that could otherwise be told by the less powerful. On the other hand, I see a constructive impulse, a creative mining of subjectivities, observing and absorbing multiple standpoints in order to acknowledge and learn. We believe we can learn from attending to ever specific, individual experiences and points of view.
This is actually where I think the ensemble improviser as participant observer is likely in-step with current thinking, possibly addressing some criticisms by adding a 4th dimension to the role: mutual observation.
Ensemble improvisation training makes a big deal out of owning your own point of view and giving space for others and their ways of seeing; improvisation training makes an even bigger deal out of collaborating to make creative use of these differences, seeing them as generative. Backing up a step further, instead of the one-way investigation of an anthropological inquiry, everyone in a collectively established improvisation ensemble has the same information about the context of the interaction. They bring their own histories or proclivities, but all the members understand who’s looking at who (that everybody’s looking at everybody), and that the idea is to create together. Obviously, the goal of the social science researcher is different. The way I understand it, the social science participant-observer is motivated to conduct first-hand observation, in part, because it’s possible that there are significant inconsistencies between what people say they believe and do, and what they actually believe and do in practice. If you ensconce yourself in peoples’ ways of being, it may be possible to identify and analyze these differences. Nowadays, we might still believe in the reality of those inconsistencies between a person’s self-view and what can be observed about that person - what people espouse and their behaviors. But there are new levels of awareness concerning the value of transparent interaction, an out-in-the-open process of observing each other. It seems there’s more willingness to use a social process to reflect our observations back to each other, to address inconsistencies in a spirit of inquiry or repair, to practice reciprocity and shift the previously lopsided power dynamic. The idea of mutual observation maintains a core of the original participant observer idea, that it’s valuable to gain understanding through intimate, engaged, careful attention in each other’s presence. Likewise, it drops the idea that only some people get to observe, while others are subject to analysis without their full participation in the process.
An important point in common between the social science context and the ensemble improvisation context, is the requirement that the participant observer actively refrain from value judgements, from evaluations that approve or disapprove. I can certainly speak to the artistic context; an attitude that’s primarily sorting what’s happening into good and bad is rarely helpful to the process. Careful observation of both inner and outer states of affairs is generative and robust when liking and not liking, when applause and offense, are put on the back burner. While criticizing and evaluating are a part of us and it’s completely ordinary that these show up, we intentionally demote them from the usual status of executive decision-maker, and practice foregrounding other sources that calibrate our actions and reactions. This is not to say that like and dislike, attraction and repulsion are not at all useful. But there’s a way in which we can work with these reactions and also question them; we can notice what these assessments reflect about ourselves, more than what they may reflect about happenings “out there.” Of course, we could still recognize something that is obviously “wrong,” like aggression or manipulation in the ensemble workings. But aesthetically, another kind of productive discernment takes the place of the usually habit-driven evaluation, especially the kind that paralyzes the process. But, that’s for another essay.
A gift of the participant observer notion is that it’s perhaps important, and at the very least interesting, to sit for a while with the question “how do we live?” and only after gathering lots of information, conducting intimate exchanges, and practicing self-observation, is it most fruitful to move on to the question of “how should we live?” (An important question that we never get to ask if we believe in a completely subjective and relative view.) Actually, more than anthropology, ensemble improvisation taught me this order of business. Creative and constructive decisions and actions emerge out of careful observation that is simultaneously doing, watching, noting, reflecting, and inquiring. By exercising patience in this integrated process, I commonly experience unforeseen beauties appearing. The compositional outcomes that emerge can be delightful, but also, the mere experience of having your perspective widened by engaging with another, is also and often deeply satisfying.
I am so happy to promote and re-state and give more cyberspace to any serious thinker and writer who knows that improvisation is a complex and valuable practice. So, I’ll close with some thoughts from the scholar who inspired this essay:
Krista Tippett: You say, “Life as an improvisation, as an improvisatory art…”
Ms. Bateson: Exactly. Well, you know people think improvisation means you don’t practice. But I have a cousin who is a jazz flutist, and I know that jazz musicians practice improvisation by the hour. And improvisation is a high order of skill.
So often in dance, and as I have done here, we are called to look outside of our own discipline for meaningful and translatable theories. I imagine this is partly because dance is a younger subject of theorizing, and partly because dance is amenable to meditating on anything under the sun, knowing that creative steps are possible as a result. I greatly appreciate seeing an expert thinker reach into art, especially improvisational art, to theorize about how life is.
Before moving onto a different topic in the discussion, Tippett comments on Bateson’s proposal that mid-century women were composing new lives with new rules and new roles, but that it sounds a lot like today’s college kids who are walking into great uncertainty with fewer and fewer standardized paths to life and career. Bateson responds in a way that shows a clear understanding of improvisation as a life practice, and life as an improvisation. Reflecting on the lack of prescribed steps for today’s college graduates, Bateson says, “I think that’s the case. I mean, I think we now live with constant change. And so they’re on stage without a script.”
Given this predicament, what better capacity and strategy and attitude than that of the ensemble improviser as participant observer? This is where the questions “how do we live?” and “how should we live?” start touching – by suggesting we not only could but should be engaging deeply and carefully with even the most unfamiliar situations, observing each other with a sense of curiosity and inquiry, and practicing the meta-consciousness that sees the self who is seeing. To me, this approach to life is part practical strategy and part ethics.
I still get pretty upset when I feel like I don’t understand my fellow humans. But, after thirty-some years of practicing, I engage ensemble improvisation as a means to find out, and to let others find out about me, reflecting back what they see. We are cultivating sophisticated powers of observation and engagement to compose a life, moment by moment, together.
