On Islands and Improvisation
(View from the airport at Benbecula, Uist)
It looks as though we’re about to land on the beach as the small dual propeller plane wafts us over Uist. As we descend towards the runway, just a narrow strip of land from the water, I can see the island dotted with silvery lakes, the white sand turning to darker earth as you move inland, and the spine road of the island with its proprietary bulges. Later, I find myself very grateful my driver knows these passing places well as we careen towards the hall where I’ll be teaching step dance. We pull off to take in a quick view over the water, the place my hostess says has the best cell reception, and look west towards the sea, towards North America. Here, I get the sense that the island is what all are answerable to.
In the opening of her piece on gender and sexualities in traditional ballads, University of Winnipeg Women’s and Gender Studies professor Pauline Greenhill mentions both the literal and figurative transportive quality of islands:
“When I was a young woman, the Mariposa Folk Festival was an experience freedom and separation, requiring bus and subway travel from my parents' apartment in Don Mills, and then a ferry across Toronto Harbour to the Toronto Islands. To spend a sunny summer weekend away from the suburbs, surrounded by trees, water, and music was to be literally and figuratively transported to other historic and symbolic locations. It was probably at Mariposa that I first heard "transvestite," "warrior-maiden," "female-sailor," or, as I call them, cross-dressing ballads, likely sung by strong women folksong-revival performers…” (1)
For Greenhill, traveling to the Toronto Islands to hear traditional songs about warrior-maidens or cross-dressing sailors at the Mariposa Folk Festival allowed her to hear these ballads not only as conventional narratives of binary gender and heterosexuality, but also as somehow suggestive of other modes of being... Of other desires, other ways of existing outside of a presumed two-gender system; ways of life that are somehow queer, somehow beyond the limits of normative.
I’ve been thinking a lot about islands. Over the past seven months of the First Footing residency, I have had the pleasure of working on three different Scottish islands: Lismore for a weekend of music and dance workshops organized by Kae Sakurai, the Isle of Skye for a weeklong step dance course organized by Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, and South Uist for a weekend of classes for singers and dancers coordinated by Ceòlas. While each island presented its own ecological richness, I’ve been wondering broadly about the correlations of teaching, performing, and especially improvising on islands.
As long as I can remember I have made a habit of improvising in performance. In the weeks leading up to my first paid gig at the leafy Saline Celtic Festival still held annually in Michigan’s breezy early summer, I remember meticulously scribbling sequences of steps on many multicolored sticky notes. I adhered these to the dresser in my room so I could follow along as I practiced dancing. From my musician collaborators, I had received the names of the tunes that would be played, their meter (jigs, reels, hornpipes, etc.), and the number of times they were to be played. I noted all this information studiously. I so desperately wanted to be prepared.
However, when it came to rehearsing with the musicians for the show (Jeremy Kittel, Sean Gavin, and Michael Gavin), my folder of adhesive-backed paper couldn’t have seemed more arbitrary. Listening and responding felt so much more relevant, so much more useful. I abandoned my scrawled steps that day. Drawing from the footwork sequences in the moment, pulling steps from many percussive dance styles including Irish step dance, Canadian stepping, Appalachian clogging, and tap dance, I could better hear nuances of melody, timing, dynamic and phrasing than if I were actively working to recall a pre-arranged set of steps. (2) Perhaps I just didn’t rehearse my stickies enough. In any case, this way of creating dance has been at the center of my work ever since. Whether performing onstage with a band, teaching a workshop (its own kind of performance!), or presenting a solo dance show, I find myself returning to improvisation as a technique. Even when working alone in a studio in recent years, I tend to improvise, film the improvisation, and watch it back to see what worked and what didn’t. Sometimes I’ll forgo the camera and rely on mental notes as I’m dancing; mentally marking what feels interesting, what feels irrelevant, what feels pleasurable, and then trying to repeat, omit, expand upon this material on the next attempt. In performance, I’ve found this method of public extemporization allows me a tremendous amount of autonomy to respond to other bodies, to sound, to the haptic nature of my feet brushing the floor, and to the specifics of place as I perform.
I found myself improvising on all three of the Scottish islands I visited during my residency. On Lismore, Kae Sakurai and Mairi Campbell hosted a public acoustic show in the village hall with performances by weekend instructors and attendees. There, with the lights low, I found myself rising from my seat in the circle of chairs amidst islanders and students to dance with Mairi, Janet Lees, and Kath Bruce playing Kath’s stately tune, Albert’s 90th. Mine was the first dancing body to enter the circle, an act which felt imbued with its own symbolic magic. As the tune unfolded, I found myself tracing big shapes, hoping to usher in a sense of “eventfulness,” a term Irish queer theorist Michael O’Rourke once ascribed to my movement after seeing a performance. On Skye, Malin Lewis and Hamish Napier both invited to join them in the midweek concert at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig. With Malin, I donned tap shoes to accompany their highland pipes for a set of gleefully acrobatic original 7/8 compositions while with Hamish, I wore a softer pair of leather shoes and used sand to meet him in the breathy, sibilant soundscape of his whistle-playing and Innes Watson’s dexterous guitar work. On Uist, I presented a 45 minute solo performance that included improvisations, songs accompanied by dancing, dances accompanied by diddling, and percussive dance that needed no accompaniment at all. All of these performance situations relied on improvisation as a compositional strategy - a mode of danced connection to islanders and islands.
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(Hamish Napier, Innes Watson and I perform Hamish’s composition Huy Huy! at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, filmed by Sophie Stephenson)
In a recent talk at Boyer College, dancer, dance scholar, and chair of African-American studies at Duke University Thomas F. DeFrantz articulates that there is queerness to the process of improvisation itself. He examines the act of improvising through the lens of black performance, especially jazz:
“That’s how jazz works. You have to be able to imagine outside of what happened before…and it’s going to be super queer to get to the place where it’s going to be interesting as an improvisation….queerness as I’m trying to think it through at the heart of improvisation, is a willingness to resist the normativity that produced what that was. Then you’re trying to improvise outside of there. You’re trying to go to a queer space or through a queer methodology to flip the beat or change the rhythm.” (3)
Thomas’ words (as they so often do) strike a deep chord for me. When I’m dancing and improvising, I’m responding to sound, to my own body, or to a fiddle tune without the script of “what comes next.” Improvisation requires an imagination beyond what we know. It’s audacious. It’s cheeky. We dare to dream that there could be something else, something more beyond what we have just experienced. Thinking broadly, when we imagine a life outside of what the norms of heteronormativity and binary gender offer, this is where marginalities enact themselves, where space is made for diverse populations, where queering occurs.
Islands themselves also seem predisposed to this kind of queering. I met fellow queer people on Lismore, Skye, and Uist, however, I’m not so much referring here to individual identities of the island’s inhabitants but rather, as Greenhill states, islands’ “symbolic locality” as places that are set apart, imbued with beyond-ness. Indeed, islands are set apart, surrounded by an ever-changing, infinitely diverse, unquantifiable bodies of fluid (what could be more queer?!) “Island time” as it’s referred to on Uist - the convention of events occurring in their own time, on their own terms, or when folks arrive - also seems to connect to queerness, especially the interpretation of queerness suggested by Judith (Jack) Halberstam in their book In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives: “One of my central assertions has been that queer temporality disrupts the normative narratives of time that form the base of nearly every definition of the human in almost all of our modes of understanding.” (4)
(Working with singers during the Ceòlas song and dance weekend, photo by Lowenna Hosken)
On the final day of the Ceòlas Song and Dance Weekend, brilliantly curated by Dance Officer Lowenna Hosken, I found myself improvising amidst my dance students as we worked with participants who had been studying Gaelic song with Fiona MacKenzie. The song students, seated, would sing traditional puirt à beaul (literally Gaelic “tunes from the mouth”) as we listened in, standing close, attempting to find gestures that would imitate their Gaelic syllables. While I had encountered many of the specific puirt repertoire in my work with Mary Ann Kennedy and the Campbells of Greepe, the act of composing repeatable footwork for the dancers in the moment was both thrilling and daunting. It happened blindingly fast, and the speed of the workshop facilitated a kind of insouciance that helped me stave off any imposter-syndrome anxiety about my own (in)ability to understand Gaelic or the gravitas of bringing traditional song and percussive dance (back) into conversation. “What was that phrase again?” “Could you sing it slower?” “One to many beats there.” “Yes, that’s it.” I constructed a phrase, taking a moment to work with the dancers who joined in with abandon. Soon we were moving together and all were smiling. “They’ve got the Gaelic in their feet.” “You can hear the words!” Eschewing the Derridean notion of false binaries, we endeavored to enact a blurring of our ostensibly separate traditional art forms: a performative slippage, a synesthetic blending of mediums in which the dance could be heard and the song could be seen, enacting a trans-linguistic, anatomic translocation from the island of one body, to the island of another. And as we moved and sounded together, I smiled to myself thinking about islands and about the way improvisation enables intimacy, if we dare to imagine.
(Awaiting the Oban ferry on Lismore in March 2019 with participants of the Lismore Music & Dance Weekend)
First Footing is a collaboration between dancer and dance researcher Nic Gareiss, the Traditional Dance Forum of Scotland, University of Edinburgh Moray House School of Education, and the School of Scottish Studies with support from Creative Scotland. For engagement opportunities check out the First Footing website.
(1) Pauline Greenhill, "Neither a Man nor a Maid": Sexualities and Gendered Meanings in Cross-Dressing Ballads, The Journal of American Folklore, 1995, p. 156 (2) The abandonment of these charted steps was the beginning of me feeling uncomfortable with using the word “choreography” for my work. In Antje Hildebrandt’s 2013 video, “The End of Choreography,” she reminds us that choreography is literally “dance writing” in Greek. While I enjoy writing about dance, I personally feel far more connected to the words performer, dancer, or improviser to describe what I do when I’m dancing.
(3) Thomas F. DeFrantz, Dance Studies Colloquium, Temple University, Boyer College, February 19, 2019, Uploaded April 25, 2019
(4) Judith (Jack) Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, 2005, p. 152
