ABOUT THIS BOOK

An adept improviser can find ways forward amid impasse, agency amid oppression, and community amid division. The editors and contributors to The Improviser’s Classroom present an array of critical approaches intended to reimagine pedagogy through the prisms of activism, reciprocity, and communal care.

Demonstrating how improvisation can inform scenes of teaching and learning, this volume also outlines how improvisatory techniques offer powerful, if not vital, tools for producing connection, creativity, accompaniment, reciprocity, meaningful revelation, and lifelong curiosity.

The Improviser's Classroom champions activist pedagogies and the public work essential for creating communities bound together by reciprocal care and equity.

Contributors: Sibongile Bhebhe, Judit Csobod, Michael Dessen, jashen edwards, Kate Galloway, Tomie Hahn, Petro Janse van Vuuren, Lauren Michelle Levesque, George Lipsitz, Rich Marsella, Tracy McMullen, Hafez Modirzadeh, Ed Sarath, Joe Sorbara, Jesse Stewart, Ellen Waterman, Carey West, and the editors

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Daniel Fischlin is Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. He is the founding Director of the Critical Studies in Improvisation Graduate program (MA/PhD) at the University of Guelph, as well as the co-founder and Artistic Director of the community artspace Silence. The author or editor of over thirty books, he is the coeditor of the recent publications, Sound Changes: Improvisation and Transcultural Difference and Playing For Keeps: Improvisation in the Aftermath.

Mark Lomanno is a jazz pianist, ethnomusicologist, and faculty member in the Musicology Department at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. They are former Chair of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Improvisation Section and founder of “The Rhythm of Study,” a public forum that celebrates jazz musicians’ work in the arts, academia, and community activism. A former Mellon Foundation and Consortium for Faculty Diversity fellow, Lomanno has also been awarded several fellowships for his ethnographic and performance work in the Canary Islands.

REVIEWS

“From the call → free fall → response, the structure of The Improviser’s Classroom unsettled me in all the right ways. Cocreation percolates through the book, from collaboration to the collective, the commons, community, comping, complicity, cooperation, coping, the copresent, cosmovisión, and the looming presence of COVID-19. Many chapters describe the experience of teaching improvisation with aching honesty and hope. All show that worldmaking—which means staying with the trouble—is the work of improvisation, especially in what feels like end times.”—Deborah Wong, Professor of Music at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Louder and Faster: Pain, Joy, and the Body Politic in Asian American Taiko

“With chapters by many of the key thinkers in Critical Studies in Improvisation and critical pedagogy, this exciting and innovative collection does not shy away from tackling difficult topics such as COVID-19, racism, sexism, colonialism, and homophobia in the education setting. The contributors offer a rich discussion of the potential of improvisatory practices to make for more collaborative, non-hierarchical, and transformative teaching and learning spaces. The Improviser’s Classroom is required reading for anyone interested in the intersection of improvisation and pedagogy.”—Sara Ramshaw, Professor of Law and Director of Cultural, Social, and Political Thought at the University of Victoria

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Seeding/Ceding Ground: An Editors’ Note on The Improviser’s Classroom | Daniel Fischlin and Mark Lomanno

Preface | Ed Sarath

Acknowledgments

Call

Worldmaking Pedagogies: Improvisation as Learning / Learning as Improvisation | Daniel Fischlin

Transformative Sensibilities

1. Performing Sense, an Improvisation | Tomie Hahn

2. Community Crossings: An Autoethnography from the Bandstand to the Classroom | Carey West

3. Puppets and Hallway Dancing: Improvisation as a Catalyst for Transformative Learning | Lauren Michelle Levesque

Coauthoring Collectivities: Pedagogy and Difference

4. Learning How to Arrive: The Improvisational Toolkit of Artivistas in Boyle Heights | George Lipsitz

5. Improvisation, Pedagogy, and Black Feminist Thought: Alternative Knowledge Takes Center Stage | Tracy McMullen

6. Applied Improvisation and the Political Classroom: A Strategic Narrative Embodiment Model for Addressing Systemic Injustice(s) | Sibongile Bhebhe and Petro Janse van Vuuren

7. We Are All Musicians: A Dialogue on Improvisation, Pedagogy, and Social Justice | Jesse Stewart and Ellen Waterman

Power and Fugitive Pedagogies

8 Attending to the Social Space of The Music: Self-Expression as a Site of Pedagogy | Joe Sorbara

9 On Not Getting Over It | Michael Dessen

Unlearning: Radical Practices of Engagement

10. manifest(o): for the advancement of extra-institutional improvised learning(s) | Judit Csobod

11. The Lost Art of Prank Calling: Politics and Rebellion in the Improviser’s Classroom | Richard Marsella

12. Situated Listening and Soundwalking in Uneasy Places and Times | Kate Galloway

13. “This Is My Family”: Sonny Stitt in Words and Music | Hafez Modirzadeh

14. Improvisational Encounters with the Sonic Lifeworld | jashen edwards

Response

Intimate Incorporations: Teaching as Improvisation / Improvisation as Teaching | Mark Lomanno

Additional Sources on Pedagogy and Improvisation

Contributors

Index

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