Mark Tompkins

When improvising, you are simultaneously listening, watching, sensing, acting, and reacting to the sensations and perceptions. The art of real time composition is not so much about alternating roles: passive- active, moving-witnessing, center-support, inside-outside, but remaining open to the wealth of internal and external impulses and receiving, processing, and proposing material in an uninterrupted flow of feedback. How to be actively attentive, avoid overload, do nothing, and still act.

All the senses are active all the time and micro-shifts happen constantly. At the same time you are making conscious choices to shift or change. Inhibiting or permitting one sense to predominate reduces or augments the others. Bridging, connecting two or more sensations, facilitates shifting. Attention to the flux – body, breath, space, sound, light, people, and objects – creates potentials of what might happen. Shifting keeps the dance alive.