As instructed actions, they do require and involve improvisation (see Albert, 2015), but always with reference to an institutionalized practice that prescribes and constrains the types of movement, coordination and rhythmic adjustment. “Social dance” refers to an institutionalized practice, that can be more or less formally taught and learned, such as salsa, tango or Lindy Hop. Some praxiological studies have been devoted to “social dances,” such as Lindy Hop (Albert, 2015 Broth & Keevallik, 2014 Keevallik, 2010, 2015, 2021). ![]() While I will resort to enlightening formulations from these two sources, my take on improvised dance will be more praxiological and naturalistic. A similar limitation can be observed in the dance studies literature (Brandstaetter et al., 2013 Sarko-Thomas, 2019), which, while highly inspiring, rarely and only superficially addresses improvised dance practices in their indexical details. ![]() What gets lost in the process is the endogenous unfolding of actual stretches of dance, documenting how dancers “make do with what is at hands” to proceed with their dance. set up measurable and quantifiable dancing tasks such as mirror games and rhythm battles. To address this specific form of collective agency, Himberg et al. ( 2018)’s neuro-scientific approach to collective improvised dance rightly emphasizes the “kinaesthetics of togetherness”: “moving together is not merely a by-product of the activity, but can be its very aim” ( 2018: 2). This text aims at a detailed empirical analysis of sequences of improvised dance. It is also what makes their performance analyzable by distant observers. The analysis shows that distance management is oriented to as relevant by the dancers and that it has consequences on their improvised duet. This work of distance management is the dance, whose choreographic accountability is produced and structured by dancers staying at a distance, getting closer and touching each other. The investigation will be focused on how, in an improvised duet, each dancer interacts with the other, and more specifically how she or he positions her- or himself in relation to the other, from distance to proximity and touch. This paper addresses the manufacture of this witnessable order, by presenting some results of an ethnographic inquiry. ![]() And of course with other dancers, whose joint gestures and moves give shape to a choreography by providing pace, rhythm and sequences, thereby constituting a narrative or fragments thereof. Many aspects of the speechless performance obviously play an important role in the achieved intelligibility of the dance: a dancer is seen moving on and from a ground, on a stage, in a space delimited by walls, illuminated by spotlights, sounded by music, in front of an audience. The intelligibility of a performance of improvised dance does not reside in the rehearsed execution of a pre-existing script, nor does it result from a sustained verbal interaction between the dancers.
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