“As George Lewis reminds us, improvisation is not just a musical technique, but a ‘social location’ one chooses to inhabit (Lewis 1996, 110). Each participant brings their own subjectivity and history to the encounter, but the goal of group improvisation is to work with others to create something that exceeds, and at the same time honors, the individual participant’s experience. Good improvisation isn’t always about achieving group harmony or consensus; instead, it might productively be about contest or dissensus, or it may traverse a broad spectrum of human interactions. Crucially, to improvise well requires good listening skills, responsiveness, and adaptability. This written conversation is both an improvisation and–like all edited writing–a composition made up of riffs, loops, interjections, and erasures that took place over several weeks.”
–Ellen Waterman from Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies
