ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that an epistemology of practice can be the basis for a conceptual framework within which "acting" and "identity" might come into more thorough and rigorous dialogue. The composite body is a meeting of acting and performance techniques with the socially transmitted knowledges of those embodied techniques that constitute our identities. Improvisation and devised work transform the range of those techniques and practices observed and recorded in field data into a performance frame. Improvisation and the devising process become resource materials that build the show, but they serve more than a utilitarian purpose. Improvisation depends on the inter-animating dynamics of both rules and unruliness that make flow possible. Improvisation and devised performance requires a different kind of listening when working with others within the intensity of ethnographic performance, relational labor, and response and freedom. For improvisation, it is human energy that engenders rhythm and rhythm engenders human energy.
