ABSTRACT
Improvisation in dance ranges from the widespread practice of contact improvisation, which involves interpersonal exploration of physical weight sharing and balance, through forms of structured and task-based improvisation, to the more controlled dance-generating systems in which source materials, tasks and rules of interaction are predefined. Choreographer and scholar Susan Leigh Foster described dance improvisation as a talking 'back and forth between the known and the unknown'. Steve Paxton, the founder of contact improvisation, eventually sought to develop techniques of perceptual orientation, which could produce awareness of a form of procedural memory he referred to as 'reflex action.' Midgelow's and Sarco-Thomas' tools direct conscious attention towards factors that inform improvisational acts and responses as they are experienced subjectively by the improviser. In order to access knowledge about factors that are harder for the dancer to register consciously, observation from a third-person perspective can be useful.
