Carrying the Feeling

We understand joint improvisation as an artistic form involving two or more performers engaging in multiple real-time interactions: with each other, with the audience and with the emerging content.

When jazz musicians perform an improvisational piece of music their behaviors are not fully prescribed in advance. Nonetheless their actions become so tightly coordinated and their decisions so

Improvising music toghether involves coping in realtimewith unprecedented patterns of behavior of another. The goal is to achieve and share a meaningful coperformance,and this is done by interacting

Scientists must grope into the undefined place beyond the known. So must improvisation theater actorswalking onto the stage with no idea what will happen next. Improvisation theater developed

What is “joint” and what is “improvisational” about joint improvisation? The “joint” aspect can be contrastedwith solo improvisation, such as that of a jazz pianist. Even when jazz pianists improvise

Clear empirical distinctions can be drawn between joint improvisation and choreography in dance by exploring the rhythmical coordination of dancers and audience members in a partner dance performance

To what extent do collaborating improvisers understand what they are doing in the same way as each other?And to what extent do their listeners understand the improvisation in the same way as the

The Sign Language Theatre Laboratory is a practicebasedartistic research group that began operating in2014 as part of the Grammar of the Body (GRAMBY) Interdisciplinary Research Project led by

“Quantifying JI” Debate.

Research on joint improvisation has shown that expert improvisers, as well as neurotypical individuals, canjointly create novel complex motion, synchronized to less than 180ms.

Joint actions require an ability to understand and predict the actions of others far enough into the future to have time to plan and execute matching motor programs. Here I will review experiments in

It is now well known that areas in the brain that are active when we act or feel become active again when weobserve other people act and express their emotions – as if we would internally relivewhat