“Chance is a goddess who moves, and in moving brings chance. Chance comes through motion, and in motion there is always something deeply indeterminate.” Thomas Nail, 2020

“The body is where we live. It’s where we fear, hope, and react. It’s where we constrict and relax.” Resmaa Menakem, 2017

The appoggiatura is a musical ornament that temporarily displaces the melodically expected note. It is a grace note that unlike the acciaccatura, which exists to highlight resolution in its swift move to the main note, places emphasis on the dissonance. It is the melancholic swing of the bluesy flattened third and seventh, a minor- in place of the expected major-. Within improvisation it is this ‘wrong’ note that becomes the note of interest. Rather than course-correcting through ignoring, skimming over, or reversing, this mistake or bad turn is picked up as the point of departure. It is the injury – from the Latin ‘wrongful’ (iniurius) – and injustice – ‘not-right’ (in+iustus) – that is lifted and moved-with. This provides continuation through indeterminate movement that is attentively open to the unpredictability of the moment, an ongoing sensitivity to that which is arising. In its curious and highly responsive feeling-through, it is deeply erotic. Capable of expanding the possible as it responsively produces sounds and ways of moving that were not predetermined. In stretching the limits of the pre-established, it queerly produces possibility in a process of active unknowing (Halberstam:2011) that is, in short, invention.

In Italian, appoggiare means to lay, lean or rest on; to support or sustain. In this way, the appoggiatura can be understood as a leaning into dissonance that itself provides the support, or that which holds you. This move marked the turn of the 20th Century Blues scene, an under-researched lesbian environment (the 'big three of the blues’ being Lucille Bogan:1897-1948, "Ma" Rainey:1886-1939, and Bessie Smith:1894-1937; not to overlook Gladys Bentley:1907-1960) in which the dissonance of living within the manifold conditions of oppression and abuse was leant into through the poetic expression of personal and collective trauma. A feeling-through characterised by improvisation that materialised, lifted, and circulated the weight of the blues, through the Blues. This provided not only the means for survival by and for black, queer people amidst subjugation but the creation of aliveness beyond endurance – pleasure, joy, togetherness. This leaning into produced spaces of queer alliance and collectivity; the smoky, sweaty, erotically charged jazz club was a malleable harmonic hold and rhythmic foundation that perverted the major- with and through the minor- in a way that sustained movement. A moving-with that was supported by and at once produced structures for meaningful queer existence.

The charge of the live moment is integral to this move. The bite, that brings the room together in the not-quite-knowing what will happen. The sense of risk, that perhaps anything could happen. The trust, in performer to carry the space, the material, and the audience, and in turn, the audience to support the performer in the will-it-won’t-it work. It is that which holds the space for improvisation to take place, that frees the performer up to experiment in a live feeling-through that itself generates the electrically held moment. This emergent quality, in which the charge of the live holding space is produced through the risk of improvising and is at once that which holds space for improvisation to take place, produces an erotically responsive attunement (Golding:2018) between performer/s, audience (Dolan:2012), material, and space. An “affective ecology” (Nail:2020) that shifts and shapes, a feeling of being in it together that coheres the space in a murmurating aliveness, sensing and moving-within the specificity of the live moment through invention in dimensional ‘real’ time. Working with movement scores or musical structures that frame the material without stifling the potential for invention begins to explore and propose a non-transcendental approach to change in that it does not look to an outside but to the immanent, thickening possibilities of working experimentally with what is present. Exploring what constitutes this charge becomes an investigation into how the erotic rhythms of liveness can be tapped into through the bodily, erotically-charged messiness of feeling-through uncertainty. In which the responsive in+feeling (em+pathos) of mingling bodies, sound, movement, and space enables not just a staying with the trouble (Haraway:2012) but a move into and with/in – with and within – the unknown, together.

This collective move is thus proposed as capable of challenging oppressive and abusive holdings – socio-political systems of power and emotional embraces that maintain themselves through controlling this felt-sense of agency (Lorde:1984). A stifling that captures and directs desire in a way that produces at once a hold over and the sense of a totalising, closed system (Nail:2018 [Lucretius:1st c BC]). This tensor-like force (Lyotard:1993) is therefore vital in understanding how change can take place; a breaking – out, up, and from the unethically established – that produces not a linear snapping with a path behind and one ahead (Ahmed:2017) but a dimensional and ongoing approach of introducing movement. In this way, the moments of invention produced through improvisation begin to mark out a productive dissonance. One that rethinks opposition as a feeling out and rubbing up (Macharia:2019) against and with/in the limits (Nail:2018 [Lucretius:1st c BC]) of existing structures and systems. A perversion or queering of the established through embellishment that creates movement through shifting and transshaping the boundaries of possibility.

This must be navigated through an embodied approach. For in the way that touch is returned, the lived experience of an oppressive holding containing abuse leaves its mark and continues to circulate even once ruptured. This marks out a stranger spatiotemporality in which this imprint continues to sensorially loop into the present, folding over time, and carrying with it the continual promise of this repeat (Sharpe:2016). Producing the opening and potential for change thus becomes a finding of ways to move with/in this resonance; a riffing with the repeat, a playing by ear, a bodily feeling-through dissonance to tune into that which feels right (Lorde:1984). This nested present can be accessed through tapping into the bodily sensation of how we carry our histories with us (Baldwin:2017). Working-with the survival response – which once activated under duress, becomes stuck as a circulating imprint which the body holds (van der Kolk:2014) or is under the hold of – marks a deeper erotic attunement. Through somatic practices of breath and movement, listening to and following the felt sensation of constriction and expansion within the specificity of the live moment, an investigation into how to set up new circulation and the conditions required to do so takes place.

Ultimately live improvisation’s ability to create a continually responsive spatiotemporal nested surface through invention in dimensional ‘real' time challenges the idea of change as an ungraspable, transcendental horizon of queer futurity (Muñoz:2009). Instead, it is invention with/in the conditions of oppression and abuse that becomes a sensual, embodied emergent encounter of resistance; a leaning into and feeling of the blues that taps into the continual motion of the erotic to lift and re-circulate the weight of trauma from oppressive holdings containing abuse. This productive dissonance with internal-external limits is a vital proposal in which existing socio-political structures and systems can be challenged and changed through a responsive, queer topological thickening. This proposes the transshaping potentials of live improvisation as a collective ongoing form/ing of queer resistance, one that continually sets up and moves to its own emergent rhythm.

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Baldwin, J. (2017). ‘I Am Not Your Negro’. New York: Vintage Books.

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