Improvisation and the Creative Process: Dewey, Collingwood, and the Aesthetics of Spontaneity

Improvisation and the Creative Process: Dewey, Collingwood, and the Aesthetics of Spontaneity

Neglect of Improvisational Performance in Creativity Studies

Many fields studying creativity and the arts, including philosophy and psychology, have historically neglected improvisational performance. The primary focus has been on "product creativity," which involves activities resulting in objective, tangible products like paintings, sculptures, or musical scores. These products remain after the creative act is complete and typically involve a long period of work. In contrast, in improvisational performance, the creative process is the product, with the audience observing the creation as it unfolds.

R. Keith Sawyer's Research and Theoretical Framework

R. Keith Sawyer's primary research interest lies in everyday conversation, which he observed to be creatively improvised without a script. His empirical research focuses on three types of improvised discourse:

• Improvisational theater

• Children's fantasy play

• Everyday conversation

His theoretical writings use these improvisational phenomena to address issues in contemporary psychology and social theory, such as the tension between structure and practice, textuality, discourse, structure versus play, and heteroglossia. This theoretical framework has evolved from an empirically grounded effort to identify specific interactional mechanisms used in collective improvisational performance.

Philosophical Implications and the Relevance of Improvisation

This paper explores the philosophical implications of improvisational group performance, explicitly linking it to product-oriented arts (painting, writing, music composition) by drawing on:

• Dewey's model of "art as experience"

• Collingwood's model of "art as language"

Improvisational performance is relevant to the empirical study of all creative genres for two main reasons:

1. Accessibility of the Creative Process: The creative process in a creator's mind is often inaccessible to researchers, occurring in fits and starts over long periods. However, an improvised performance is created in the moment, onstage, making it easily observable.

2. Observable Collaboration: Many improvisational performance genres are fundamentally collaborative. Observing this collaboration onstage is relatively straightforward compared to the difficulties of observing the many forms of collaboration contributing to a work of art.

The Problem-Finding Artist: The Picasso Example

An illustrative example is the Claude Renoir film, The Mystery of Picasso, which captured Picasso's five-hour improvisational painting process using time-lapse photography. Picasso painted free-form, without a preconceived image, experimenting with colors, forms, and moods. He began with a reclining nude, deviated, and painted a matador and bull, then a Mediterranean harbor. Five hours later, he declared the canvas a failure and discarded it, stating, "Now that I begin to see where I'm going with it, I'll take a new canvas and start again." This shows that the process, even without a 'successful' product, generated new ideas.

This improvisational style is known by creativity researchers as problem-finding. Most successful painters use this approach, constantly searching for their visual problem while painting, essentially improvising their work rather than executing a detailed plan. This contrasts with a problem-solving style, where a detailed plan is formulated beforehand, and painting involves executing that predefined solution. This distinction was identified by psychologists Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi in their ten-year study of Master of Fine Arts students.

Process Versus Product in Art Theory

Historically, those who study the arts, including art historians, psychologists, aestheticians, and art critics, have focused on art products rather than the processes that generate them. Monroe Beardsley, for instance, argued that understanding the creative process "makes no difference at all" to the value of the art produced.

However, some influential critics, like Clement Greenberg, argued that artworks cannot be understood without considering process. Greenberg's view on modern abstract art was that "the avant-garde imitates the processes of art" rather than nature, making "the disciplines and processes of art and literature themselves" the subject of art.

Dewey's "Art as Experience"

The distinction between creative process and product was central to American pragmatism. John Dewey's aesthetic theory is based on the idea that "The product of art… is not the work of art." The work of art is a psychological process; it is "active and experienced. It is what the product does, its working" ((AE, p. 162) ). Dewey's theory naturally extends to the performing arts and improvisation, emphasizing that no work of art can be instantaneously perceived, as perception involves an accumulation in time, similar to hearing music or reading a novel ((AE, pp. 182-183) ).

Collingwood's Aesthetic Theory

R. G. Collingwood similarly distinguishes between the physical product and the work of art. For him, "The painted picture is not the work of art." Instead, its production is connected to the aesthetic activity, "with the creation of the imaginative experience which is the work of art." He strongly asserts that the visible, ostensible product is essentially irrelevant, claiming, "A work of art may be completely created when it has been created as a thing whose only place is in the artist's mind" ((PA, p. 130) ).

Critique of Collingwood and Dewey's Strengths

Collingwood's theory, however, is not entirely adequate for staged improvisation. His insistence that the true work of art occurs solely "in the head of the artist" leads him to dismiss live improvisation as merely incidental. For example, humming a tune is an accessory, not the principal aesthetic activity ((PA, p. 134) ). This reflects an "individualistic psychology" that fails to account for the social and interactional essence of creative processes in improvisational theater, which cannot be reduced to a single actor's mental inspiration.

In contrast, Dewey's pragmatist framework emphasizes "action in the world" and the practical effects of that action, moving beyond a focus on what is solely "in the head" of the artist.

Emergence in Improvisational Interaction

Improvisational theater scenes are emergent, a concept dating back to the 19th-century philosopher George Henry Lewes and continued in contemporary theories like connectionism and distributed cognition. Pragmatist G. H. Mead (1930) defined emergence: "The emergent when it appears is always found to follow from the past, but before it appears, it does not, by definition, follow from the past." This highlights the contingency of improvisational interaction: while a retrospective view reveals coherence, each social act offers a range of creative options, any of which could have led to a radically different performance.

An example from an improvisational theater sketch demonstrates this:

• Actor A mimes driving a vehicle by sitting and holding an imaginary steering wheel.

• Actor B approaches.

• A asks: "On or off?"

• B replies: "I'm getting on, sir."

This brief exchange rapidly establishes a context: A is a professional driver (e.g., bus, plane), and B is a paying customer. Initial gestures and utterances leave many options open, leading to a "combinatorial explosion" of potential narratives. Yet, through interaction, a coherent dramatic frame emerges, guiding subsequent dialogue, for example, establishing A as an impatient bus driver and B as a potentially shifty passenger. The dramatic frame is dynamic, continually changing and emerging from the collective actions of all actors.

Mead considered emergence a fundamental analytical category and the paramount issue for social science, presenting it as the task of philosophy to reconcile scientific determination with the emergence of the novel:
It is the task of the philosophy of today to bring into congruence with each other this universality of determination which is the text of modern science, and the emergence of the novel.

Five Characteristics of Improvisation for Comparing Dewey and Collingwood

Sawyer uses five key characteristics of improvisation to compare Dewey's and Collingwood's theories, arguing that both implicitly base their aesthetics on a theory of the creative process as improvisation, even when discussing product creativity:

1. Emphasis on creative process rather than creative product.

2. Emphasis on creative processes that are problem-finding rather than problem-solving.

3. Comparison of art to everyday language use.

4. Importance of collaboration, with fellow artists and with the audience.

5. The role of the ready-made, or cliché, in art.

Sawyer contends that focusing on improvisation reveals many similarities between these philosophers, as their theories unite on all five characteristics. By applying their theories to improvisational theater, insights can be gained into where each theory might benefit from elaboration, suggesting properties for a more comprehensive aesthetic theory of improvisational creativity.

The Neglect of Performance-Oriented Arts and Sawyer's Interdisciplinary Approach

Just as psychology and aesthetics have neglected improvisation, many performance-oriented fields, such as folkloristics, ethnomusicology, and musicology, have done the same. Existing research often provides ethnographic descriptions of musical and verbal performance genres, like jazz, Indian raga, Javanese gamelan, or public verbal performance in various cultures.

Sawyer integrates insights from several empirical studies of group verbal improvisation, including improvisational theater, ritual verbal performance, everyday small talk, and children's fantasy play dialogues. Initially, he found a complete absence of psychological research on performance creativity (improvised or scripted). Therefore, he expanded his search to other disciplines, drawing on semiotics, folkloristics, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis for theoretical models. His focus on discourse led him to Dewey and Collingwood, whose theories emphasize the communicative and interactional properties of art, a contrast to the prevailing bias towards "culturally valued art forms" like abstract painting or orchestral composition.

Contrasting Improvisational and Product Creativity

The following table (summarizing Figure 1 in the original text) outlines key differences:

Improvisational creativity involves a collective creative process that constitutes the product: an ephemeral public performance. Examples include small-group jazz ensembles collaborating spontaneously or improvisational theater actors collectively creating emergent dialogue. Here, the process itself is the performance and the product. Because of its ephemeral nature and lack of a permanent tangible product, improvisational creativity has often been neglected by traditional aesthetic analysis. However, it likely represents a more common and accessible form of creativity, evident in everyday social interactions like conversation, teaching, parenting, and mentoring, which, despite their importance, resist aesthetic analysis due to their non-product-generating nature.

In contrast, product creativity allows the artist an unlimited period to contemplate, edit, and revise the work, with the creative process often largely invisible to the public before the finished product is displayed. The Picasso film is exceptional precisely because it allows viewers to observe this usually private, improvisational process of creation, challenging common myths that inspiration always precedes execution or that artists never edit their work. Psychologist and aesthetic studies, by focusing almost exclusively on finished "products," contribute to these myths and neglect the dynamic, lived experience of the creative process.