Impossible Partnerships: Improvisation
2pm to 4.30pm, 1st February 2017 @ Somerset House

The Culture Capital Exchange, in collaboration with Middlesex University London, invite you to a roundtable discussion about Improvisation and its role in the exploration of cross-disciplinarity and as a boost of creative potential across practices and a means to manage an increasingly more volatile and uncertain economic, political and commercial landscape.

Improvisation is heavily connected to the world of Performing Arts, but what happens when we apply it to Business, Management, Finance, and any other discipline? The discussion will help participants to understand the potential of Improvisation in their own work. This informal session will present improvisation ideas and techniques, which will help bridge the gaps across disciplines. The diversity of expertise present at the table will prompt a general discussion on how to take advantage and benefit from this multi-faceted discipline.

Potential research topics to be discussed include:

• How can we incorporate elements of Improvisation in our everyday practice?
• What are the most effective tools that we can use, to encourage teamwork, collaboration, networking, brainstorming?
• Can Improvisation be used to improve our Research and our Teaching methods?
• How can we encourage colleagues who are not ready, to include Improvisatory elements, through a collaborative process?
• How can we apply improvisation within companies to realise emergent change strategies?

This Impossible Partnership will be led by Professor Vida Midgelow, Professor of Dance and Choreographic Practices at Middlesex University, and PhD researcher and project manager  Clive Powell, who runs workshops on how to apply improvisation to manage emergent change within small and large companies. We welcome contributions from all those who actively use improvisation in their work or practice, to those who have the curiosity to use it in the future.

Impossible Partnerships: a series of small-scale, informal, convivial meetings, developed and curated by TCCE to boost the collaborative potential of projects and topics, in order to support new networks between research and the creative sectors. Throughout the year, we map common trends among researchers and entrepreneurs, tackling topics from a variety of angles. As a result, we foster aggregate of collaborative networks will thrive, develop across institutions, and reach out beyond the academy.