Sten Rudstrøm’s solo improvisations have been described as having a bottled and shaken intensity. With his savage humor he binds together the scary, scandalous and romantic in provocative and intriguing ways. The panorama of characters, bare-bones honesty and rawness, lets us see the feelings of foolishness, fear or confusion in our lives and lifts the viewers up to get a sharper glimpse of themselves, their relationships with people and the environment around them.
Improvisation #___? is part of an on-going solo improvisation series of evening length shows (45-60 minutes) that I have been numbering since the early 2000’s.
In solo improvisation practice, I always have at least 3 partners to work with:
1) my body — the kinesthetic sensations that occur inside of me;
2) my mind — the mental activity generated from my present moment experience: thoughts, attitudes, judgments, analysis, etc.;
3) the room — the improvisation itself.
After some years of practice, I began to realize that there isn’t a place for “I don’t know” to exist in an improvisation. There always is a something. Believing that there is “nothing” is choosing to believe the mind’s judgment of the moment is more important than the present experience of the experience. Artaud said something similar to “The problem with man is that he looked out at emptiness, and saw nothing, when the space was full.” This is exactly what my negative-thinking mind tries to do inside of an on-going improvisation: it tries very hard to find “nothing” in the emptiness when the emptiness is full. It is the discipline of remembering to change focus, to question the authority of the mind, that brings me back to the body experience. The body experience constantly giving me information via a never-ending flow of sensations. To treat that as nothing is a lie. It’s where the harvest comes from.