Free Improvisation As a Connection Tool: Searching For Technical Proficiency, Reconnection and Creativity in Flute Practice
(2025)
author(s): Elisa Bartolome Gomez
published in: KC Research Portal
The pursuit of perfection and the pressure to continually progress often overshadow the intrinsic joy and freedom that initially drew musicians to their profession. After a negative experience within my studies, I wanted to rediscover the essence of music-making through the lens of a specific tool: free improvisation.
The research is driven by an autoethnographic approach where I focus on a specific angle within the broader topic of free improvisation: exploring how incorporating this tool affects the different parts of flute playing by putting the focus on how it can make us connect with our instrument, be more aware of our playing, of our body and to expand our creativity and imagination.
Adopting a qualitative methodology, this research includes an exhaustive literature review, a journal on my reflections in collaborative sessions with a professional on the field and a data analysis of the survey answers by both professionals and students connected with this tool.
Through immersive sessions conducted by Anne La Berge, I was guided across the possibilities of this tool. These are captured in a field journal where I reflect on topics as body awareness, skill development, creativity and motivational shifts triggered by the improvisational process in my own experience.
Additionally, the insights collected from the questionnaires bring different points of view in the matter, offering diverse experiences and valuable perspectives.
In summary, this study highlights the potential of free improvisation as a tool for reconnection, self-discovery and artistic growth as a flute player.
Tracing Practices – questioning and circulating archives
(2023)
author(s): Per Roar, Camilla Graff Junior, Luisa Greenfield, Myna Trustram
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
Our exposition comes out of a conversation and explorative research process about the performative potential of archives, both publicly and personally, shaped by four different artistic mediums and practices in film, performance art, choreography and essay writing. The shared medium has been through the use of text and online communication.
The research was developed through ongoing monthly meetings and notes that were taken since April 2019. From those meetings, we laid a structure where we each created our parts of what became the score for "Living and Lasting", which we first performed in Oslo and then in Berlin in 2022*. This score is the pivot point of our exposition.
Our working process includes considerable elements of risk and surprise by alternating between collaborative meetings and individual work. The first time we perform a new piece none of us know exactly what or how the others will present. Along with the audience, we experience portions of the text, movements, and media put together for the first time, without knowing whether the whole thing will coalesce, diverge, or fall apart.
(*) In Oslo at the 2022 Nordic Summer University (NSU) and in Berlin at the symposium “Who tells y/our story?” by the artistic research project MEMORYWORK (2021-2024).