The imperative of the present: Improvisation and the ageing body

This article examines an interdisciplinary improvisation practice that brings together dancer Olivia Millard and theatre-maker Kate Hunter. Drawing on their performance work, Audio Logical, the authors unfold their separate and interwoven practices as they respond, react, move and travel together through the crossovers and meeting points in the genealogies of their combined 50-year performance history. This immersive practice has brought considerations to the fore of sustaining a practice; what does it mean to build a body of work – and a body? How do we sustain an embodied practice now and into the future? Audio Logical engages with the imperative of the present while contemplating past experiences and embodied histories. The artists also acknowledge their ageing female bodies unapologetically. Rather than representing a loss of youth, the elder body is proposed as a site of revolutionary potential.