Our story

The work of collaborators and IMPROV SPACES Co-Directors electric acoustic harpist Alex Chang and percussionist Adam Forman stems from the larger framework of believing that the boundaries separating arts practices and performance can be constricting.  Interdisciplinary improvisation can be a model for the blurring of these boundaries of form from jazz, folk, popular and classical music, poetry, visual art, computer/human interactions and embodied movement through experimental practice. Improvisation permits, allows, and enables with an element of freedom while promoting a safe space to take chances. 

Fred Moten’s decolonial idea of “the consent not to be a single being” proposes the idea of refusing object-hood and forced subject-hood and that music refuses becoming object. In their collaborative practice, Alex and Adam are rethinking their interrelations with each other and the beyond human —  our collective sentience, our emotional and empathic relations around us.

Their co-created frameworks among collaborators permit interdisciplinary improvisation based on themes, sounds, textures, moods — an open dialogue across fields, perpetuating a potentiality of what can be and not what’s expected.

As artists, they push against the eventual nature of performance, and are instead more interested in developing an ongoing relationship between interdisciplinary collaborators. The workshop and dialogic structure of their collaborative practice counters the idea of the final performance so that the focus is on becoming rather than a means to an eventual end. In many cases, the process itself becomes the performance.

Alex and Adam hope that IMPROV SPACES can help to serve as a hub in the Saratoga/Capital region and provide resources for new music with a community of interdisciplinary collaborators.  They’re seeking to introduce the practice of improvisation to the general public through site-specific work with live performance, virtual interdisciplinary jams, digital projects, animations, and performative workshops.