Black dance festival highlights improvisation as performance, not process
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This weekend, a Minneapolis dance festival puts improvisation center stage — not as a rehearsal technique, but as the performance itself.
One of those performers is Taylor West, who’s exploring what it means to create movement in the moment.
“I took improvisation class or classes in college and have learned about the technique of improvisation,” West said. “I’ve been in processes with choreographers where they asked dancers to improvise a little bit.”
West admits she’s still fairly new to using improvisation as the product of a process
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“It’s been a very interesting learning, discovering process for myself,” she said.
West is developing a piece for the 2025 Black Dance Improvisation Festival, which is taking place Friday and Saturday in Minneapolis. She is one of several artists whose work will be featured.
The festival is organized by Leslie Parker, a Twin Cities-based dance scholar and choreographer. She says it offers artists a space to explore their connection to improvisation and its cultural meaning.
Parker says that for Black dancers, improvisation isn’t just a technique — it’s often tied to questions of identity, history and cultural legacy.
“Sometimes, artists want to know more about improvisation and more about, ‘OK, what does it mean to be a Black body in improvisation, and what is this lineage?’ And then ‘do I fit?’” Parker said.
“This is an opportunity for that, for them to explore even more.”
She is the founder of the Leslie Parker Dance Project, which engages in research, performance, and training opportunities that explore and advance Black culture. She points out that improvisation is an art form expressed through different mediums like music, visual arts and dance.
“It is a way that I think about community and bridging communities around conversations, and the way that I imagine what a Pan-Black African experience could look like in the dance community, surrounding the world of Black improvisation,” she said.
While Parker studies the pedagogy of Black dance improvisation, she says the festival focuses less on technique and more on how each artist approaches the form.
“It’s not just a tool for exploration. It is the end of what it is that we’re doing, and it is a very thoughtful process,” Parker said. “It requires a degree of reflection and taking the time to understand what an individual’s process is.”
For West, that process has been a sacred one, that has led to reflections beyond dancing.
“To live as a Black person is to improvise, in every sense of the word.”
The Black Dance Improvisation Festival will be held at Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis.
