“It is indeed necessary to improvise, it is necessary to improvise well,” Jacques Derrida told a crowd of unsuspecting Ornette Coleman devotees who’d come to hear Coleman perform with German pianist Joachim Kühn at the Parc de la Villette on July 1, 1997. Coleman’s fans did not react well to the experiment: in fact, the heckling eventually caused Derrida to leave the stage before he’d finished reading (improvising, pretending to read) his text, despite Coleman’s encouragement. Yet while Derrida’s performance might have gone awry (he describes it as a disaster unlike anything that had happened to him in his years of standing before large audiences), the event (or non-event) enables us to delve further into what Erin Graff Zivin insists is a necessary encounter between deconstruction and improvisation.
Join us for a miniseminar on this encounter, led by Professor Graff Zivin, Thursday 20 March, 4pm. We’ll read Derrida’s interview of Coleman as well as his piece “Play – The First Name.” RSVP to interccect at gmail for pdfs.
UIC University Hall, room 1850 (18th floor, 601 S Morgan, Blue Line: UIC Halsted).
mark your calendars now for our upcoming events:
7 April with special guest Andrew DeWaard on his new book Derivative Media
8 May InterCcECT stalwart Adam Kotsko discusses his new book Late Star Trek
InterCcECT 