This talk will examine the relations of co-presence in improvisations. While improvising, we usually tend to be in touch with our partner’s thoughts, feelings, movements, with the atmosphere of the environment, etc., instead of having predetermined ideas of what is to happen. Improvisation then highlights receptiveness to the other’s presence and acceptance of what lies around us. But a first paradox appears: it seems that presence is not an innate ability we can simply embody every day or usually perceive from the other’s body, but is rather a practice that needs to be trained from the relations with others. A second paradox may then stand out: while being open to others, we are ego-lessor partly self-dispossessed, but in the meantime that self-dispossession  opens to a new self-presence. So, we can ask ourselves how such a situation of co-presence between the improviser and the general context could create both absence and presence within the self, both passivity and activity from the ego.

Recent graduate from a master’s degree in philosophy at UCA (University of Côte d’Azur, Nice), Alessandra Randazo is a PHD student in second year, in UCA, where she also gives lectures. Her research takes part into CRHI’s activities, the Research Centre on History of Ideas, where she works, more particularly, on a thesis entitled « Event and Performance : an encounter between philosophy, theatre and dance »,under the supervision of Professor Grégori Jean.