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Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art

Stephen Nachmanovitch

4.13 · Rating details · 1,585 Ratings · 119 Reviews

This book is about the inner sources of spontaneous creation. It is about where art in the widest sense comes from. It is about why we create and what we learn when we do. It is about the flow of unhindered creative energy: the joy of making art in all its varied forms.

Free Play is directed toward people in any field who want to contact, honor, and strengthen their own cr

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Paperback, 224 pages

Published May 1st 1991 by Tarcherperigee (first published January 11th 1990)

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Aug 20, 2015 Janet rated it it was amazing

Shelves: best-books-about-writing

The right book at the right time saves lives. Man, you can say that about Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art. The thing about play in art, is it's a sign of strength to spare, wind to spare, like someone running a marathon who breaks out into a pirouette. Sometimes working on a long project, the task just seems monstrous--like trying to build a gothic cathedral all by yourself. This book is a reminder, for a writer in long form, that it's not stone on stone, a heavy, exhausting thing. That The right book at the right time saves lives. Man, you can say that about Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art. The thing about play in art, is it's a sign of strength to spare, wind to spare, like someone running a marathon who breaks out into a pirouette. Sometimes working on a long project, the task just seems monstrous--like trying to build a gothic cathedral all by yourself. This book is a reminder, for a writer in long form, that it's not stone on stone, a heavy, exhausting thing. That play, like the free jazz that the violinist author Nachmanovitch loves, makes heavy work light. That there are other ways to solve problems, other ways to approach the page, and that improvisation, the lightness of it, the in-the-momentness of its playfulness, IS the 'air that falls through the net' that Neruda describes.

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Here's my favorite part so far-- on editing.

"In producing large works… we are perforce taking the results of many inspirations and melding them together into a flowing structure that has its own integrity and endures through time…. We arrange them, cook them, render them down, digest them. We add, subtract, reframe, shift, break part, melt together. The play of revision and editing transforms the raw into the cooked. This is a whole art unto itself, of vision and revision, playing again with the half-baked products of our prior play. …

"Editing must come from the same inspired joy and abandon as free improvisation…. There is a stereotyped belief that the muse in us acts from inspiration, while the editor in us acts from reason and judgment. But if we leave our imp or improviser out of the process, re-vision becomes impossible. If I see the paragraph I wrote last month as mere words on a page, they become dead and so do I…

"Some elements of artistic editing: 1. deep feeling for the intentions beneath the surface; 2. sensual love of the language; 3. sense of elegance; and 4. ruthlessness. The first three can perhaps be summarized under the category of good taste, which involvers sensation, sense of balance and knowledge of the medium, leavened with an appropriate sense of outrageousness…."

I will definitely put Free Play on the shelf right next to The Art Spirit within arm's reach of my writing desk, to remind me about the air that falls through the net. I can't be reminded of it enough.

...more

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Nov 24, 2008 Ganesh rated it it was amazing

Shelves: creativity

In the fall, I discovered this book in my boyfriend's apartment.

As I was falling in love, this excerpt resonated deeply with me:

"Though love is a material act (whether sexual love, friendship, parenting, or any other kind of devotion, love is always an act), it lifts us out of the ordinary world into a kind of mystic participation with one another. We tune, more and more finely, our capacity to sense the other person's subtleties. We are willing to be infinitely patient and persevering. In a se ...more

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Feb 03, 2010 Nottyboy rated it liked it

Did not get interesting until the middle, where there were some concrete suggestions on how to play around with limits, the interplay between creativity and judgement.

The beginning and the end of the book are weakest, in my opinion. They are filled with too much pseudo-spiritual riffs, or get off track with rants against mainstream society, neither of which did much for me.

All that said, I still think it was a worthwhile read for what was there regarding improvisation.

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Jan 21, 2009 Jesse rated it did not like it

This book really bothered me. I started out just disagreeing with the way things were worded. But by 3/4ths of the way through, I couldn't take it any more, and stopped reading. The book is poorly organized. It was missing structural guidelines such as transition paragraphs, or a general outline in the beginning. I didn't know where it was going. Many of the chapters seemed incomplete. But this was not the main thing that bothered me. I could have dealt with that. What pissed me off the most was ...more

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Apr 13, 2009 Flissy rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2009

A lot of things rang true with what I have come to believe about creativity and my own process. My number one creative mantra lately has been "All creative acts have value." Knitting, baking, drawing, dancing, doing yoga, making up silly songs to the cats... they all are equal in getting juice flowing, removing blocks, and revealing new things to incorporate in my art/dance/yoga. Another thing I found really interesting is that he stresses the importance of allowing your internal muse and intern ...more

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Nov 22, 2017 Anna Granberg rated it really liked it

This is an interesting read on creativity and improvisation to come back to. I read it with pen in hand and highlighted the parts that spoke to me. If I reread, I feel like I might find other parts that capture me next time.

Some parts of the book were too filled with spiritual flummery for my taste, and I didn't like that some is written like if it were the objective truth, even though it's the writer's opinion, theories and own experiences. The writing is also unnecessarily complicated, often I ...more

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Mar 25, 2010 Holly rated it it was amazing

Shelves: writing-craft

I read this book at least twice. It worked. I was trying to be a serious musician and artist; I'd just discovered that I loved writing. I wish I could remember more, but there was something about the description of the human need to create though improvisation (play) that resonated with me.

I might just have to read it again.

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Mar 25, 2008 Jon rated it it was amazing

Man do I love this book. No really. I've read it four times at different points in my life and each time I find something new and awesome. If, for some reason, you want to know my philosophy on creativity and the purpose of art, this is the book to start with.

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Jul 26, 2010 Marilyn McEntyre rated it it was amazing

One of my favorite books. I've reread it several times, and referred to it often. An inspiring reminder of what it means to be awake to the moment and to receive its possibilities with gratitude and imagination.

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Sep 09, 2007 Maria rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: To all artist, and anyone who loves to play!

Shelves: spiritual

This is one of my favorit books! I go back to it often when I need a reminder about the role of play and creativity in life. This book is filled with stories, and lessons about the bigs and smalls of life. The take home message is: Relax, and bring play and into all aspects of life!

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Jul 30, 2009 Samantha rated it it was amazing

If you are an artist of any sort, read this book.

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Mar 06, 2016 Malcolm rated it really liked it

During the late 1980s and early 1990s I worked in a bookstore that managed to survive the mega-chain onslaught and political shifts that killed off most of the independent literary stores and others such as the local specialist feminist and the Marxist/leftist book store as well as quite a few of the second hand stores. Across the road from us was another survivor, specialising in New Age and similar publications. Like many independents, we relied on the high turnover of a few titles to allow us During the late 1980s and early 1990s I worked in a bookstore that managed to survive the mega-chain onslaught and political shifts that killed off most of the independent literary stores and others such as the local specialist feminist and the Marxist/leftist book store as well as quite a few of the second hand stores. Across the road from us was another survivor, specialising in New Age and similar publications. Like many independents, we relied on the high turnover of a few titles to allow us to keep a broad set of literary and non-fiction books with a much lower turnover: now we’d call that a long tail. Every few weeks, at our regular staff meetings we’d discuss sections of the store we thought we’d like to know more about, and at most, if not every second of those, someone would observe that the ‘north west corner’ was a bit of a mystery, and we’d all nod, slightly perplexed by direction until we realised, this as the area labelled ‘self-help’ (although nowadays that is more likely to be ‘body, mind, spirit’ or some such (perhaps even popular psychology).

In my case, not only was this corner of the store a mystery area, it also seemed like a big pile of hokum – truisms for the desperate bundled up inside usually some crudely articulated version of ‘Eastern’ mysticism as a foil for the weaknesses of the ‘West’ with its ‘alienating rationality’. All this meant that I was more than a little unsettled when, acting on the advice of a musician friend whose work I respect, I picked this up to find the publishers had classified it ‘self-help’: my retail bête noir. The book has many of the characteristics of the ‘self-help’ style, at least those few I have dabbled in – the breezy knowingness, the magpie approach to various ‘Eastern’ religious concepts, the step-by-step progress through the problems of our inner being. To his credit though, Nachmanovitch manages to avoid the ‘here’s the answer to everything’ tone of many in the genre, or the serial re-visioning and restatement of one idea in book after book after…... A key aspect of this ‘avoidance’ is that in his day job he seems to be a practitioner of the cultural/creative work that he is dealing with. And it here that my recommender-friend comes into the mix: Nachmanovitch, the violinist, has been recommended to me by a singer, and voice teacher.

So, I read this adopting two standpoints: as a writer (OK, so academic writing but still that relies on a particular creative style), and as on who intermittently ventures into the scholarship of play (basing this on the title, Free Play). Of course, there is a whole bunch of play theories we call on but the one I kept coming back to is a set of ideas that sees almost anything as play if we approach it with the ‘right’ attitude – that is, an attitude of playfulness (a ludic disposition). We’ve all seen that, the ‘game’ that should be fun but is a dull grind – I see it all too often in sports matches – because the ‘players’ did not approach the game with a ludic expectation. A ludic attitude can make pretty much anything fun, but drawing on the work of one play scholar, the cultural historian Johan Huizinga, ludus is one aspect of play while the other paidia seen by French philosopher of play Roger Caillois as having four stages – disturbance, tumult, fantasy and imagination. By my reading, Nachmaovitch’s Free Play works best as paidia (there is an essay about this I have co-authored in a recent edited collection of philosophical papers).

Adopting this standpoint gave me a basis on which to make sense of Nachmanovitch’s approach and when I cut through all the dressing of the tao and Buddha and other ‘Eastern’ spiritual trappings this is a pretty good book about a ludic disposition and the limitations placed on its enactment by the constraints of the ‘way things should be done’. (btw: as a non-believer I can see many of the same ‘overcoming alienation’ ideas deployed from these religions in forms of monotheism – Christianity, Islam and Judaism – and they’re not that mystical.) What is more, it is full of pretty sensible advice about ways to deal with diversions, distractions and barriers to creative work – be it music, visual or plastic art, sport, writing, dance or pretty much anything else where we need to allow ourselves to be absorbed. That said, the third section of the four that make up the book (‘Obstacles and Openings’), did in places get a little prescriptive, although without falling into the trap of lists or imperatives.

Many years ago I recall sitting in my local pub with a (still) well-known poet. For some reason we’d got onto a long rambling discussion about organising cultural events – and I recall him saying that nothing was spontaneous, or rather that all spontaneity was rehearsed. Throughout this book I found myself remembering that conversation of over 35 years ago and realised that Nachmanovitch was explaining the rehearsal than Sam (the poet) had identified as the basis of successful spontaneity. What’s more, he manages to avoid the psycho-babble of so much of the current writing on creativity, but alas he remains stuck in an individualising discourse (there is little here about collective work and stimulating environments) but even with those limitations I expect I’ll be coming back to this quite regularly – even if it is to do more (or less) than seek inspiration for tasks for my students, who seem to park their ludus at the door. ...more

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Apr 09, 2010 Marydanielle rated it it was amazing

I have several guidebooks for living and this is one of my most precious. I've shared it, relied upon it, and re-read it. Interestingly, though it is by a musician, it is very apt and helpful in any field of endeavor. When I first read it I was working in a law office and had to design little interactive macros for legal documents so that attorneys could use their computers more easily and this book helped me do that. It has also helped me design my garden, decorate my house, find my way through ...more

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May 06, 2013 Tine! rated it really liked it

Recommended to Tine! by: Christov Churchward

Another book representative of my recently-favourite genre: "genre-less". Yes, it's sold as an improv skill-booster, but Nachmanovitch dips into every circle of the human hell and ties the ends together neatly with a taut viola string. When I mentioned to the friend who let me borrow this book ("it's meant to be passed around") that this was the author's only published book, he shrugged and riffed, "he said it all". Truth. Unfortunately, as the author is wailing away with his handsaw of personal ...more

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Jan 31, 2017 David Sasaki rated it really liked it

I read this book back in 2002 when I aspired to be a roving, down-and-out, bohemian novelist. I remember staying up late into the night underlining passages that felt like a clear expression of a worldview I had never considered. Nachmanovitch asks us to treat every moment of our lives as an input to a creative project: be it a painting, a short story, a computer program, or a story to be re-told.

As I look back over my journals from that time of life, I constantly carried creative inspiration. M ...more

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Sep 17, 2012 Gwen rated it really liked it

"A poetic embrace for the role that muse plays...beyond art. A refreshing balance to reductionist efforts to simply map our way into uncovering the mystery of creativity.

People interested in "the five steps to improving your creativity" will find this book highly unsatisfying. People who are intimately familiar with the angst of bringing the new into the world will recognize the undercurrents of brilliance and frustration that coexist with any true new undertaking or inspirational voyage.

Message ...more

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Mar 02, 2014 Beth Bacon rated it it was amazing

Shelves: nonfiction

This book ruminates on the nature of creative genius and proposes that we all have genius in us, if we just transcend rational selfhood, express that unbounded expression, and translate it back out through practiced craft. He doesn't tell us exactly how to "transfer this receptivity, compassion, and free flow of mind to everyone and everything we touch" (p. 169) but it's inspiring to know that free flow is possible for all of us.

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Mar 04, 2009 Kat rated it really liked it

Philosophy of improvisation--cool. The author is an expert in about 85 million different fields, and it helps him write a truly interdisciplinary book that will have some relevance to just about anyone. I only got half-way through this before returning it to the library. I plan to buy it; it's way too dense to read through quickly. The writing is clear, there are just too many ideas in this little book.

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Dec 03, 2015 Mauricio Lopes rated it it was amazing

Shelves: art

This is about creativity and improvisation in general. It is mostly about music and I am a painter, but it still managed to become the most influential book on the manner I establish project goals and strategy in my work.

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May 09, 2012 Sergej van Middendorp rated it really liked it

So far, this is a treasure trove of inspirational gems. It is very carefully crafted, without losing the connection to the core theme of improvisation. It is a book of wisdom and inspiration. Very valuable. Saving the fifth star until finished.

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Jan 12, 2015 Luisa Asiul rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

A fine little book that I suspect I will come back to time and time again. Creation is hard work and Nachmanovitch will not do your heavy lifting for you, but he will point you to the moon (even—perhaps especially—if you have seen it before).

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Jul 22, 2010 Dennis rated it it was amazing

Shelves: theater, teaching

One of the best books I read on creativity.

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Jan 16, 2012 Ashley rated it it was amazing

a must read for anyone who wants to develop their creativity. i read this book in college and have revisited it multiple times.

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Dec 27, 2010 Terri R rated it really liked it

Love the book. The book has taught me to turn discipline and learning into an adventure--- and in fact helped me become a better chef and hostess by preparing and the being playful.

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Mar 01, 2015 Sheldon Russell rated it it was amazing

This is a powerful book, the kind of book that requires more than a single reading. I'll be back.

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Feb 02, 2015 Susan Richards rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, art

Free Play is wonderful to re-read, or to just revisit some of my underlinings. It continually speaks to me anew. It is always a source of inspiration.

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