Diagramming the Possible: Situated Improvisation as a Way of Inhabiting Professional Worlds

Abstract In this study, we build on our previous work that examines the creative dancemaking collaboration between choreographers and arborist-dancers as they work together in rehearsals to create a performance featuring the workaday skillfulness of urban foresters. They face unique challenges and contingencies because to step into each other’s professional worlds requires a provisionally shared way of thinking that cuts across their diverse experiences; therefore, the two groups create external representations with their bodies (i.e., marking) to bridge epistemic divides. We extend our previous analysis of this microethnographic context—analyzing a routine where an arborist drives a loader truck to distribute mulch—by further demonstrating the semiotic purchase of Charles Goodwin’s interactional semiotics. Goodwin’s notion of “situated improvisation” is especially helpful for making sense of the embodied diagrams that emerge in marking together—a jointly crafted conceptual world makes perceptual experiences of both groups readable and deployable for dance creation.