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Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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 creative powers. It integrates material from a wide variety of sources among the arts, sciences, and spiritual traditions of humanity. Filled with unusual quotes, amusing and illuminating anecdotes, and original metaphors, it reveals how inspiration arises within us, how that inspiration may be blocked, derailed or obscured by certain unavoidable facts of life, and how finally it can be liberated - how we can be liberated - to speak or sing, write or paint, dance or play, with our own authentic voice.
The whole enterprise of improvisation in life and art, of recovering free play and awakening creativity, is about being true to ourselves and our visions. It brings us into direct, active contact with boundless creative energies that we may not even know we had.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 11, 1990
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 263 reviews
May 7, 2021
Tenía mucha curiosidad por leer este libro, que parece ser sobre improvisación, y algo de eso cubre, pero es más sobre creatividad. Tiene cosas muy lindas, porque conecta la creatividad, y el arte, con cosas profundas, que van más allá de nuestra conciencia. Me encantaría que lo leyera cualquier persona que se dedique a la pedagogía, toca el Zen, habla de Jung, cita a e.e.cummings, a Henry Miller. Lo que quiero decir es que sus referencias son muy variadas. A momentos me parecía que idealizaba mucho es de “la vida de artista“, pero justo lo bueno que tiene es que lo abre hacia cualquier persona, y defiende que la creatividad es algo que tenemos cada persona que existimos, como parte de nuestra humanidad. Y con eso suscribo. El resultado puede ser bueno o malo, pero es el proceso creativo mismo lo que cuenta. Me hizo pensar en “Creative Quest“ de Questlove, un libro que también habla sobre estos procesos. Muy recomendado.
April 17, 2016
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.
*************************
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.
*************************
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.
February 9, 2010
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.
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.
June 25, 2009
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 sense, genius equals compassion, because both involve the infinite capacity for taking pains. The great lovers, the great world reformers and peacemakers, are those who have passed beyond their individual ego demands and are able to hear the cries of the world. The motive is not self-gratification, but gratification of a bigger being of which we are part. Genius and compassion signify a transcendent, painstaking thoroughness and attention to detail--taking the trouble to take care of our body and mind and everyone else's body and mind.
This is exactly what we do when we set out on the adventure of loving another human being. We learn, the easy or the hard, to cultivate receptivity and mutual, expressive emancipation."
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 sense, genius equals compassion, because both involve the infinite capacity for taking pains. The great lovers, the great world reformers and peacemakers, are those who have passed beyond their individual ego demands and are able to hear the cries of the world. The motive is not self-gratification, but gratification of a bigger being of which we are part. Genius and compassion signify a transcendent, painstaking thoroughness and attention to detail--taking the trouble to take care of our body and mind and everyone else's body and mind.
This is exactly what we do when we set out on the adventure of loving another human being. We learn, the easy or the hard, to cultivate receptivity and mutual, expressive emancipation."
April 27, 2016
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.
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.
April 13, 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 internal editor to run parallel to each other. When the editor crosses the muses path, you can get blocked by negative inner dialogue, etc. BINGO. It's given me something to think about while I work out challenges in my dance, particularly.
May 4, 2020
An essential read for anyone creative, and pairs well with The Artist’s Way; in fact, Nachmanovitch lays out some concepts around creativity much better than Julia Cameron does. Reading this is really helping me let go of music as a career so that I may regain it as a love and passion. It’s worth just reading it, but ultimately, it derails most of what I learned in school, and I can’t help wondering if I’d embodied this outlook sooner what my life would look like. Oh well!!
January 10, 2025
یکی از بهترین کتاب هایی بود که در زمینه هنر و خلاقیت خوندم
مطمئنم بارها و بارها بهش برمیگردم
5 ستاره ی کامل
مطمئنم بارها و بارها بهش برمیگردم
5 ستاره ی کامل
November 22, 2017
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 found I could rephrase a couple of paragraphs in just a sentence or two. Then I was like 'oh, was that what you meant, couldn't you just have said so!'
But all in all I found it well worth reading.
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 found I could rephrase a couple of paragraphs in just a sentence or two. Then I was like 'oh, was that what you meant, couldn't you just have said so!'
But all in all I found it well worth reading.
August 8, 2024
A million stars. I’m not even kidding.
I cannot express how utterly mesmerising this has been. I just know I will read it several times in my life. It is a rare and fine work of writing—just the right words, the right pace, no superfluous sentences or chapters or passages. Just enough, to express the inexpressible. Seriously, this is my new bible. No amount of words or turns of phrases could express my astonishment and reverence for this book.
I cannot express how utterly mesmerising this has been. I just know I will read it several times in my life. It is a rare and fine work of writing—just the right words, the right pace, no superfluous sentences or chapters or passages. Just enough, to express the inexpressible. Seriously, this is my new bible. No amount of words or turns of phrases could express my astonishment and reverence for this book.
July 26, 2010
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.
March 7, 2022
Two names sum up my my review of this fantastic book: Keith Jarrett and Gregory Bateson... well OK, and the fact that Nachmanovitch weaves together wisdom threads East and West, ancient and modern, in the arts and sciences to create this little masterwork on creativity. But if you know these two giants of creativity, you'll already know a lot about this book.
Keith Jarrett's life and work are a perfect example of Free Play in art music (jazz and classical) and Gregory Bateson's life and work (his friend and mentor and one of the founders of cybernetics) stand as a multi-disciplinary edifice of how to think about play, creativity, and freedom in the context of biological evolution, emergence theory, and mind-as-biological organization and embodiment. Embodied emergence, free play and the power of limits, yin and yang...
You Matter: feel inspired, create something!
Keith Jarrett's life and work are a perfect example of Free Play in art music (jazz and classical) and Gregory Bateson's life and work (his friend and mentor and one of the founders of cybernetics) stand as a multi-disciplinary edifice of how to think about play, creativity, and freedom in the context of biological evolution, emergence theory, and mind-as-biological organization and embodiment. Embodied emergence, free play and the power of limits, yin and yang...
You Matter: feel inspired, create something!
October 25, 2025
I desperately do not want to sound pretentious when I write this review, but this book was so internally polarizing of a read – many thoughts ahead. I'll start with what I liked:
Nachmanovitch's grasp on music and art education is delightfully clear and eloquently written in this book. I especially enjoyed the chapter "Childhood's End" and the author's ideas regarding childhood creativity, aging into artistic practice, and social conditioning. If the whole book was on this, then five big shining stars from me. Not that what he says is anything incredibly novel, but I do love his wording on all of our life existing as a "school" where truths are either accepted or rejected for the consumerist hive mind. I also, to some extent, do enjoy the breadth of sources and the ideas that Nachmanovitch draws from them (I'll get to this in a second). It seems the book made a point and kept to it - that what we are about to read about can't really be explained. Bummer. However, the language is inspiring, and I can definitely resonate with the author's passion for this sort of artistic -awakening- that is present in others and can be reached by seemingly infinite pathways. It is held up by Nachmanovitch's strong ability in storytelling and his obvious knowledge of, well, a frickin ton of stuff. The book ends on a high note and holistically stays quite positive about our powers as creatives, something that I find refreshing.
Now, I expected a book about improvisation. Didn't really get the vibe. By "improvisation," I think Nachmanovitch refers (more and more) to this cosmic sort of artistic mystic/Taoist/revelationist "Free Play" – a freedom to pursue creativity in, perhaps, an enlightenment. Cool idea, but not really what I was expecting nor looking for in the first place.
As for what knocked off those two final stars, the language is what I can only describe as a Chex Mix of new-age/Zen/Taoist/mystic/religious/social-spiritual references and talkings about... uh... making art? I was a bit lost by the text being highly peppered with inspirational quote after inspirational quote relating to some sort of cosmic artistic being, as well as the insertion of vocabulary from these spiritual practices that I think could have more easily been explained in a simpler dialogue.
I understand the use of so many differing sources (from Ancient China to John Keats to Beethoven to Walt Whitman) as a survey of humanity's search and accomplishments for and with this "thing" that artists seek in their practices. However, sometimes it just read as a bit contradictory at times by mixing so many ideas and quotes at once into this synthesis. The idea had to be changed to fit the sources or vice versa, and I couldn't grasp hold of much going on in what seemed to be an ever becoming manifesto-like writing in an increasingly stream-of-consciousness form.
Anyway, it was okay. Not what I wanted. I probably would have loved it three or four years ago.
Nachmanovitch's grasp on music and art education is delightfully clear and eloquently written in this book. I especially enjoyed the chapter "Childhood's End" and the author's ideas regarding childhood creativity, aging into artistic practice, and social conditioning. If the whole book was on this, then five big shining stars from me. Not that what he says is anything incredibly novel, but I do love his wording on all of our life existing as a "school" where truths are either accepted or rejected for the consumerist hive mind. I also, to some extent, do enjoy the breadth of sources and the ideas that Nachmanovitch draws from them (I'll get to this in a second). It seems the book made a point and kept to it - that what we are about to read about can't really be explained. Bummer. However, the language is inspiring, and I can definitely resonate with the author's passion for this sort of artistic -awakening- that is present in others and can be reached by seemingly infinite pathways. It is held up by Nachmanovitch's strong ability in storytelling and his obvious knowledge of, well, a frickin ton of stuff. The book ends on a high note and holistically stays quite positive about our powers as creatives, something that I find refreshing.
Now, I expected a book about improvisation. Didn't really get the vibe. By "improvisation," I think Nachmanovitch refers (more and more) to this cosmic sort of artistic mystic/Taoist/revelationist "Free Play" – a freedom to pursue creativity in, perhaps, an enlightenment. Cool idea, but not really what I was expecting nor looking for in the first place.
As for what knocked off those two final stars, the language is what I can only describe as a Chex Mix of new-age/Zen/Taoist/mystic/religious/social-spiritual references and talkings about... uh... making art? I was a bit lost by the text being highly peppered with inspirational quote after inspirational quote relating to some sort of cosmic artistic being, as well as the insertion of vocabulary from these spiritual practices that I think could have more easily been explained in a simpler dialogue.
I understand the use of so many differing sources (from Ancient China to John Keats to Beethoven to Walt Whitman) as a survey of humanity's search and accomplishments for and with this "thing" that artists seek in their practices. However, sometimes it just read as a bit contradictory at times by mixing so many ideas and quotes at once into this synthesis. The idea had to be changed to fit the sources or vice versa, and I couldn't grasp hold of much going on in what seemed to be an ever becoming manifesto-like writing in an increasingly stream-of-consciousness form.
Anyway, it was okay. Not what I wanted. I probably would have loved it three or four years ago.
June 28, 2013
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 a variety of puzzling projects, as well as allowed me to give good advice to my friends who find themselves confused and stuck. I recently recommended it to a person who works in the sciences and she found it helped her work through a difficult task she was confronted with. The concept that life is improvisation is very liberating, but it also is a challenge - it gives you a sense of agency and creative license - but maybe a sense of responsibility too, in a lovely way. The book is filled with the wisdom of philosophers and artists, so I always feel when I'm reading it that I've been immersed in an ongoing conversation with the greatest creative thinkers from all over the world.
September 9, 2007
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!
August 19, 2010
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.
July 30, 2009
If you are an artist of any sort, read this book.
June 11, 2025
What a wonderful book. It looks at improvisation in the context of art, but also in many of it's other forms, such as holding a conversation. It does not give you a direct step-by-step "how to improvise", but instead helps you tear down the mental blockades which might hold you back from improvising freely.
After reading this I'm feeling a lot more confident in my ability to improvise in any form, be it holding a speech, starting a drawing or holding a difficult conversation. The only caveat I have to this is that I've been doing lots of other kinds of inner work recently, so it might not all be attributed to this book.
Anyway, still highly recommend!
After reading this I'm feeling a lot more confident in my ability to improvise in any form, be it holding a speech, starting a drawing or holding a difficult conversation. The only caveat I have to this is that I've been doing lots of other kinds of inner work recently, so it might not all be attributed to this book.
Anyway, still highly recommend!
December 4, 2020
"We now find ourselves, as individuals, as nation-states, and as a species, involved in a period of intense and often bewildering transformation. The systems of government, production, culture, thought, and perception to which we have become accustomed and that have functioned for so long are not working. This presents us with a challenge. We can cling to that which is passing, or has already passed, or we can remain accessible to - even surrender to - the creative process, without insisting that we know in advance the ultimate outcome for us, our institutions, or our planet. To accept this challenge is to cherish freedom, to embrace life, and to find meaning."
-
(Just a later paragraph that captures the zeitgeist of 2020 from 30 years ago. The rest is an expanded review after re-reading.)
At the core, Free Play is about wu wei, the Taoist and Zen principle of "action without action," pure awareness and responsiveness. It's a feeling Michelangelo channeled when he brushed the stone away from the statue inside - a feeling he called "intelletto," nonrational artistic awareness. Others call it "beginner's mind," "radical openness," or "oneness."
Nachmanovitch's book was the text for a senior seminar I took in transpersonal psychology (that would be the study of religious experiences, epiphanies, flow states, meditation, etc). It's as sonorous and streamlike as you'd expect from an admired improvisational violinist, but ten times more useful than you'd expect.
I've never found a more concentrated guide to creative processes. Inside out, outside in. If you ever feel stuck, this book tells you how to gently obliterate preconceptions. It goes into extraordinary detail on that easy thing that isn't easy, that difficult thing that isn't difficult, how and why you get blocked, avoidant, afraid. And it brings in oodles of great references, anecdotes, and poetic quotations that would be pretentious if they weren't so to the point.
If you're interested in ludology, he has a lot to say about the magic circle, which he calls temenos, ancient Greek for sacred grove. For those who don't know the magic circle by name, you do know it: it's any safe space where you are free to play, where you can enter a world of make-believe, something a little set apart from the rest of reality, with its own rules. It's the proverbial sandbox in all its manifestations.
Artistry goes beyond play, but without some form of play there is no art or invention. Play requires safety, or it isn't free and isn't really play; it's suffocated. Hence the creative blocks arise from fear. When people agree to play a game together (or simply let each other know they're playing around), as long as they cooperate and follow the rules, a new world appears in the midst of their imaginations. The rule-following (or at least not hurting anyone you're joking around with) corresponds to staying in the magic circle, and the imaginative world is the result. The metaphor refers to a magic spell cast in a circle of candles or a pentagram, and the rules (of play and safety) are the ritual of the spell itself, how it's cast.
The stage of a theater performance is part of its magic circle. When someone gets run through with a halberd on stage, you know not to worry too much, because inside that circle are found hypothesis, counterfactual, recapitulation, fantasy, performance, play, etc. When lights go off in a cinema, that's part of the magic circle. Dogs and wolves enter the magic circle by dropping on their front paws and wagging their tails; then everyone knows this is not a fight. Even formal debate occurs in a magic circle; participants shake hands to reinforce that what happens inside is a symbolic battle, a battle of ideas, not a display of personal animosity. This idea is shared across all the arts.
People are typically most creative in a state of free play, which might look very serious. The freedom is freedom to try something different - without any of that freedom, you can't. Removing heavy consequences makes experimentation possible. The magic circle is a metaphor, but it refers to the essence of what makes play itself.
Creative blocks can be analyzed usefully as fear in relation to that concept, though I wouldn't reduce the contents of the book quite so far as to say that's its entire thesis. It's a rich and faceted look at many kinds of creative processes and how they unfold, from a point of view that's both mystical and practical. It applies regardless of art form, and even on re-reading this, I found a number of surprisingly helpful suggestions and ways to subversively reframe things. Flights of fancy aside, it gives some very down-to-earth advice that anyone can follow.
The professor of the class I mentioned is somewhat famous for his lectures, a style of performance art I've never seen before or since. I liked them so much I took a second course with him, even though at the start of that, the seminar involving this book, he looked at all of us, then the ones he recognized, and yelled, "Why are you still here??? What are you doing? Didn't you learn the first time???" Anyway, his copy of Free Play was more inked up than the Hell's Angels. Whenever he read from it, he'd rest it in his palms carefully. An ancient, gigantic speckled moth. It looked like it might crumble if stared at.
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(Just a later paragraph that captures the zeitgeist of 2020 from 30 years ago. The rest is an expanded review after re-reading.)
At the core, Free Play is about wu wei, the Taoist and Zen principle of "action without action," pure awareness and responsiveness. It's a feeling Michelangelo channeled when he brushed the stone away from the statue inside - a feeling he called "intelletto," nonrational artistic awareness. Others call it "beginner's mind," "radical openness," or "oneness."
Nachmanovitch's book was the text for a senior seminar I took in transpersonal psychology (that would be the study of religious experiences, epiphanies, flow states, meditation, etc). It's as sonorous and streamlike as you'd expect from an admired improvisational violinist, but ten times more useful than you'd expect.
I've never found a more concentrated guide to creative processes. Inside out, outside in. If you ever feel stuck, this book tells you how to gently obliterate preconceptions. It goes into extraordinary detail on that easy thing that isn't easy, that difficult thing that isn't difficult, how and why you get blocked, avoidant, afraid. And it brings in oodles of great references, anecdotes, and poetic quotations that would be pretentious if they weren't so to the point.
If you're interested in ludology, he has a lot to say about the magic circle, which he calls temenos, ancient Greek for sacred grove. For those who don't know the magic circle by name, you do know it: it's any safe space where you are free to play, where you can enter a world of make-believe, something a little set apart from the rest of reality, with its own rules. It's the proverbial sandbox in all its manifestations.
Artistry goes beyond play, but without some form of play there is no art or invention. Play requires safety, or it isn't free and isn't really play; it's suffocated. Hence the creative blocks arise from fear. When people agree to play a game together (or simply let each other know they're playing around), as long as they cooperate and follow the rules, a new world appears in the midst of their imaginations. The rule-following (or at least not hurting anyone you're joking around with) corresponds to staying in the magic circle, and the imaginative world is the result. The metaphor refers to a magic spell cast in a circle of candles or a pentagram, and the rules (of play and safety) are the ritual of the spell itself, how it's cast.
The stage of a theater performance is part of its magic circle. When someone gets run through with a halberd on stage, you know not to worry too much, because inside that circle are found hypothesis, counterfactual, recapitulation, fantasy, performance, play, etc. When lights go off in a cinema, that's part of the magic circle. Dogs and wolves enter the magic circle by dropping on their front paws and wagging their tails; then everyone knows this is not a fight. Even formal debate occurs in a magic circle; participants shake hands to reinforce that what happens inside is a symbolic battle, a battle of ideas, not a display of personal animosity. This idea is shared across all the arts.
People are typically most creative in a state of free play, which might look very serious. The freedom is freedom to try something different - without any of that freedom, you can't. Removing heavy consequences makes experimentation possible. The magic circle is a metaphor, but it refers to the essence of what makes play itself.
Creative blocks can be analyzed usefully as fear in relation to that concept, though I wouldn't reduce the contents of the book quite so far as to say that's its entire thesis. It's a rich and faceted look at many kinds of creative processes and how they unfold, from a point of view that's both mystical and practical. It applies regardless of art form, and even on re-reading this, I found a number of surprisingly helpful suggestions and ways to subversively reframe things. Flights of fancy aside, it gives some very down-to-earth advice that anyone can follow.
The professor of the class I mentioned is somewhat famous for his lectures, a style of performance art I've never seen before or since. I liked them so much I took a second course with him, even though at the start of that, the seminar involving this book, he looked at all of us, then the ones he recognized, and yelled, "Why are you still here??? What are you doing? Didn't you learn the first time???" Anyway, his copy of Free Play was more inked up than the Hell's Angels. Whenever he read from it, he'd rest it in his palms carefully. An ancient, gigantic speckled moth. It looked like it might crumble if stared at.
February 9, 2026
Una serie de lindas reflexiones sobre la espiritualidad que implica hacer arte!
March 7, 2026
3.5 Parts were really interesting and very insightful. Parts were a little disorganized and rambling type shit
March 2, 2026
Unexpectedly one of the most potent complex and joyful spiritual texts I’ve come across
January 21, 2022
Atopei este libro por accidente, porque en realidade o que eu quería era que alguén me explicase cientificamente o que pasa no meu cerebro e no meu corpo mentres improviso. Porén, isto é máis ben unha carta de amor moi longa á improvisación no seu sentido máis amplo: unha carta de amor longa e preciosísima a un estado que é —e con esta idea eu resoo moi forte— "metabolic rather than conceptual".
De verdade, preciosísimo:
De verdade, preciosísimo:
"I had found a freedom that was both exhilarating and exacting."
"Impulse, like improvisation, is not 'just anything'; it is not without structure but is the expression of organic, immanent, self-creating structure."
"The intensity of your focused concentration and involvement maintains and augments itself, your physical needs decrease, your gaze narrows, your sense of time stops. (...) You lose yourself in your own voice, in the handling of your tools, in your feeling of the rules. (...) When the self-clinging personality somehow drops away, we are both entranced and alert at the same time."
"Practice is the entry into direct, personal, and interactive relationships. It is the linkage of inner knowing and action. Mastery comes from practice; practice comes from playful, compulsive experimentation (the impish side of lîla), and from a sense of wonder (the godlike side of lîla). (...) This level of performance cannot be attained through some Calvinist demands of the superego, through feelings of guilt or obligation. In practice, work is play, intrinsically rewarding. It is that feeling of our inner child wanting to play for just five minutes more."
"In playing together there is real risk of cacophony, the antidote to which is discipline. But this need not be the discipline of 'let's agree on a structure in advance'. It is the discipline of mutual awareness, consideration, listening, willingness to be subtle. Trusting someone else can involve gigantic risks, and it leads to the even more challenging task of learning to trust yourself."
"I play with my partner; we listen to each other; we mirror each other; we connect with what we hear. He doesn’t know where I’m going, I don’t know where he’s going, yet we anticipate, sense, lead, and follow each other. There is no agreed-on structure or measure, but once we have played for five seconds there is a structure, because we’ve started something. We open each other’s minds like an infinite series of Chinese boxes. A mysterious kind of information flows back and forth."
January 10, 2022
The theme of this book is that, for art, the process is more important than the result. Evolution is a "process" by which nature creates, and it models all arts. Everything is art when it becomes "play." Play is an activity that is an "end in itself" rather than a means. Play without rules does not produce art, so artists "practice" their craft and learn its rules. Too much practice can impede creativity, so artists should regard every practice as a "performance." The mathematicians' definition of "elegance" is producing great results from scant means. Similarly, art is more elegant "under constraint" than in freedom. "Mistakes" are inevitable during the process of creation because they are creations themselves. Artists fear failures if they are fixated on results, and "fear of failure" inhibits creativity. Sometimes "not doing can be more productive than doing" because being stuck is also a part of the process. Making art is like making love. It's a "commitment" and you must be ready to love it even when it is not yet complete. Art is beautiful when it's truthful, and you can't be true to yourself if you are more worried about the result than the process.
March 26, 2010
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.
I might just have to read it again.
January 17, 2024
Every once and a while when I read books on music and philosophy I get this rare sense of inclusion because somebody is putting my feelings into words that I didn't know other people also felt. This is one of those books for me. I like to include a quote I enjoyed in my reviews, but this book had fantastic quotes on every single page. It reinforced the idea that all aspects of your life affect how you improvise, and that no matter how many trials and tribulations an artist has to go through in life if you stick to your guns on how you want your music to sound, you can never go wrong. I will reread this book whenever I am feeling uncertain about my musical journey. To remind myself that has non-lucrative, thankless, and unnoticed being a musician can be, life would be worse off without us.
April 13, 2021
a good prespective about the creative process. however, it felt a bit like a too romanticized ideia, it gave me the sensation that almost everything in art must be about pleasure. At times I felt that I was doing all wrong because creation in me is sometimes truly painful. It is a good book, it is the opinion of a person about improvisation and about art and of course with value.
February 22, 2025
as a dancer that was struggling with the weight of constant improvement, i found myself beginning to hate my art form out of frustration. this book came to me at a perfect time when i was realizing my overzealous work ethic was getting in the way of experiencing the action of dancing. this book gave me peace and revelations about the creation of art and how i was engaging with it.
October 12, 2024
“We can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in perpetual motion. And a perpetual invitation to create.”
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