Every Friday a group of us meet for an experimental workshop where we try to bring elements of Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck into VR theater practice. At this week’s meeting, the subject came up of “flow”. That is, flow in the sense that is described by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi: a mental state of total immersion, where everyday cares and self-consciousness drop away.
A few hours later, after our research team had spent much of the evening working away on a demo, one of the students started noodling around on the piano, improvising a beautiful sequence of jazz riffs. At some point I wandered over and started improvising a melody on top of it. For the next twenty minutes, we just explored the musical space together, both of us rapturously immersed within the chromatically shifting chords and winding melodies, in a total state of flow.
Not a bad place to be.