Feminist Improvising Group

Feminist Improvising Group
The Feminist Improvising Group, October 1977 Left to right: Corinne Liensol, Maggie Nicols, Georgie Born, Lindsay Cooper, Cathy Williams
Background information
Origin	London, England
Genres	Avant-garde jazz, free improvisation, experimental music
Years active	1977–1982
Associated acts	Henry Cow, European Women's Improvising Group, Les Diaboliques
Past members	Maggie Nicols Lindsay Cooper Georgie Born Corinne Liensol Cathy Williams Irène Schweizer Sally Potter Annemarie Roelofs Frankie Armstrong Angèle Veltmeijer Françoise Dupety

The Feminist Improvising Group (FIG) were a five- to eight-piece English free improvising avant-garde jazz and experimental music ensemble formed in London in 1977 by Scottish vocalist Maggie Nicols and English bassoonist/composer Lindsay Cooper. Their debut performance was at a "Music for Socialism" festival at the Almost Free Theatre in London in October 1977, and they toured Europe several times in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

FIG were the first publicly performing women-only group of improvisers and challenged the hitherto male-dominated musical improvisation community. The group consisted of women from different backgrounds with different levels of musicianship, and their concerts were a combination of music and theatre that dealt with everyday women's issues. FIG also integrated "lesbian sexuality" into their performances that, Canadian academic Julie Dawn Smith said, "queered" the improvisational space and "demanded queer listening".

FIG were generally not well received by male improvisers, who Nicols said criticised their technical ability and their "irreverent approach to technique and tradition". Smith noted that FIG's performances were also criticised by some feminists for being "too virtuosic and abstract", but they generally received positive reactions from both women and men at concerts. A review in the improvised music magazine Musics said that FIG's debut performance "was a welcome contrast to the previous performances [of the evening] which had been singularly humourless."

In 1983 FIG evolved into the European Women's Improvising Group (EWIG), bowing to pressure to tone down their name. FIG were influential on the second-generation improvisation scene and spawned a number of women-only improvising groups and events. FIG were also educational in that they exposed new audiences to improvisation and feminism.

The Feminist Improvising Group (FIG) was founded in London in 1977 by Scottish vocalist Maggie Nicols from Centipede and English bassoonist/composer Lindsay Cooper from Henry Cow. Nicols and Cooper first discussed the idea of an all-women improvising group at a musician's union meeting. Cooper said, "we agreed that improvisation had become very important and no women were doing it. And suddenly we thought, well let's do it! Let's get women together and do it ourselves!" While Nicols and Cooper had both performed frequently with men, they had little experience performing with other women, but their involvement in class politics as well as feminist and lesbian activism prompted them to pursue this project. The other members of the five-piece ensemble were cellist/bassist Georgie Born, also from Henry Cow, vocalist/pianist Cathy Williams from the British duo Rag Doll, and trumpeter Corinne Liensol from British feminist rock band Jam Today. They had originally intended to call themselves the "Women's Improvising Group", but at their first engagement they discovered that the organisers had billed them as the "Feminist Improvising Group". Nicols said that the "political statement of the band's name never even came from us! But we just thought, 'OK, they've called us feminist, we'll work with that'".