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.
[1][2][3] FIG were generally not well received by male improvisers, who Nicols said criticised their technical ability and their "irreverent approach to technique and tradition".
[4] Smith noted that FIG's performances were also criticised by some feminists for being "too virtuosic and abstract",[5] but they generally received positive reactions from both women and men at concerts.
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.
[8] An opportunity presented itself in mid-1977, when organisers of the "Music for Socialism" festival approached Nicols and asked if she could arrange some female performers for the next concert as so few had featured in previous events.
[9] Nicols and Cooper put together a five-piece ensemble with themselves, plus cellist/bassist Georgie Born, also from Henry Cow, vocalist/pianist Cathy Williams from the British duo Rag Doll (with ex Henry Cow member Geoff Leigh), and trumpeter Corinne Liensol from British feminist rock band Jam Today.
[15] They staged parodies around the role of women in society and incorporated domestic "found objects" in their performances, including "vacuum cleaners, brooms, dustpans, pots and pans, and egg slicers".
[2] In the late 1970s and early 1980s, FIG toured Europe several times, where they played at festivals at various venues, including Paris, Berlin, Rome, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Reykjavík.
[23] Born said "we found ourselves in situations implicitly saturated with gender dynamics ... in which our musical 'voice' was rendered somehow inappropriate, or was overwhelmed and could not emerge or be heard".
[29] Born said that FIG functioned very differently from a mixed group: "when you are playing with men, there is an element of competition; they tend to feel that there is a threat from women.
[12] FIG integrated "lesbian sexuality" in their improvised performances: their stage acts often included "fights" and "hugs" that Smith described as "violating taboos of musical propriety and masculinist competition that prohibited musicians from touching one another".
"[2] Smith wrote that male heterosexual improvisers typically dismissed women in audiences as not important, seeing them as "either wives, girlfriends, or groupies".
[3][a][italics in the source] Writing in The Guardian, Nicolas Soames described FIG's music as often comprising "hard trombone chords, angular bursts, and restless scurryings made by every imaginable sound-producing object"; it sometimes drifts into "blues-like dirge[s]" or tangos, but is different from the "unrelieved adventures into the abstract to be heard from some male improvising groups.
"[12] American academic David G. Pier said FIG used free jazz's "extreme timbres" to enhance their live performances, which he described as "in-your-face queer sexuality and feminist shock politics.
"[31] Smith characterised performances by FIG as a "sonic negotiation of eroticism, resistance, liberation, joy, pleasure, power, and agency, a multilayered call and response between individual improvisers and a community of listeners".
[2] Nicols said they also complained about FIG's "irreverent approach to technique and tradition",[4] while Smith suggested that they may have felt threatened by the "spectacle of so many unsupervised and unpredictable women on the stage".
[32] Schweizer recalled that FIG were invited to perform at the Total Music Meeting in Berlin in November 1979 because she had played at the festival before (in all-men groups).
The founding members included Nicols, Jackie Lansley and Sylvia Hallett, with Schweizer and Joëlle Léandre participating in their first concert.
[20][35] In the early 1990s, Nicols, Schweizer and Léandre formed the "highly theatrical and often satirical"[36] improvising trio, Les Diaboliques, who released three albums between 1994 and 1998.