Tags

, ,

I have my routine responses to what happens around me just like everyone else, but this last year I have been tangentially involved in improvisation. It is a technique first known to me from watching stage performers on TV such as Saturday Night Live. Those people have only an outline of what they are going to do, and a few props too, but some of the skits they do are clearly made up in the moment of reactions to what the other people are doing and saying at that time. This is wholly different from other acting techniques, such as the Stanislavsky method of acting where the actor pre-thinks about emotional scenes that put them in the right frame of mind for the mood and associated emotions to come to the fore, and when in the mood they go ahead and perform the written lines and actions.

Improv is different; it is a special form of acting that responds as spontaneously as possible from within a limited set of rules. These rules are intended to free up one’s responses by expanding the options available. One of the first rules for achieving spontaneity is responding to the other person’s statements and actions with a positive response instead of an analytical one. Having hung around the intellectual community of the University of California – Berkeley for fifty years I have inadvertently cultivated the habit of seeing the abstract borders of a thought and then “improving it” by a, generally negative, chipping away at its perceived limitations. It is thought of as a way of getting to the deeper truths of whatever is being discussed, and that it usually gets to a better statement of the core idea. It is an analytic process and method of chipping down to the essence.

Improv is different, doesn’t chip away, it adds. It takes what is present and adds more positive material to it. That idea is encapsulated in the phrase “Yes and.” The improvisor responds in a positive way to what is on the floor and then adds an appropriate something more. Improv is additive and accumulative, intellectualizing is subtractive and abstracting an essence. Thus, improv creates expansive ways of behaving, and intellectualizing hones behavior toward ideals. Improv moves toward Classic Homeric Greek expansive storytelling, whereas intellectualizing moves toward Classic Greek idealized Platonic forms. Improv grasps its moment fully, but is quick to hand off to others something they can participate in, and add to, intellectualizing tightens things toward a memorable uniqueness. Improv when given the opportunity tends toward cooperative, happy and enthusiastic, but intellectualizing tends toward individualized, dour, and constrained.

Here is an improv-like game for cultivating the ability to give and receive. It makes sense to practice this for a while because if you are a typical person you probably have some problems with giving and receiving, particularly in politely receiving gifts. We will develop some other games later that will help with developing other abilities, but this giving and receiving one is easy and important.

Begin with a circle of about eight people, and give every other person some item of small value. Items such as a pencil, a piece of blank paper, a paper clip, a piece of string, it can be anything. The game begins by the person holding an object turning to the left and giving the gift to the person next to them, and saying something appropriate in their own words. “Here is a pencil, it’s a gift and you can do with it as you wish.” The recipient would say something appropriate which would formulate a use for the item, such as, “Thank you, I can use this for making my grocery list.” They then turn to the person to their left and say something appropriate, such as, “I have this extra pencil, and you might find a use for it. It’s yours.” “Thank you, I needed a pencil for propping a wobbly chair.” The offer and the receipt statements can be anything reasonably appropriate. These offers and receipts go for about two minutes and then reverse direction around the circle. Each person will have had enough responses on each direction to feel comfortable with the game. Then it changes a bit, and a single person does a transaction with the person next to them, and each of the other players say and physically act out first the giving person and then the receiving person. This can be done in unison if it feels better. Then the next pair of people do a transaction and the group does the repeating copying actions. We go around the circle until everyone has had a chance to play both parts.

In about ten minutes everyone has had the opportunity to do these giving and receiving transactions about twenty times, and has had a chance to practice doing these transactions in a ways that are new to them. This gives people alternate ways to respond in the future to these types of situations. They become more conscious of how they and other people are behaving and are more able to respond consciously and deliberately to what comes their way.

By practicing standard transactions in an improv way people become more fully human.