Skills and approaches for a creative, whole wellbeing

Play's The Thing has been and gone and what an event it was: all manner of gifts, indeed. I enjoyed our improv workshop very much, and can testify to plenty of attention focused on shared aims: creating stories, visual scenes and moments by listening to each other and adding the next obvious thing. But how do you get into a state where that comes naturally?

 

I've said elsewhere  that "[I]mprov itself is a training regime for connection with the moment, connection with the real." This was quoted back to me in an online discussion on improv and philosophy with the practical philosopher Andrew Taggart  (You can see some of the fruits of that conversation popping up here.) Andrew posited that this was essentially a process of denuding, and I think this is a great term for it - declothing us of  trappings that can prevent us from taking a more natural state.

 

As I said at our workshop, the person who has most influenced my practice is Keith Johnstone, who really puts this denuding front and centre within his teaching. He talks of banishing the "deadness and greyness" of the world by "attending to the reality" around us. The challenge is that we are encultured to be afraid of failure and being judged and therefore we retreat from things as they truly are. A major aim of early improvisational practice, therefore, is to reduce fear, the major impediment to being connected, by relaxing the improviser and making them feel safe. We put ourselves on stage and say 'it's ok to have nothing - just pay attention to your partner" and internalise aphorisms like "be obvious', 'be more boring', as ways to neutralise common fears on the stage. This is what we focused on in our workshop together at Play's The Thing.

 

Another approach it to cultivate the attitude that the action is in your partner, being interested in them, trusting that what they give you is what you need. A lot of this is fail-fast learning: if you ignore your partner, your scenes will be patchy at best, diabolical otherwise. But the vice of being more interested in yourself can persist in more subtle ways, and the best groups work to enhance trust together, through games inside of the workshops, to simply getting to know each other really well and generating trust. Here's a slightly operationalised definition of trust from the psychological literature: trust is "the probability that one party attaches to cooperative behaviour by other parties". Improv teaches us to attend to, discover and cherish such behaviour in our partners.

 

There are other perils. The improviser must learn to be indifferent to failure AND to success, something I've had described to me as quintessentially Hindu in focus. In a scene, you may say something clumsy, or do some terrible mime that only clutters things, and instantly find yourself drawn inward, to review and fret; arguably this is simply fear in action, although it may be cloaked in other qualities such as perfectionism. 

 

But you may say something brilliant in a scene, or make a brilliant, appropriate sight gag. This is a point of equal risk, where the mind turns inwards, to review and applaud, and you disconnect from the flow of events around you. So to combat this, many exercises are in fact competitive,with win and lose states. When playing these, the improvisers should buy in to the competition, for if they reject it, nothing can be learned about inescapably rewarding and punishing moments found outside the game, inside the scene of the performance. The improviser trains to encounter and move through success and failure, not ignoring them - for that would be ignoring things as they truly are in another way (that messy mime may need to be clarified at some point) but not being sucked into them.

 

So these are the skills and dispositions that improvisational theory stakes out and improvisational practice facilitates:

 

In 2012, I'll continue to explore how tools of play, improvisation and theatre can build and enhance these qualities, and attempt to discover others that matter. I'll be back here, too, to report back and join discussions with you, if you're interested. For now, though, wishing you well for the holidays.

 

Best

Alex