In improvised theatre you walk onto an empty stage to create a story from nothing. When it works, selves dissolve like sugar cubes and reality roars in a-flowing. Often though, it doesn’t work; fear, hope, imagination and excessive planning, theorising and crippling, scenius-destroying self-consciousness—all the second impressions of ego—get in the way. The scene crumbles, and everyone scrambles around clenched and desperate.
This should sound familiar to anyone who has ever been lifted team-whole by an unseen hand on a football pitch only to ‘ooh-ooh I’m gonna score’ fluff an open goal, or flapped around like a beached guppy in the company of a real woman, or let the brush paint harmony before giving self one last touch of ruin, or auto-piloted through paradise to later look back in anguish at your own tragic absence.
Impro fails—the improvised play, the improvised act, the improvised conversation, the improvised seduction, the improvised partnership and the improvised life—because the self-informed ego cannot divine the unselfish source of life, because ego can’t be bothered to master enough craft to guide the flow of life and because it fears what it cannot control; the genius of life. Ego resists self-mastery, corrupts craft-mastery and blocks the underground river of myth at every weird wellspring.
Thus, to master impro, the novice must master unself, unstatus and unlanguage:
Unself
To master unself, is to overcome self in charge. For this the players practice awareness enhancement, fearless (but not reckless) commitment, psychological generosity, uncertainty [or failure] embracing, casual stake-raising decisiveness and self-emptying presence. To the extent that they master these existential skills in an atmosphere of trust, unblocked players can allow the collective, unconscious truth between them to manifest the straightforward character-honesty, sincere insanity, meaningful change, psychological risk and archetypical structure called a great story. Or a great life. To allow, in other words, the situation to speak.
Unstatus
Much of the fascination of drama—improvised or scripted, tragic or comic, real or make-believe—comes from the overcoming or reversal of status. Status-theory is based on the idea that most inter-species behaviour is a presentation or ‘transaction’ of status. A high status animal, for example, will look directly and slowly, and then look away without looking back, and its posture will be relaxed and open to attack; whereas a low status animal will glance and then glance back, or cower its body protectively. Humans display similar behaviour when interacting with the people—occasionally even the objects—around them. Status transactions change according to the situation—a man can be high status to his employees but low status to his wife (again, pleasurable to watch on the screen or stage)—and can be extremely subtle—an unconscious touch of the nose, a split-second’s hesitation, a strained smile, a swallow…
Status-theory is allied to the founding assumption of evolutionism and of game theory; that we are biological machines. Adherents of such ideology believe that status is an inescapable component of human nature, and so the only way to succeed in life is to become a status expert, free to play the status you choose, in order to get what you want. This utilitarian or pragmatic approach to human interaction—this technique—is not an option for the mechanical self-informed self; in lieu of any other way of experiencing or dealing with other people, it is an essential prerequisite for social survival.
Status theory can be nuanced and thrilling to behold in theatrical action and it is useful and entertaining to apply an understanding of it to oneself and others. But it is a theory—a product of mentation, crude and binary, predicated upon an equally crude and binary representation of reality; it still comes down to ones and zeros, highs and lows, winners and losers. This is partly why it feels uncomfortable to be reduced to a status in the presence of someone attempting to bully you into status-submission (psychologists, managers, pick-up-artists, etc.), but the main reason it feels bad is because communion has its roots in a total absence of status; in unstatus.
When unself rules the system, there is no I to state. When the body is apperceptively allowed to play, then soft-awareness is unselfishly, ‘behind’ the play, consciously statusless. When I greet a friend with ‘good morning peasant’ or ‘good morning sire’ my playful co-star does not feel insulted or proud, and so can respond instantly, from the fact, rather than the feeling. When lovers dock, presently together, there is, ultimately, nothing describable; least of all who is the dominant animal.1 All this status business is only in unconscious animal behaviour; and the idea that it is inescapable2 is because in the world, which coerces us into behaving like unconscious animals, it is inescapable.3
Unlanguage
What do the words real, free, god, life, death, beauty, love and truth mean? It’s hard to say when they are used continually and applied to everything. This isn’t to say that playdough words can’t be thrown freely around, but with the most meaningful words, or ways of speaking, isolated and hollowed out by the co-opting ego, it becomes nearly impossible to find, express or recognise answers to ordinary meaningful questions such as; ‘Do I love her?’ or ‘What should I do?’ or ‘What’s the bloody point?’
Good writers work to solve the problems of degraded language by expressing the truth in new ways; by freeing language from the sentimental pretensions of pseudo-artists, the co-opted clichés of propaganda and the efforts of priestly or professional power to restrain meaning within approved limits. The writer’s work is vital, but the power of the written word is inherently limited a) by its static, material, possessable, divided (into illusory words) and co-optable nature; and b) by the fact that, despite the music of the writer’s art, the written word lacks the tone, vibe, silence and, deepest of all, the fluid response to context of live, illiterate, speech.
Entertaining and useful as it might be to read of new ways to talk about love and death, or to expand the boundaries of creative language through literature, to really understand each other there is no need to find new ways of expressing or even understanding Big Words. Speech only has to be truthful. An epic poem about love cannot hold a candle to ‘I love you’,4 said right; and that—before dastardly moustache-twirling, zero-gravity bar-room fights and baboon eruptions—is what the improvised life is about; saying ‘I love you’, right.
How to Improvise
Say yes-and
Yielding completely to the context and accepting all offers into the unknown with a full-hearted ‘yes, and…’ (instead of a close-hearted ‘no’ or a half-hearted ‘yes, but…’)
Big, big commitment
Go in big (which means embracing failure) and give your whole eagle attention softly to what is, as if your life depends on it—which it does—so you can hear exactly what the context is saying and respond to that, and not to…
Be obvious, be simple
Don’t be clever; the word or act you need is a tiny golden fruit hanging right before your eyes, if you are both sensitive enough to smell and bold enough to seize it
Don’t prepare, don’t try
Impro is not learnt by studying, by getting ready or by making an effort (to be original or be liked) which generate emotion (particularly expectation) and which strangle genius, sensitivity, spontaneity and simplicity while they sleep; you can only learn to speak by speaking, you can only learn to do by doing
Let go of failure and pride
The instant you say something that clunks or stifles flow, or that stamps out a sprouting miracle, or makes you feel all ‘ooh I’m the big man’, release the feeling at once and re-enter the flux
Give to the scene
Strive to make other people feel good, to make the scene glorious, to allow the room to speak; strive to egg blend with the atmosphere of the context… there is no need to try to do this, all you have to do is let your body listen
Plans; useful but deadly
Ifs and shoulds will fly across the screen of your mind; look through them to what is actually happening; the instant a plan appears, put it to one side, because if the situation serves the plan, rather than vice versa, the good thing dies
Learn your craft
The crafts of stage and story, like those of partnership and society, draw inspiration from a common well; but without consummate craft, and years of dedication to it, the bucket will leak and the rope will snap 7
You are not in charge
Impro is shaped by your craft; but it is animated by something far bigger than technique; you can become confident, charismatic, protean 8 and technically adept but without the selfless humility of something else at the rudder, you will always behave somehow uncreatively, come across somehow unpleasantly—humourless perhaps, or stiff—and feel somehow dead; and somehow, somewhere, you’ll know it; and so will they.
This article is from The Apocalypedia
Not that animals are unconscious (not a bit of it, although they are less conscious than human beings, which is why it is fine to domesticate and eat them; see Self and Unself), nor that there isn’t ecstatic majesty in the marvellous animal drama of status-play and complementary genders; rather that status confinement, being unconscious, runs blindly off the animal feed-fight-fuck code.
Lack of unstatus in improvised theatre manifests as lack of superb tragedy; the intense (comic-flecked) seriousness that tragedy demands is impossible without death, love and other statusless states of self-annihilation.
Lack of unstatus in improvised theatre manifests as lack of superb tragedy; the intense (comic-flecked) seriousness that tragedy demands is impossible without death, love and other statusless states of self-annihilation.
A surprisingly good chat-up line, provided that you mean it from the bottom of your heart, and can deliver it seriously, with a touch of humour, and without cling.