<aside> 💡 I’m back to answering questions from other improvisers (send your questions to [email protected] please).
This week, Tanja writes: Has there been something not-improv related literature/courses/ideologies, that has affected greatly your thinking of improv? What was it?
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This is an absolutely brilliant question. And a very rich seam of inspiration to mine. In truth, almost everything I read, watch, listen to, play or do inspires my thinking on improv.
I should probably get a life, huh?
But regardless, here’s a list of things that were particularly fruitful for me.
This book, by James Clear is about building healthy habits - things that you do automatically without ever accessing the conscious part of your mind. His contention is that you are the sum total of your habits - both good and bad. Once something becomes habitual, it’s part of the fabric of who you are as a person.
I love this idea for improv. And it explains why many veteran improvisers are so supernaturally good at their craft.
It’s because they’ve made so much of their process habitual.
Whereas a newer improviser must be consciously thinking about countless things - choosing an emotional point of view, maintaining character, building a platform, creating narrative, listening and supporting their scene partners ideas - experienced improvisers have made all these things a habit. They’ve moved them from the tiny part of their cognitive process that is aware that it’s thinking to the vast unknowable intelligence that runs everything else. The part of our selves that fills our lungs with air or co-ordinates hundreds of muscles to allow us to walk.
And the absolutely brilliant thing about that is that it frees up the conscious mind to learn something new. To focus on another positive behaviour until it too passes beyond the conscious mind into the realm of habit.
It’s a call for us to keep learning and growing our whole lives.
This is a two-fold learning for me.
One is the idea of staying in the moment. Of not thinking about the future, or worrying about the past, but of simply being in the present.
Improv is one of the only art forms that is created at the same instant it is observed by its audience. It exists in the present, in that glorious metronomic moment of now. As improvisers we should be alive to this constantly fleeting succession of now moments - banging into each other like dominos, each one a split-second opportunity to make something matter.
I’m inspired by the idea of a blank mind. Of going into the scene with no plan and just reacting in the moment. It’s my absolutely favourite kind of improv when done well. It feels dangerous and exciting and crucially, something that can only be done in our art form. Where else can you see theatre that is being created moment to moment in front of your eyes?
So, that’s the first learning. And the second one is about being at the beginning of a journey and sucking at it.
In my yoga class, I’m the least experienced and therefore least flexible person there by some margin. I lay my mat at the back of the room and I glow with embarrassment at my feeble range of movement. But what my teacher tells me is - it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’m stretching myself in terms of my own practice.
If you can’t touch your toe, touch your ankle.