How are you feeling?

I studied with an improv teacher once who made us define how we were feeling to a granular level. “Good” and “bad” didn’t cut it. We had to dig down to “confidently relaxed” or “haunted by floating dread.” I found the exercise irritating, sorry, “meanderingly irrelevant”, mostly because I have never cared much about what something is called. I find labels reductive and deceiving. But she did leave me with a lasting gift. I am not lazy anymore about identifying how I’m feeling. In any class or workshop I run, I look for ways to get the participants to notice how they’re feeling. I don’t spend as much time on what they call it, but I suggest that this kind of self-awareness is a powerful tool for them to use in their personal and professional lives.

Participants at a Creative Corporate Training workshop after doing the “mirror” exercise.

One of the keys with this kind of work is that the facilitator has to engineer a change in feeling. We are much more likely to notice how we’re feeling when our feelings change. At Bright Invention, that initial feeling change is almost always joyful. Through our games and exercises participants move from nervous/bored/curious to playful/connected/ engaged. This awareness of feelings changing is the first doorway toward a kind of mindfulness called emotional intelligence.

There are two basic core competencies involved in emotional intelligence:

Personal Competence comprises your self-awareness and self-management skills, which focus more on you individually than on your interactions with other people. Personal competence is your ability to stay aware of your emotions and manage your behavior and tendencies.

• Self-awareness: how am I feeling? How do I know?

• Self-management: what do I do because of how am I feeling? What do I need to watch out for?

Social Competence is made up of your social awareness and relationship management skills; social competence is your ability to understand other people's moods, behavior, and motives in order to respond effectively and improve the quality of your relationships.

• Social Awareness: how is he/she/they feeling? How can I tell?

• Relationship Management: what is the most humane and effective way to proceed knowing how he/she/they are feeling?

Members of the Bright Invention ensemble observe a rehearsal.

Hamza Mudassir, a lecturer in strategy at the Judge Business School of the University of Cambridge, recently proposed that working with emotion is an essential part of strategic planning. “Strategy formulation—just like emotion—is also based on a set of forecasts. You are doing what you believe to be best for your company, based on whatever you’ve experienced before. This means that whenever you embark on a strategy development process, you are in effect embarking on an emotional journey as much as an intellectual one.”

We are living through an era of global stress and anxiety. It’s important that we feel it and notice it - because it’s extreme, and it is having an impact on our decision-making, relationships and general well-being. Indeed, the worst case scenario is that we adopt this ever-present anxiety as our default, and react to it without acknowledging it. We need to give ourselves experiences which return us to joy, relaxation, clarity, for only then will we remember: oh right, it’s possible to feel like this too. In fact, it’s what “normal” used to feel like.

One last thing. Noticing how I feel requires me to slow down. In our multi-taking hypercaffeinated lives slowing down is counter cultural. But I submit to you it is essential. We need to give ourselves pauses that allow us to assess how we’re doing . . . and what we’re feeling.

Confronting my anti-business bias.

L - R: Merce Cunningham, my Mom Barbara Dilley, Albert Reid in a PR shot for the European tour of 1966. I was on that tour. I was 3 turning 4.

I was not raised in a “business-centric” family. My Dad had a long career working for nonprofits and my Mom is a dancer, choreographer, teacher. I had a privileged upbringing of private schools, fancy colleges and grad school, and then - the life of the struggling actor/teacher for twenty years. I adopted the identity of the “art warrior”, a kind of rebel super-hero who “fights The Man” and aligns himself with anti-capitalism and progressive political positions. And I retain some - but not all - of those points of view. Because somehow, as the result of my mid-life crisis, I became a businessman.

Sort of . . . I run a nonprofit called Bright Invention which has an entrepreneurial program called Creative Corporate Training. Bright Invention was created from disillusion and hope. I was profoundly disillusioned with the life of the stage actor and the nonprofit ecosystem that “supports” it. And I was filled with hope that if I could somehow direct the transformative power of live performance at specific problems, I could create a new way to support actors.

The nonprofit ecosystem of regional theatres is filled with noble and principled leaders who make a lot of noise about empowering creativity, supporting artists and being an antidote to the materialistic culture we live in. And it is filled with struggling artists of all kinds who routinely can’t pay their bills, sacrifice having families, develop mental illness from the stress and anxiety of the life they have chosen, and see no other options. My lightbulb moment came when I was “successful” within this ecosystem. I was acting in two or three union stage acting jobs per year, and teaching as an adjunct at a college or two (another career path rank with institutional hypocrisy), and trying to raise two kids and stay afloat . . . and failing. My White privilege gave me a safety net many of my creative brothers and sisters don’t have - I could beg my family for assistance, an act of abject humiliation for a man in his middle age.

Meet the Medicis - one of the greatest supporters of the nonprofit ecosystem.

Here is the lightbulb: it’s actually not that the nonprofit leaders are exploiters and oppressors, it’s that the economics of it don’t work, and never have. The world of performing arts nonprofits is an ecosystem based on begging. We know we can’t function as common businesses, because if we did, tickets to our shows would be $400 each and . . . well you can see how that ends. So we make up for the fact that we can’t actually meet our bottom line selling our services in the marketplace by asking for support from donors and foundations. And thank God for them. Bright Invention would not exist but for its donors, especially The Wyncote Foundation. And it’s been this way since Michelangelo bowed before the Medicis and Shakespeare made friends with the Queen.

In order to succeed in the word of fundraising and development, you need to prove to funders that you are fiscally responsible: keeping costs down, raising money from other sources, and working with a clear strategy supported by professionals. Performing arts nonprofits are especially expensive because they rely on human beings. And human beings - at a bare minimum -need to eat and pay their bills. If theatres performed with dancing robots, well, things might be less expensive. So nonprofits are constantly underpaying artists in order to create budgets that are workable to foundations, because if they asked for the money their artists actually need to survive, no one would fund them (especially the small and mid-size theatres which employ most of us.) And the dancing robots? Mark my words: they are coming.

So where did I find my hope? In a form of theatrical performance that needs little to no capital support: no sets, no theatres, no costumes, no scripts. It’s called long form improvisation, and it was invented by a mad genius named Del Close in the 70s. It’s the foundation everything I do now, creatively and professionally. As I began exploring and experimenting with our ensemble, I discovered something else about improvisation: it’s economically nimble, and professionally adaptable. I wanted to develop a program which effectively monetized an actor’s creativity, so I developed a technique I call “scenario-based training”. Our actors perform scenarios for our clients using structured improvisation: a kind of in-between form which has the structure and repeatability of a script, and the flexibility of improvisation. I found out later this work is related to the ground-breaking work of South American theatre artist Augusto Boal.

Del Close during one of his calmer moments.

We a did a couple of pilot workshops and we knew we were on to something. Now - how to sell it? Through fits, starts, consultations and professional development I became . . . an entrepreneur, a business man, and began to think of our work as a dynamic service to sell, as opposed to artistic work to find funding for. I was immediately energized by the proactive and action-based mindset of the entrepreneur: leads, targets, strategies, connections and follow ups. It felt refreshing next to the submissive work of asking for money. Business activates, asking waits.

During the pandemic I knew I needed to up my game if we were to survive. So I invested in online networking groups, hired a business strategy coach and learned how to turbo-charge my LinkedIn activity. It was in the networking groups that I first became aware of my anti-business bias, because I felt myself shedding it. The people I have met in these groups and through the connections they create have been business people like me, trying to grow, refine and nurture their Big Idea. Far from being the competitive, aggressive and obnoxious stereotype I had in my head about “business people”, I have been delighted by the open, curious and mutually supportive people I have met. It’s not a stretch to say that the relationships I have made in the business community over the last nine months have not only supported the growth of my business, they have also been meaningful source of real human connection.

Performing a scenario for Community Associations Institute. Pictured: Caitlin Chin and Josh Kirwin.

And here’s a wrinkle. Into my business meetings I bring with me all my years of creative training, an elaborate understanding of narrative and storytelling, and a hopeful mindset about human relationships profoundly shaped by years in the theatre. I bring with me an essentially artistic point of view. It’s a point of view that loves innovation, nurtures authenticity, dares to be bold - ironically, all high-value traits in the business world. I find the people I meet thrill to this energy and want more of it. Far from being alien to this world, I believe artists are in fact natural entrepreneurs.

There is a lot about capitalism to critique, especially as it is practiced in America. American capitalism makes a fetish out of individualism and winning. It promotes a binary win/lose mindset antithetical to cooperation and community. All too often, managers cast themselves as the winners, which means the workers have to be the losers. I pay my actors between $75 and $200 per hour for our CCT workshops - an hourly rate that more than doubles what they might make in other contracted work as actors. And still, I have a long way to go to achieve the Big Goal: salaried positions for ensemble members with benefits, working in multi-faceted full-time positions, performing, teaching, and growing the business in a variety of ways.

And let’s be honest, I am having my cake and eating it too by continuing to raise money as a nonprofit. But my goal isn’t to stop being a nonprofit, my goal is to demonstrate there’s another way to be a nonprofit, one that relies more on earned program income, and less on donated income. One that engages the dynamism of entrepreneurship, drives its resources to supporting people not products, and lives in the assumption of abundance. But in order to become that kind of nonprofit, we need to prove our value to businesses. We need to activate, not wait.

George Floyd, Whiteness and Improv

PAINTING OF GEORGE FLOYD

Bright Invention unequivocally denounces the murder of George Floyd and stands with those who are protesting for an end to racist policing, institutional racism and the systemic oppression of people of color in this country. It may seem odd for a small, creative non-profit based in improvisation to make a statement like that. But in my opinion we would be complicit in Mr. Floyd’s murder if we did not.

It’s worth noting that performed theatrical improv is a white male world. As such, theatrical improv more often than not fails to represent the diverse experience of people of color (and, it’s worth noting, other marginalized populations, such as the LGBTQ and disability communities.) This week has made it clear to me as a leader of an improv group that only intentional and focused work by straight, cis-gender white people will make this change happen.

Yesterday I took part in a short online focus group through the weekly online Open Space facilitated by the Applied Improvisation Network, which I am a member of. AIN is a worldwide collective of professional practitioners of applied improvisation, which means using improvisation for ends other than the delight it brings when performed. We are therapists, workshop leaders and trainers. And for the most part, our clients are white and well-off, as are we. The focus group I was in was about white privilege. I wish I could report that the 12 of us white people in that focus group came away with a unified response to the inequity we represent. At best, we had 30 minutes to have frank conversation and experiment with one exercise. It was paltry, but it was a start. I thank Mallory Penney for having the courage to offer this space for us.

PROTEST IN PHILADELPHIA, MAY 30,2020. PHOTO BY SARAH BLOOM.

My goal for funding a more diverse application of our work uses money made through our Creative Corporate Training program to subsidize workshops offered to marginalized communities. Last year, we were able to offer an eight-week structured improv class to The Village: Hope in Action for Children and Families as the beginning of this vision. Kiersten Adams (one of the two people of color in our ensemble) and I led this class for 20 - 25 young women, predominantly black and latina. In order for Bright Invention to be a force for diversity, equity and inclusion we must offer more programs like this to marginalized communities, and continue to diversify our ensemble of performing artists.

Today I will participate in board and staff meeting for Bright Invention. We are considering ways to raise money to get us through the pandemic, which has put our organization in jeopardy. I intend to raise up the issues described in this post, and to suggest that a funding priority for money raised be on diversifying our ensemble and subsidizing workshops offered at little or no cost to marginalized communities. This is the only way we will lift those voices up and hear the stories they tell. This is the only way we will begin to dismantle institutional racism and awaken to the roles we as white people have played in preserving it.

PROTEST IN PHILADELPHIA, MAY 30,2020. PHOTO BY SARAH BLOOM.

TJ Jagodowski is one half of the legendary longform improv duo TJ and Dave. I heard TJ interviewed on a podcast once and he was asked about the famous improv exercise “Yes, and . . . “ This exercise is usually described as one that teaches students to accept their partner’s offers, and build a story based on it. In this interview, TJ described his slightly different take on it. He said he feels that the “Yes” part is about acknowledging that “this is really happening”, and the “And” part is about going more deeply into what is really happening.

People of color are being systemically oppressed, and sometimes murdered, by a white majority culture defended by racist policing. This is really happening. Let’s go more deeply into it, so we can begin to come out of it.

PROTEST IN PHILADELPHIA, MAY 30,2020. PHOTO BY SARAH BLOOM.

Sarah R. Bloom is a professional photographer that takes our ensemble portraits. Please check out her remarkable photos of the Philadelphia protest here.

Ben Notes: what improv offers the differently abled

BRIGHT INVENTION TEACHER KIERSTEN ADAMS ADDRESS THE ACTING OUT! ENSEMBLE

It was March or April 2014. With the help of my brother I had just opened a small performing arts studio in my hometown of Elkins Park, PA. As I was standing on the sidewalk outside, I was approached by a woman and her teenage daughter. I noticed that her daughter hid behind her mom while her mom spoke to me. This caught my attention.

“This is so great!” her mom said of my little studio. “Will you be offering classes for young people with disabilities?” I told her that was something I was personally interested in but I didn’t want to misrepresent us. I explained that we - the ensemble and I - weren’t trained in working with that population. She introduced herself and her daughter to me. Her daughter is on the autism spectrum.

Two weeks later she emailed me and offered me this: she would pay to have me and as many of our ensemble as were interested trained by a woman who had been offering theater classes to kids with disabilities for years. I was moved and excited - and said yes! In the fall of 2014, we offered our first class for young people with disabilities and we named it Acting Out! This fall we celebrate five continuous years of offering this class.

TEACHERS KIERSTEN AND SHEA SONSKY TAPE DOWN THE FLOOR FOR THE FINAL SHARE WHILE FOUNDING MEMBERS ISABEL, CARLEY, ELIAS AND ERIC HELP.

Of all the various constituents Bright Invention serves and has served - from summer campers to corporate entities- our community of families in the disability community have been the most steadfast and loyal. Of that original group in 2014, four students have been in every class since, and we have begun to call them the “Acting Out! Ensemble”, and have begun thinking of ways to raise the bar in terms of their performance and visibility.

One of the things that sets our class apart from others like it is that we make no distinctions of either ability or disability. Many creativity classes are focused on particular disability or disability spectrum: autism, cerebral palsy, Down’s syndrome, etc. We essentially throw our doors open and say, if you think this is the class for you you are welcome. This affirms our commitment to radical inclusivity, and it comes with some challenges. Our teachers need to create an eight-week experience that serves everyone in the class, some of whom read, some who don’t, some who can jump around, others can’t, some who are very verbal, others who are very quiet. We have experimented with many approaches, and at first were using a variety of scripted formats to create theater, everything from original plays written by teachers from student ideas, to short Shakespeare scenes. But the scripts were challenging and had the unfortunate effect of dividing our group in to two basic groups: those who could read and memorize, and those who couldn’t.

Around this time I was developing an approach to organizational development, team building and leadership training which has come to be called Creative Corporate Training. These workshops use a “scenario-based” approach in which we design tailor-made scenarios we perform for our clients, which enact themes or challenges they want to explore. Then through a feedback sequence, the client group watches a problematic scenario improve as our actors replay the scenario making adjustments based on client observations and ideas. We create these scenarios using “structured improvisation” in which we design a simple three-act story based on our client’s needs, and our actors rehearse and perform it like it’s a little play. Except it isn’t. Because there’s no script. You see where this is going?

Please help Bright Invention deliver creative dramatics and structured improv to communities in need!

A HAPPY COMMUNITY AFTER A SUCCESSFUL FINAL SHARE!

Since 2017, this three-act, structured improvisation technique has been at the center of our work with people with disabilities. With this technique, everyone in the class can participate to their full potential. Everyone in the class is co-creating a three-act play, with assigned roles, a repeatable and rehearsable structure, and no limit on anyone’s creativity and imagination. All of the benefits of creative dramatics are engaged in this process. Our students are gaining confidence, developing verbal skills, acquiring emotional intelligence, and learning basic narrative structure: beginning, middle, end. Because our students are theatre people, our classes also include a rehearsed and performed show tune, which is now woven into the three-act play they create. We are really lucky to have talented and committed teachers who know how to lead structured improv, and can also choreograph a kick-ass show stopper. And we are expanding. This year, we brought our technique to a new community to us: teenage girls recovering from trauma.

Over the years, through my deepening relationship to these families I have learned a lot about what matters to them. I can write all I want about (see paragraph above) but here’s what the families tell me. Having a safe and reliable communal experience, in which their loved ones are having a fun and creative experience together is what matters. Because for their loved ones in this class, there aren’t a lot of places that offer that safe, creative space. I keep trying to innovate and they tell me, sure, okay, but just keep doing this, because this is essential for us.

That shy girl I met behind her mom on the sidewalk in 2014 is Isabel, and she is a core member of the Acting Out! Ensemble. She has been in every class since. She has performed for us and for her school, where I saw her play a leading role in their production of Hairspray. Here is a short interview I did with her before the Acting Out! final share last weekend:

I can no longer think of her and her classmates as “disabled”. She and they are just this bunch of amazing young people we get to play with year after year, and stand amazed as they bring their gifts, creativity and love to each other, us and the world.

Happy Thanksgiving. There is much to be grateful for.

Are you a human being? Or a human doing?

I don’t remember who said it. I don’t even remember where I was when I heard it. But I know this. I was in a bad place. I was looking for solace, or maybe a way to understand why I felt so sad, so stressed out.

SOME OF MY CLIENTS PLAYING . . .

“Ben,” my angel said, “it sounds like you’re a human doing, not a human being.”

And thus began a slow unpacking and examination of how I exist in the world, and why. It’s taken a few therapists and years in the recovery movement but if I could distill it, my ”human-doingness” comes from this: I never felt I was good enough and so had to work extra hard to get the emotional support others seemed to receive effortlessly. And like all of the scars we bear from our origin stories, this one is a paradox, with both positive and negative attributes. On the upside, I became an over-achiever, a leader and maker of events, art, and classes. On the downside, I felt like if I didn’t, I would be a neglected shade plant in the corner, ignored and starving for sustenance.

ABOUT TO PLAY WITH MY IMPROV ENSEMBLE . . .

A “human doing” is a person who lives under the sword of Damocles, constantly responding to the “or else”: I have to do this, or else that will occur. It’s a life lived under continual threat. And since it’s a condition developed in childhood, usually in response to what the child perceives as a survival strategy, as we age we lose awareness of it and it simply becomes our experience of living, as unconscious as the air we breath and every bit as consequential. It leads to codependent relationship problems (“I have to do ______ or else she won’t _______”), tyrannical leadership styles (“Do _______ or else I will make sure _______ happens”), and a generally transactional behavior pattern (“Let’s do this, so that that will happen.”)

Besides the pernicious and exhausting stress of living with the constant “or else”, something more subtle but more problematic happens. When I am a human doing, I am never where I am. I exist in a perpetually self-created anxious future. The thing I am doing I do not for its own value or experience, but in order to manage an event that doesn’t exist because it hasn’t happened yet. And because it doesn’t exist, it is a future event I create in my own anxious imagination. A human doing finds it difficult to enjoy an experience for its own sake, without attempting to know what the consequence will be in the future - a knowledge which is fundamentally unknowable.

I would love to report that I have been entirely cured of my human doingness, and that I now live in a swami-like state of pure presence. Ha. What I can report is that I am deeply aware of my own tendencies in this direction, and I know some warning signs. I can fall in to an anxiety spiral about the future and I know what that feels like. When I feel that way I do some breathing exercises, I go to a recovery meeting or talk to a friend about how I’m feeling. I take some medicine that helps too. And I look for opportunities . . . to play.

PLAYING WITH PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES . . .

Yes, play. What do I mean by play? For me, play is an activity done with others that has no explicit purpose other than the activity itself, and which engenders a shared joyful emotional state. There is a ton of research on play and since I am not a data person or a researcher I will let you go and find it. But I have read a few books and listened to a few podcasts and my takeaway is this: playing is an essential activity in the development of healthy humans, it begins in the year after we are born and continues throughout our childhood. And then for many of us . . . it stops. There are many reasons our playing stops, and it varies from person to person. But one of the most common is that we become “professionals” and enter workplaces driven by projections and outcomes. In other words, workplaces that succeed with a workforce of human doings, who exist to make sure that if they do this, that will happen.

In this light, being a playful person might be seen as an act of rebellion against the demands of professional expectations. But here’s what I know from years of applying improvisation to workplace dilemmas through a program I created called Creative Corporate Training - cultivating a playful mindset in the workplace:

• leads to innovative thinking

• deeper problem-solving

• more productive co-working

• more efficient teams

• happier and healthier workers

• retention of those happier an healthier workers

ABOUT TO PLAY WITH SOME PHARMA WORKERS . . .

Introducing the playful mindset is a gateway to any number of explorations: mindfulness, self-care, conflict management, emotional intelligence, better customer service, and the list goes on. Improvisation is the ideal delivery system for the playful mindset, because in improv all you have is the present moment and the other person. Improv teaches us that we are enough - we have all the wisdom, creativity and courage needed to build joyful connections to others as we work towards common goals.

So take a moment today to just be. Sit quietly somewhere nice and take a few deep breaths. Notice what rises up in your experience - no judgment! If you find yourself obsessively speculating about the next thing, and the next, and the next . . . maybe it’s time to play.