Rick Horner, new Ensemble Director

Rick Horner (photo: Jennifer Gershon)

With over 25 years experience teaching, coaching and performing improvisation, Rick Horner has been named Ensemble Director for Bright Invention for the 2022 – 2023 season. After being a member of the ensemble for two years, Executive Director Benjamin Lloyd felt this was a logical next step for Rick. Ben said “we have been fortunate to have Rick’s experience in the ensemble. Now it feels like this is the right time for new creative leadership, and Rick was the obvious choice. I’m thrilled he is stepping in!”

Rick rehearsing with ensemble member Aimee Goldstein

Since 1997, Rick has been involved in studying, performing, coaching, and leading various improv groups in Philadelphia proper.  Rick was one of the Founders of the Philadelphia Improv Festival and was sole Founder of the F. Harold Improv Festival. Rick was one of the first House Team Directors at Philly Improv Theater (PHIT) (Team Activity Book), who created monthly long-form shows to sold-out audiences. Rick also created and has facilitated the Improv Incubator, which has been running weekly for almost seventeen years and which is open to anyone who is willing. Rick performs virtually with Vintage Improv (Timeless and the Merritt House Team), Ricochet Illustrated Improv and two teams in Improv College. Rick is also half of two different virtual duos; Holdwater and PortmanTwo. Rick created LCR, the progenitor of the fledgling Blue Bell / Ambler improv community scene, focused on creating a healthy improv community in the Philadelphia suburbs. Rick also coaches and directs a musical long form improv team (coming soon to a screen near you!) When not coaching or doing improv, Rick is re-watching Planet of the Apes movies, looking for meaning. 

Rick rehearsing with ensemble member Eric Walker, Jr.

Rick is interested in assembling the diverse, talented folks in and around the Philadelphia area into an improv community. “I have been inspired by the Bright Invention mission and am excited to develop new and innovative long form improvisation with the ensemble,” says Rick. “Improv encourages us to focus our attention on the present moment. We listen to each word that is spoken and watch each movement in order to understand who, where and when you are. This is great exercise for our brains and teaches us to trust ourselves. Improv is made up mostly of trust. Trust feels wonderful and lack of trust feels terrible.”

Ben will step back from creative leadership to focus on developing the company’s corporate training work, and to launch some new initiatives serving marginalized communities. Bright Invention will debut a new show under Rick’s leadership later this fall at their new performance venue at the Arden Theatre Hamilton Family Arts Center in Old City, Philadelphia. “I can’t wait to see what they come up with!” said Ben. “I believe it will be improv like you have never experienced it before.”

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.

Lineage

ANTONIO FAVA IN HIS WORKSHOP WITH HIS MASKS.

In 2006, I had the great good fortune to study with a master of the commedia dell’arte Antonio Fava. For two weeks I was in a group of Philadelphia theatre professionals, making fools of ourselves under Fava’s smiling countenance. It’s hard to express the impact those those two weeks had on me, not only for the fascination and awe I developed for the extraordinary genre he was teaching, but also in what I learned from him about being a teacher of acting and improvising. On that latter point, if I could distill it down, it would come to this: the master teacher loves his students, especially when they fail.

VYACHESLAV (SLAVA) DOLGACHEV

A couple of years earlier, I studied with another master. Slava Dolgachev is the Director of the New Drama Theatre in Moscow. His own acting teacher had been a student of Contantine Stanislavsky. For a person steeped in the process of rehearsing, performing and teaching realistic acting, I felt like I was two degrees away from the legend who invented it all. But what I got from Slava was not at all what I expected. Rather than lectures on performance theory, he put us (a group of acting teachers) through a series of drills and exercises on our feet that were entirely experiential. In one, we had to move around he room with a partner, maintaining the distance of an imaginary stick between our outstretched hands. In another, we attempted to stop a blindfolded partner from moving away from us by jerking our head up and focusing on their back. The number of times this actually worked made the hair on my neck stand and tingle. I asked him about Stanislavsky’s interest in spiritual energy. He paused and said, through his interpreter, “Acting is not for ‘smart people’, acting is for people of faith, who dive in, who are a little crazy.”

Both of these men practice and teach their art from a distinct and acknowledged lineage. I remember Fava telling us that his own father (or uncle?) was a commedia performer. And Dolgachev worked on the plays of Chekhov, the playwright who was in essence Stanislavsky’s partner in realism. And so I am led to ask . . .

What is my lineage? What is yours?

The word obviously comes from the root “line”. The suggestion is we can draw a line from who we are (creatively, familiarly, politically) to a person or persons who came before us. In the arts, this is usually a teacher or other mentor figure, who we feel has imparted to us foundational ideas about art and creativity. And if we name ourselves in that person’s lineage, then we are saying that who we are and what perform and teach has been deeply affected - almost formed - by that person in our past.

MOM PERFORMING WITH DOUGLAS DUNN IN THE GRAND UNION

All of this came to the fore for me when I participated in an online conversation last weekend with my mother, the dancer, teacher and choreographer Barbara Dilley. Called Talking Improvisation and moderated by my friend and colleague Amy Smith, this was a fundraiser for Bright Invention attended by members of both my mom’s and my own art tribes. It has been source of curiosity to me that many of my creative undertakings and approaches to teaching have been deeply influenced by my mom, even though I never had anything like an apprenticeship with her, never studied with her, and in fact, have had to navigate an occasionally fractured relationship with her.

Mom was discussing her work with the Grand Union, the seminal dance/theatre group she was part of in the early 70s, that improvised all its shows. She came to that work out of a tightly choreographed experience with Merce Cunningham. I came to long form improvisation from the scripted work of stage acting, and this parallel we share - from scripted/choreographed work to improvisation - was a subject of our discussion. My mom has developed an exercise called “Lineage tree” - you can read about it in her book!

ME PRACTICING LONG FORM WITH ENSEMBLE MEMBERS AIMEE GOLDSTEIN AND OWEN COREY

Mom calls Merce and his partner John Cage her “art fathers” and Yvonne Rainer and the Grand Union her “art mothers.” Its a beautiful way to honor both approaches to dance without choosing one over the other. As she spoke I longed for such a neat lineage, but the truth is mine is blurrier, at least for now. Perhpas Bobbi Block, who introduced me to long form, is one of my art mothers. But so is Virginia Ness Ray, my voice teacher at the Yale School of Drama, who taught the work of Kristin Linklater. And speaking of Yale, Earle Gister, my first year acting teacher there, is certainly one of my art fathers. But so are Slava and Fava, even in the brevity of my time with them. I know I carry some of them into my creative work to this day. It feels as if I don’t have a lineage as much as I have a kaleidoscope, a great mandala of teachers who are significant pieces of the ongoing design which is me.

In some communities, your lineage is biological, and for the most part you can’t choose it. This has given rise to generations of oppression, as “chosen” lineages oppress others in order to preserve and consolidate their power. Think of Indian castes. Think of English peerage. Think of white supremacy.

But also think of your own parents. Perhpas the clearest lineage I have creatively is to both my mother and my father, Lewis Lloyd, who was professionally an administrator and producer of performance. My dad was a stage manager, company manager for the Cunningham Company, managing director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, leader for the New York State Council on the Arts, public television manager at WGBH. As Executive Director of Bright Invention and also improvisor and artistic director of the ensemble I am somehow, almost comically, a perfect combination of my mother and father.

So I invite you to create your own lineage. Think of it as a thought exercise - not a destiny or edict. The great thing about this exercise is you get to notice what parts of your art mothers and fathers you hold on to and what parts you’ve left behind. In this way, you are “purifying” what made them so powerful, distilling them to their essence in your own work and play, keeping the best parts of them alive. It’s a way to do something I think we don’t do enough of these days: honor our elders, their love, their wisdom, their experience. Who knows. Maybe someday you will be in someone else’s lineage . . . and may they honor you when they put you there.

To access a video of Talking Improvisation with me, mom and Amy click here, then use the passcode: #*b3xY5B 

Here’s a silent video of me and mom improvising together in 1968 . . .

Improv 1 is free . . . ish!

“It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection.” — The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde

ENSEMBLE MEMBERS SHEA SONSKY AND AIMEE GOLDSTEIN

This week, the teachers of our Improv 1 class, ensemble members Aimee Goldstein and Shea Sonsky, decided to make it free to enroll, and “pay-what-you-can”. They are inviting students to make donations as they go, or to join our Patreon if they choose to. Of course, this is simply a request and anyone can take the full eight-week class without a donation if they need to/choose to. In making this decision, they were responding to some prospective students who have expressed an interest in attending, but can’t because of financial constraints, most of which have been brought on by the pandemic. This decision will mean that Aimee and Shea will make drastically less money as teachers, and Bright Invention will forgo its percentage of this tution income. Aimee and Shea are facing their own financial stress. Why would they do this?

There is a relationship to the concept of value which guides Bright Invention as we negotiate remuneration. We make a distinction between the gift economy and the commercial economy, a distinction I first understood by reading Lewis Hyde’s remarkable book The Gift. We understand that our artistic creative gifts - the ones that we refine as we become better and better actor/improvisors - have no price tag, and are not for sale. Likewise, our artistic creations - our shows - are also pay-what-you-can. We expect cash payment for services we render in the commercial marketplace, primarily our work as consultants through our Creative Corporate Training Program. Yes, we are using our creative gifts here too. But the relationship to our “audience” in this case is defined by a fee-for-services arrangement. You hire us to help you solve a problem in your workplace. Our ensemble members make between $50 and $100 per hour for this work, which, it should be noted, has taken a hit during the pandemic.

WHAT YOUR ONLINE BRIGHT INVENTION CLASS MIGHT LOOK LIKE!

Classes have always fallen into a grey area between the commercial and the gift economy. It’s not stated explicitly, but as Executive Director I never want money to get in the way of someone taking a class with us. And - I want our teachers compensated fairly. So this decision by Shea and Aimee - which was entirely theirs - touched me.

We have spirited discussions in rehearsals about the word “free”. Some feel it denigrates what we do, and makes it feel like it has no value. Others feel it is a powerful marketing word and gets people’s attention. I have landed on “free-ish”.

“[The] art that matters to us—which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience—that work is received by us as a gift is received.” — The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde

Something mysterious and fundamentally unquantifiable happens when an actor moves us, or a teacher inspires us. We feel like we have received something personal and precious. Most people, if you asked them to put a dollar amount on that experience, would look at you like you were nuts. Because even if we paid money somehow for access to that experience, the experience itself feels gifted, not sold. It has to do with “feeling bond” alluded to in the opening quote above. The world “gift” swirls around creativity. We speak of God-given gifts, creative gifts, artistic gifts. We artists understand that the urgent and mysterious energy that drives us to make things as something we have been given. It can be refined through practice and instruction, but its origin is essential, fundamental, innate.

This is why it’s so profoundly painful for so many if us when we feel how misunderstood and cheapened we become by selling that gift in a commercial marketplace. Because in the commercial marketplace of the performing arts, what’s actually being sold is a person. And as soon as you are in the business of buying and selling people (auditioning and casting, for instance) that person becomes a thing, a product. This is why the commerce of entertainment is dominated by visual forms: body shape, skin color, height, weight, etc. These are the measurements of things, not people. This warping of people into products does deep and lasting harm to the psyches of young performing artists - I speak from experience. Do I sound bitter? That’s okay. It’s actually outrage. And Bright Invention is my humble way to begin to address it.

So go ahead. Sign up for Improv 1 with Aimee and Shea! And play with them in the flowing circle of gifts they create online with you. You won’t be sorry, I promise. You may be inspired to make a gift in return.

“ . . . a gift is consumed when it moves from one hand to another with no assurance of anything in return. There is little difference, therefore, between its consumption and its movement. A market exchange has an equilibrium or stasis: you pay to balance the scale. But when you give a gift there is momentum, and the weight shifts from body to body.” — The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde