A different kind of virus.

Like the rest of America, I was gutted by the whiplash of January 6th. First, the astonishing victories in Georgia by Warnock and Ossoff, the culmination of years of work by Black communities there, led by Black women. And then, I watched our country attacked from the inside by the deranged and clownish followers of Donald Trump. And I watched our law enforcement officials treat them like friendly neighbors who had had a little too much to drink. And I thought of the protests of this past year, honoring the lives of Brionna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and others. And I fell into a pit of anger, grief and despair.

I was caught off guard by the intensity of my own feelings. My adrenaline spiked as I watched the riot. My heartbeat increased, my blood pressure rose and my thoughts become cloudy and confused. I wanted to feel a baton in my hand with which to attack them. I wanted to do violence in response to violence. I wanted to hear gunshots, and I wanted to witness a massacre. I went upstairs to bed around midnight with a tightness in my chest and hands and legs that felt as if they were vibrating. Even the next day, at the one work meeting I could handle at 10 AM Thursday, my thoughts were still cloudy. I slurred some words, and took long pauses as I searched for terms and concepts that were ordinarily automatic. Most of Thursday, I felt on the brink of tears. Even writing this hard for me - stirring up those feelings - and I have to stop now.

OK I’m back. As I came to terms with the depth of my anguish on Thursday, I had the presence of mind to take care of myself. I had to choose to do something active, to launch my own personal insurrection against the forces of despair. I walked outside. I exercised. I settled. I felt the world I inhabit come in to focus again, and I was able to count my blessings. I connected with others, and pushed my loneliness back into its cage, where it paces in front of the bars, waiting for another opportunity to escape and capture me. Self-care is everything.

Sidebar: we need to be careful with admonitions to “practice more self-care”. The ability to take time out of one’s day to, say, go to a health club, or do some yoga, is a privilege and many in our nation don’t have it. Others struggle with mental illness, making the very idea of “self-care” an extraordinary mountain to climb. I believe there are many kinds of self-care, and it is available to everyone. But not practicing it may have more to do with forces outside of our control, and not with an individual failure of will.

So . . . why am I writing all of this and sharing it with you? I’m sure you have your own version of this experience. I hope you came through it and are breathing easier now. I guess it’s this:

Personal and political change don’t occur because of thoughts or ideas. They occur because people feel emotions. And feelings are contagious.

Think of the Capitol building as a human body. In it, various cells (the people inside) scurry about and do things. Some of them have executive functions. Others maintain the well-being of the edifice. And others, like our white blood cells, protect it from outside threats. That body is governed by well-ordered and regular patterns. And even though feelings can run high inside that body, those regular patterns ensure its continued health, even if you dislike the outcomes of its work. The overall feeling, I would argue, is one of safety. No matter how hot people get with each other in there, nothing collapses or disintegrates, because an order is maintained.

On Wednesday, the Capitol was invaded by a virus: chaos. The white blood cells failed, and the virus briefly took control. And the virus radiated outwards as viruses do, seeking new hosts. That feeling of chaos spread to anyone who observed it. My panic and despair on Wednesday was born of a viral infection I could do nothing about . . . as long as I focused on it. It was only when the original body infected regained control and order was restored (and the election was certified) that I began to feel safe again, even though I was still reeling from the side effects: grief, despair, anxiety.

The scariest aspect of it to me isn’t that the virus did what it did, it’s that it was an intentional strategy executed by a real movement led by a deranged narcissist. Nothing about Wednesday was accidental. Since Ghengis Khan, this is the playbook: disrupt the governing order through violent chaos, and then win over the populace by implementing a new order based on whatever goals the insurrectionists espouse. Think of Germany in the 30s. And, think of the American colonies in the 1770s. The overthrow of an established order doesn’t depend upon the “moral rightness” of those leading that overthrow. It depends on the injection and spread of a virus of feelings based on chaos and violence, leading to the restoration of order. To the forces of George III, the American rebels weren’t freedom fighters. They were domestic terrorists.

How do we fight a virus like this? Clearly, we need to bolster our white blood cells. We need to hunt down and hold accountable the agents of the virus. We need to capture and contain them. This is the job of law enforcement and the justice system. And as those processes are observed and their consequences felt, the destabilizing effects of the virus are diminished.

But we also need an equally proactive strategy around feelings. Part of why the virus of chaos is so effective is that chaos is the foundational terror of human existence. From the moment of our birth, we are confronted by chaos, and we begin a life-long journey to create order and safety for ourselves in the face of it. Because chaos isn’t optional - it’s a baseline fact. Existence is chaotic. Human culture - families, communities, tribes and nations - are essentially protections from chaos. So when you stir it up to achieve whatever goal you have, it stimulates the deepest fear of all. This explains the extreme reaction I had Wednesday, being a child with a lived experience of chaos myself. The attempted coup was a personal trigger for me, as I imagine it was for many millions of others.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy employs active, physical activities and adjustments a person enacts when they are feeling triggered. I practiced a version of it Thursday. I had to actively disrupt the virus by actually doing something different, even as I was feeling the effects of the virus. The activity I engaged in was an elaborate form of self-soothing. I experienced my body as strong and alive and healthy. I saw the world as beautiful and full of gentleness and light. I put myself in the company of other humans who were safe, affirming, comforting. By Friday morning, I was restored . . . or at least well enough to have a relatively “normal” day, whatever the hell that means in these times we are living through.

So this next bit . . . I’m going to try and not come off as the worst kind of Pollyanna, Kumbaya-type naif. But here it is.

We need to combat this virus with a different kind of virus. Our animal instinct (and some political theory) would lead us to combat violence with violence, and chaos with chaos. But this only feeds the virus, not defeat it. The virus of chaos is defeated through an encounter with a stronger and very different virus of feelings. Such a virus exists, and it is as foundational to our human experience as is the fear of chaos. This virus is called the joy of human connection.

Paradoxically, it was at work even in the actions of the insurrectionists Wednesday. One of the great sorrows of that awful day was observing that their horrible actions, and more broadly their allegiance to the movement that spawned it, was a deeply compelling experience of human connection for them. To them, it was the experience of being a part of a righteous brotherhood, and they felt a bond with each other as they smashed windows, destroyed offices and chanted hateful slogans. The most insidious effect of the virus of chaos, is its use of love between humans to achieve its ends. Deep in our DNA, we crave connection to others. And when we are alienated and disaffected, we will take it wherever we can find it.

Our task is to affirm that need for human connection, but disconnect it from chaotic ends. Further, it seems to me that we must use that need for human connection to create encounters between people of different backgrounds, beliefs and sympathies in which they can experience that essential joy of connection in a safe space, divorced from the cultural triggers that divide us. Not an easy task. But doable. And I believe it starts with play.

There are several well-intentioned “Red-Blue” bridge-building movements afoot, and I support all of them. But the critical mistake I observe some of them making is that they begin with an attempt to talk about the hard stuff safely. My approach is different: at the outset, let’s not talk about the hard stuff at all. Because in the current era, talking about the hard stuff devolves into an argument about what is true and what is not. Once you get to that argument, progress only occurs when one side or the other admits they were wrong about what they believe is true. And if what they believe is true is a powerful source of human connection for them, they will very rarely do that.

Instead, let’s not focus on the thoughts or ideas at all, and instead let’s stimulate the conditions for the spread of this new virus, the one that feeds on the joy of human connection. Let’s connect on stuff that has nothing to do with thoughts and ideas, but instead on safe experiences we participate in together. Games. Laughter. Play. Because as we begin to connect safely with each other through play, a bond begins to grow between us, one that we remember from childhood, when all we needed for the cops and robbers game to begin was to get the kid across the street to join in. That bond resists disconnection. Part of what makes it so powerful is that it instantly begins to replicate. It’s a virus - it spreads. As we witness bonds being made between others, we begin bonding with others ourselves, because it feels . . . awesome.

Here, let me shoot Polyanna for you. Play is not the solution. The hard stuff does need to get worked on. The solution, the “cure” for the great cultural divide we are living in, is generational. I believe we will not actually experience it unless we live long enough to see our children in position of power, the ones who grew up in this shitstorm and enter adulthood with the conviction to create a more just and peaceful society. But play is a beginning. It is one vaccine among many. It is strong medicine, greatly misunderstood and undervalued.

Those of us skilled at creating playful places, through improvisation, performance, teaching, workshops and art, have a vital and essential role to play in our recovery from this collective disease we are living through. We are called upon to offer safe play to everyone, yes, even to the Trumpists. Maybe especially to them, so that they can begin to experience their own capacity for human connection in ways that don’t involve violence.

My experience as a teacher of acting and improvisation, as a leader of classes and workshops, shows me this: that the joyful experience of human connection is stronger than any idea. Given the choice in a safe space to connect or not, we will, each in our own way, choose to connect. There is a way to get to where we want to be from where we are. Many ways, in fact. It’s up to us to disrupt the chaos and choose a new way, a different kind of virus.

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