The Four Virtues of Improvisation

I have a thing for the number four, which is weird because most actors have a thing for the number three. Three is the magic comic number. When constructing a gag based on repetition, do it three times building somehow to the third occurance and you are nearly guaranteed a laugh after #3. There is a library full of various “comic three” sequences, from simple escalations, to elaborate gags involving audience reaction. I love comedy and the techniques that drive it, but there’s something soothing to me about four.

Empathy: Kiersten Adams listens to Shea Sonsky (2020 Improvathon.)

Maybe it’s because I am reminded if the four corners of a room, holding and protecting me. Maybe years of listening to popular music in 4/4 time has brainwashed me. Maybe it’s that as an even number, four contains balance and symmetry. Or maybe it’s my devotion to Angeles Arrien’s Four Fold Way, which has formed a way of living and creating for me since my mom first shared it with me twenty years ago.

Whatever the reason, over years of acting, improvising and teaching I have come to define four virtues awakened by the practice of improvisation (and I do not restrict this to the kind that I practice - long form theatrical improvisation - I believe it’s true for all kinds of performed improvisation.) Here’s what I mean by virtue. To me, a virtue is potential. It is a beneficial way of behaving that is awakened into action by external conditions. A virtue is a reply, a response, an offer. We don’t experience and display virtues until we are stimulated by someone or some situation. And that person or situation needs to be challenging - even uncomfortable - for your virtue to appear.

Courage: Eric Walker improvises a monologue. (2020 Improvathon)

So. The Four Virtues of Improvisation.

1. Courage. Anyone who has taken any kind of improv class will have the sense memory of being a beginner there. I’ve never bungee-jumped, but I submit it’s a similar sensation. Or maybe it’s more like this: a kindly person points you and someone else towards the beginning of a trail through the woods. You can’t see the end but the kindly person says, if you help each other out you will not only find your way, you will have a great time doing it. When you ask for a map, they laugh at you. Discovering your own courage isn’t only a beginner’s experience in improv. The deeper you get into it, the longer the path is, and the greater the obstacles.

2. Empathy. There are so many empathetic engines at work in improvisation it’s hard to know where to begin. First, there’s the empathy you feel for your fellow student and performer. How dazzling and brave they become to you headed into the woods like that (and how they inspire you to sense your own dazzle and bravery.) Then there’s the empathy of character, both the one you discover and the one you’re on stage with. Because of the “yes, and” mindset improvisation drives relentlessly towards cooperation. So even the most despicable character cannot be denied. Somehow, some way you find a way to accept who they are and co-create with them to get to the end of the trail through the woods. And in doing so, your empathetic virtue is revealed and strengthened.

3. Creativity. Not the kind you plan for, the spontaneous kind. The kind where you have no idea what to say so you say the first thing that comes to your head, and it turns out to be amazing. Or you fall on your face and it’s still amazing. The practice of improvisation shows you that your imagination is limitless, which turns out to be a terrifying truth. Improvisation pushes you beyond convention, politeness, and tact. Improvisation pulls you outside of the box and invites you into the cave, as Del Close put it. If you’re being supported in the right way, you will find the most amazing ideas in there . . .

4. Faith. There is no quitting in improvisation. The scene is not over until the offstage actors say it is. So no matter how boring, stupid, banal or embarrassing you feel in whatever disaster of a scene you are co-creating, you cannot escape. Most of the rational parts of your brain may be shouting, “this is hopeless!”, still you have to say the next thing, whatever it is, and have faith that somehow it will lead the two of you to someplace less embarrassing. Or, you have a spasm of crazy courage and you decide to go all-in on the embarrassment. In either case, you will not have a clue about where you will end up. Improvisation is “ready, fire, aim!” Faith is the virtue that keeps you creating, even in when any reasonable person would forgive you for walking off the stage.

Creativity: Eric Walker, Owen Corey and Aimee Goldstein help Shannon Hill give birth (2020 Improvathon.)

If I’m right, then you can understand why those of us who are devoted to this art form feel like it has answers to many social, professional and interpersonal dilemmas. Perhaps you can see why we feel practicing improvisation is a kind of on-going personal self-improvement. I hope you will see why many of us apply it to situations that have nothing to do with entertainment. Maybe you will understand it as I do not as a genre, but as a movement.

Oh look! A handy infographic! I created this a while back so the descriptions of each virtue are a little different from above, but feel free to print it out anyway and put it up on your fridge. Your virtues will thank you for it.

Faith: Aimee Goldstein, Kiersten Adams and special guest Mary Carpenter creating the path they are following (Improvathon 2020.)

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.

Layers of agreement

“Yes, and . . . “ is the foundational exercise of improvisation. It contains two essential features first defined in the “Kitchen Rules” of the Compass Theatre in the 1960s: agreement and collaborative story-building. The longer I have played with this game and the concepts it promotes, the more profound it has become for me.

Do you realize how much we depend on agreement in our everyday lives? Think about a four-way stop sign intersection on crossing roads. First we agree we will stop. Then we agree who moves first. Or forming a queue for . . . anything. An effective conversation depends on a simple agreement: you talk, I listen. Then, reverse.

I will go out on a limb here and say the following: the very existence of civilization depends upon agreements, often unspoken and unexamined. Civilization begins to break down when those agreements fall apart.

And here’s another observation: genuine agreement includes a loss of ego and a feeling of vulnerability. When we agree (even at the stop sign or the Starbucks line) we become partners. We have moved from an individual existence in which the only actions are my responses to the chaos of existence, to a shared existence in which we have seen and recognized each other and are organizing existence together. Agreement then can be seen as a defense against fear and isolation. But it requires that I don’t entirely get my way, I acknowledge you have something to say and contribute, and that I will make space for it. And though in joining me in agreement you ease my fear and isolation, your presence make me feel vulnerable . . . even just a little.

One of my foundational pieces of writing is David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water. The title refers to the a joke which plays upon the way we operate in ways we don’t even see. He calls this our “default setting,” and cautions us to be aware of when that setting is dialed in to negativity, cynicism and intolerance. But here’s a glass half full version: we can also notice when our default setting includes agreement.

We walk in the world through layers of agreement, and each one - from the “bless you/thank you” exchange after the sneeze, to the groundbreaking one in which we finally put all the anger behind us - each one is a spiritual affirmation. We are not alone. We can meet each other safely. We can move forward together.

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.

2020 is Both/And

THE BRIGHT INVENTION ENSEMBLE IN MARCH 2020, RIGHT BEFORE THE PANDEMIC HIT. PHOTO BY SARAH BLOOM.

Years from now, when we look back on 2020, we may have a surprising assessment of this tumultuous year. Without question, this will forever be a year of tremendous loss of human life. It will always be a year in which a madman tried to dismantle our democracy. It will be a year when our racist culture was seen and felt in unambiguous acts of violence. But years from now it is my belief that we will look back on 2020 and see that we found out what we are made of. 

AIMEE GOLDSTEIN AND OWEN COREY IN THE IMPROVATHON, FEBRUARY 2020. WE RAISED $1,000 FOR THE WEST PHILADELPHIA SKILLS INITIATIVE!

When I teach or coach improvisation, I tell people that practicing improv is way towards the Four Virtues of Improvisation: courage, empathy, creativity and faith. Improv does not impart these to you, it allows you to discover them in yourselves. How? Through a safe and playful “stress test.” You meet another human being in a creative space and co-create a story, while being observed by others (courage). You accept everything about this other person (empathy.) You and they continuously move forward in time adding endlessly to the story you are both creating (creativity.) You believe nothing can go wrong as you co-create (faith.) 

I believe 2020 was a great cultural stress test for America. Now, let me own my optimism and romantic nature (another by-product of practicing improv.) And let me again acknowledge the pain and trauma experienced by so many Americans this year, especially BIPOC Americans. And yet, I believe years from now we will see that we collectively discovered the Four Virtues of Improvisation in ourselves this year. Not all of us. But most of us. This entire year was a national improvisation. We had no script for any of it. All we had were each other and our own innate virtues. 

It’s tempting to apply binary judgments to 2020. “It was a total and complete horror show and it can’t end fast enough.” Sound familiar? And yet here too, improvisation has something to teach us. Improv resists binary thinking. Improv is not either/or, it’s both/and. I’m constantly coaching improvisors out of binary conflicts in scenes – I’m right, you’re wrong; my way or the highway. These kinds of offers in improv scenes grind the story to a halt. I say, yes it’s true your character was deeply hurt by the other character, but the scene still needs to continue. How will you maintain the integrity of the story, and also move the scene forward? Both/and. 

For instance, in 2020 Bright Invention lost the ability to offer any of its intensely in-person programs. And, we dramatically expanded our audience reach through virtual programming. We lost a great deal of money in canceled or deferred contracts, and we made new connections online, and developed new and viable virtual workshops and shows. We missed being physically close to each other, and we discovered how essential our online connections to each other were. 

THE ENSEMBLE REHEARSES ONLINE, MAY 2020

It’s an appropriate time to reflect. Here, at the winter solstice, many are contemplating, assessing, planning. We have crossed over now. Now the days become slowly longer and the nights shorter. Maybe now is a good time to ask – what story will we tell about 2021?

Maybe it will be a story about recovery. One in which you tell the truth about what happened to you this year – all of it, good and bad. And you asked for help, and you let others help you. A story about how you gave yourself permission to fall apart and collapse, to not have your shit together, and to become aware, dimly at first, that you are still loved. Perhaps your recovery started with your body, with deep breaths and stretches, with naps and something good to eat. And in that stillness, you heard the old tapes – the ones that don’t help. And you threw them away. 

Maybe it will be a story about reconciliation. You and someone else see the enormous distance between you. It seems hopeless. And you name it. You say, there is a huge distance between us and it seems hopeless. And then you look up the canyon, to a place where the gulf narrows and both of you can see the water flowing below. Instead of trying to build a bridge – so expensive, so complex, so daunting – you both carefully climb down to the water’s edge and drink. And you discover you share a great love for this water, and that you can hear each other from across the river. So you talk. 

AUDIENCE FOR ONE OF OUR LIVE SHOWS . . .

Maybe it will be a story about redemption. You think, maybe this one is binary: I either throw people away or I don’t. Maybe you feel the grace of the present moment, in which you realize in a flash that the past doesn’t exist, it’s not real, and it only holds on to you because you invent a story – a story about how the past holds on to you. And you can choose to tell a different story. Maybe it’s about your growing awareness that the future isn’t full of monsters and plagues, and it’s not full of parties and victories either. The future is . . . empty. And you choose to begin a story to fill it with, one in which you and the guy across the river both grow and change. One in which you are not alone, and you invite others to co-create this new story with you. Yes, maybe even with him.

Here’s my plan. In everything I do in 2021, I will strive to create real human connection, between myself and others, within groups of people, through my work, while at play, in person or online. Maybe I will meet you along the way, playing “Yes, and . . . .”