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.)

Who are you anyway?

Last week I asked you how you were doing.

This week I’m asking you who you are.

This is me improvising someone authoritative with Shea. Or maybe I don’t know what I’m doing and she’s instructing me? I forget.

Oh, you think you know, do you? I submit to you that this assuredness that you, in fact, know who you are is a compendium of things you have been told about yourself, and wishes of ego fulfillment. In the first group - what you’ve been told about yourself - are the messages you have received from the culture at large (entertainments, commercials, the news), your friends and colleagues and your childhood. It’s this last one that takes an entire lifetime to disentangle. Take me for example. My mom left me (this is how I experienced it) when I was three, and so I have been trying to get her back through other relationships ever since (label me exhibit A under “Mommy Issues.”) Some of what others have told you about yourself is true and useful. But a great deal of it is total bullshit, and has more to do with other people’s needs and desires and not your well-being.

Here I’m improvising smoking a cigarette with Owen after sex . . . maybe?

The other category - ego wish fulfillment - are all the ways you want to be. And sometimes you are. And sometimes you’re not. I try to be who I want you to think I am, whether it’s true or not. Even more distressing, the longer I live in this self-delusion, the less chance I have of sensing that it is indeed a delusion. I begin to act and behave as if I am who I want you to think I am. Unfortunately I am occasionally successful at this. People actually believe the nonsense I trumpet about myself in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. And then I’m trapped. Because I know, deep in my core, that I am inauthentic when I am like this. And inauthenticity is a kind of psychic cancer that slowly destroys the ability have real human connection with anyone.

Take a moment and think about all the ways you don’t want the world to know you. Here, I’ll go first:

• vulnerable

• insecure

• afraid

• vain

• grandiose

• and some more, but that’s a good start . . .

Authenticity is owning accepting these parts of myself too. Even more harrowing, authenticity means sharing from these places with other humans, so others can know me when I’m especially vain or vulnerable. Only then can I take the biggest risk I know: ask to be accepted as the damaged and imperfect creature that I am. I’ve done this a few times and guess what? I have never been refused. Those moments of acceptance of me by others when I am weak or wrong in some way are transformative, healing, revelatory.

So what does all this have to do with improv?

Not sure who I am in this picture, but Bob is definitely someone pretty awesome.

The kind of improvisation I practice is long form improvisation. As I understand it, it has to do with realistic people in deep relationship with each other, telling a story together that extends over time. Sounds heavy, but it can actually be quite hilarious. But it doesn’t have to be. And the removal of the requirement to be funny opens up breathtaking possibilities. Long form improvisation is a kind of personality laboratory. If I trust the people I am playing with, I have the opportunity to inhabit “my self” in any variety of characteristics. I can be the most wounded and awful person, the most appalling self-centered egomaniac, the most toxically masculine manly-man, and why? Because I am playing with someone who accepts my offer.

So when you hear an improv zealot like me tell you the practicing improv changes your life, this aspect of it is one of the reasons why. We are given the opportunity to experience all of ourselves, in collaboration with an accepting partner, witnessed by a group of affirming fellow explorers. The calcified mold of identity we have been trying to fit into in our “regular lives” shatters, and we briefly see the pieces of it on the floor of the stage as we take authenticity for a walk. Such a paradox isn’t it? Finding authenticity in a fiction.

It would be nice to report that the inauthentic mold of identity we temporarily escape from practicing improv stays in pieces on the floor. But It doesn’t of course. Under the weight of memory, habit and the crush of external messaging we find ourselves inside that mold again. But less and less. And then comes the day when we break out of it without an improv class, and those around say . . . wow.

Clearly being a Dad here with Aimee and Kelly - not a stretch for me.

Practicing improv is way to explore ourselves in a safe creative setting. And even though I was playing “someone else” a good coach will point out that it all came out of me. This is why Del Close told his students to “to get the hell out of their own way!” At its apex, improv allows all those parts of me I don’t want the world to know about to come out and play. And when I am seen and accepted like that, behind the thin veil of a co-created fiction, something deep is released.

So who am I? Well, I can tell you today. But ask me again tomorrow, and the answer will change. I am not a solid, I am fluid. And I bend and ebb and flow around the people and objects I encounter. Sometimes I am steam and sometimes I freeze. But if you are kind, you can dip your toes in. The water’s fine.

New. Year.

I have felt for a long time that the Jewish new year is placed more appropriately on the calendar than the one on January 1st. Perhaps that’s because the academic calendar is so deeply ingrained in my consciousness. Or maybe it’s because that - as an actor - I felt the fall was the season of beginnings: new shows, new rehearsals, new events. But mostly I think it’s because the Jewish new year is in synch with the changing of the seasons. This new year begins and the world slowly transforms from heat and green to cool, and orange, red and brown. It’s as if the world reminds us: change and transformation is inevitable. After January 1st it just stays cold and dark for a couple more months . . .

Speaking of change and transformation, I believe we are in an era of cultural change unlike anything we have witnessed since the sixties. The similarities are striking. Both eras are focused on racial justice and the rights of those victimized by American capitalism and systems of oppression. Both are characterized by progressive politics and led by our youth. Both include a challenge to sexual and gender norms. And both are fiercely resisted by reactionary cultural and political forces. We live in an era in which it is impossible to remain neutral. We must align ourselves somewhere on the spectrum defined by the poles of these opposing forces.

What does improvisation teach us about this state of convulsive change we are in? Several things it seems to me:

• Listen before speaking. Great improvisors are exquisite listeners and observers. They will say “My job is to make my partner look like a genius.” It is in this deep listening that extraordinary co-creating can take place. I make my creative offers based on what I hear and see from and in you. Today it’s really hard to listen to someone who is on the spectrum far away from you. But more than ever it’s essential. The goal is not to come to agreement. The goal is to feel where the words are coming from, and ask: why? Why is this person saying these things?

• Let go of the need to know. When we are confronted by a threat we work feverishly to construct a future in which that threat is diminished. We are tempted to say: I know exactly how this is going to turn out, and perhpas engage in a pre-planned “prophecy.” But we don’t know how it’s going to turn out, or what the future holds, plan as frantically as we might. Then what are we left with? This very moment. That’s it. What is right in front us, where our feet are standing, and who we are accompanied by. Improv lives creatively in this tension between spontaneity and planning. Improvisors live in the present moment, and yet some part of our brain is playing out a series of what-ifs. The trick is not getting attached to any of them. As Dr. Angeles Arrien said, “Be open to outcome, not attached to outcome.”

• Conflict kills progress. Which is not to say, “don’t have a conflict.” Sometimes in a scene and in life a conflict is essential. Conflict is a part of the DNA of change and transformation. What is being left behind will cry defiantly and attempt to prevent change. Improv doesn’t teach us to avoid conflict, it teaches us not to get stuck in it. Watching an improv scene in which two people are locked in an endless conflict is a little like non-anaesthetized dental work. Improv thrives when it evolves, it dies when it doesn’t. I submit the same is true for our human species. I tell my ensemble and students, the conflict must evolve. Sometimes that means someone “loses”. Sometimes it means someone shouts “Look! A unicorn!” And sometimes it means the two amazing actors improvise their way into something truthful; something which doesn’t deny the conflict, allows for both characters to have integrity, and somehow gives birth to a way forward.

• Avoid the addiction to intensity. When a scene heats up emotionally, we sometimes throw gasoline on the fire by inauthentically stamping our feet, raising our voices, squeezing “emotion.” Some of us can become addicted to this state of fake noise and wheel-spinning anxious energy. In this state, listening usually goes out the window and conflicts are invited. But your intensity isn’t interesting to anyone, not even to you. If you’re honest with yourself, you will acknowledge that it is a burden. It misrepresents you. It is a useless energy drain. Because here’s the hardest lesson improv teaches us:

• You are enough. You don’t need extra energy, some missing brilliant idea, ten fewer pounds or more hair. You don’t need to prove to your teacher, parent, colleagues that you deserve to [ have that opinion / make that creative offer / lie down and rest / trust your gut and go for it / be here now. ] These eras of momentous change are like amazing and challenging improv scenes we find ourselves in, the ones Del Close used to tell us to “follow the fear” in. When we meet them, our natural human insecurity will tell us “you can’t do this, you don’t have what it takes.” But you do. You really do. Just as you are, breathing, listening, observing.

“Follow the fear” is often misunderstood to mean “do something outrageous and offensive.” No, all it means is that improv is a pathway to discovering innate (meaning you already have them) virtues in yourself. The four virtues of improv as I see them are courage, empathy, creativity and faith. Three out of the four need to have an event or encounter to be felt. Improv provides that encounter. Only creativity can be accomplished fully by yourself.

Perhaps the era we are living through, this new year, is an opportunity for us to feel the virtues we already have. I have adopted the inherently optimistic energy of improv, I admit it, but perhaps this new year is a canvas, or a stage, waiting for us to make our brave, empathetic, faithful and creative offers.

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.