‘The freedom of improv is one of the things that draws people to it. When you step onto the stage, anything could happen. You turn off the conscious mind, take a holiday from the everyday, and let creativity happen to you. Surely letting your instincts take over is the whole point?
Well, yes and no. You cannot, for example, punch your scene partner in the face. Or not at any theatre I know. Nor can you initiate a scene that your partner finds traumatic due to personal experience. I don’t expect many people would want to, but you can’t. You take a breath, let go, and do something else.
I don’t really know what to say to the person who wanted to punch their partner in the face. Talk to someone about it, perhaps don’t come to improv for a while. Everyone has intrusive thoughts, but that one is worrying. The person who wants to play a scene that their partner finds traumatic? That’s more complex. Say it’s a scene with a creepy character; I can see the joy in that. On a different day, creepy Matt might be great fun. Creepiness can be funny when held at a distance. If you ban onstage all behavior that you disapprove of in life, you end up in a very small playground.
This is surfing dangerously close to ‘You can’t say anything these days’, so let me clarify. I might laugh at a creepy character, I might even play one (I have). I believe that creepy characters should exist in improv, but only if everyone is enjoying it. If it’s reminding someone of an experience they don’t want to think about, let’s do something else – there’s lots of improv left. If someone in the room is feeling the palm-prickle and tight chest of adrenaline, let’s step away. But if it’s feeling energetic and edgy, let’s keep going.
The challenging truth around what material you can play is that there are (nearly) no absolutes. Putting a bullet point list of banned topics on the wall may make you weaker. More powerful (and more difficult) is learning the skills to negotiate what works scene by scene, moment by moment, person by person. Along with the skills to stop a scene and talk where necessary.
Because finding what we can joyfully play together is not an annoying eccentricity of improv, it is the whole damned thing. And it sometimes means not following an instinct. Improvisation is watching two people finding agreement, losing it and finding it again. Whether you love or hate the phrase ‘yes, and’, cooperation is not just the morally right thing to do; it’s what makes the best shows. It’s a profoundly iconoclastic idea, and the reason why improv is inherently political. Improv is collective decision-making, with all its sharp edges.
The political philosopher Erich Fromm divides freedom into two parts: freedom from and freedom to (or liberty and power). The first is the absence of rules, the second is the ability to accomplish something. There is no (human) law preventing me from flying; I lack the physicality to do so. I am at liberty to do it, I just lack the power. This, I think, is a good way to think about freedom in improvisation. There may be times when your teacher or teammates ask you not to do something, and that may sometimes rankle, but in the accumulation of those moments, you build a team that can do something you could not do alone.
Which means sometimes (sorry) it’s not your idea. Sometimes (sorry) it doesn’t go the way you expect it, and sometimes (sorry again) you don’t get to do exactly what you want. You give up individual liberty to gain collective power.
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No Stupid Questions is a series of blogs answering common questions we are asked in improv classes. Feel free to send suggestions to jules@andalsoimprov.com.