In this episode, Heather & Jules talk about ‘Yes, And’ in a little bit more detail. Some of the more complicated nuanced ways you might approach this idea as you get further along your improv journey.

“You’ve heard YES, now here is AND!”

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Full transcript:

And also a podcast with me Jules Munns and Heather Urquhart. In this episode we talk about Yes And in a little bit more detail. Some of the more complicated and nuanced ways you might approach this idea as you get further along your improv journey.

Welcome to part 2 of Yes And. This is the And bit. You’ve heard Yes, now here is And.

Because there’s a lot to be said about it apart from how it works. There’s a lot of problems that it can cause, there’s a lot of things it doesn’t mean. There’s a lot of legitimate reasons to attack it.

There’s a lot of reasons why people attack it which I don’t think is legitimate. Big, big complex subject. And side note, when we teach Yes And on our beginners courses we do actually split it into Yes and And.

Because they’re slightly different aren’t they? Sending Yes to an idea is a huge first step to get into and then building upon it is actually another thing in itself. However we wanted to talk now a little bit about why not Yes And? What are the problems with it? It’s become a little bit more controversial in recent years hasn’t it? Yeah, well let’s go for the simplest form of it. The simplest form of the problems that Yes And can cause.

Let’s imagine that you have an exercise like Yes Let’s. So Yes Let’s, lovely exercise. Everyone’s standing in the room and then someone says Let’s all brush our teeth.

And everyone says Yes Let’s and you all start brushing your teeth. And then the next person says Let’s all floss our teeth. And everyone says Yes Let’s and then you do that.

And it’s a nice way of just getting people to build on what has come before and to do something together. You can play it with a kind of elimination version where if you don’t want to do the thing which is mentioned you just sit down and you’re waiting for the last person to be left. But if you’re playing without elimination so you have to follow the thing that’s been said there will quite often be some smart arse, sorry, who will say Let’s all do 20 press ups.

Yeah. Who will leverage Yes And as a technique to force other people to do something which will be uncomfortable for them. In that case physically, there are obviously emotional and psychological equivalences and that’s just not what it’s for.

It’s not. And I think there’s, correct me if I’m wrong Jules, but I feel like this really came into focus post Me Too because there’s definitely situations in improv, particularly if someone’s playing an intimate relationship where people’s consent and boundaries can be crossed. And if you’ve got a teacher saying We say Yes And to everything and then you’re feeling a little bit uncomfortable about something and a newer improviser, there’s a huge potential there for someone to say Yes to something they really don’t want to.

So, you know, big red neon sign flashing very loudly that Yes And. Is it flashing loudly? It’s flashing loudly because it doesn’t want you to say Yes to anything that you as an individual human do not want to say Yes to. That’s the thing we haven’t talked about actually, that we’re often, where’s the line between a character saying Yes and the human saying Yes and the human saying Yes to the idea but the human underneath that not wanting to do anything that makes them feel uncomfortable.

There’s lots of levels to this that I think are important. May I give an anecdote that I’ve just remembered and you mentioning that Yes Vets game? I mean, you’re asking permission to waffle a bit on a podcast. It’s what we’re here for, isn’t it? Well, it’s a bit of a, I don’t know if it’s the right time to mention it, but we were… Who were you going to slag off? We were teaching a workshop, Jules Mund, you and I, many, many years ago at a place that we shall not name.

Oh, is it us you’re going to slag off? No, I’m not slagging anyone off. We were teaching a improv workshop at a community that is known for its more out there practices, some of which in the 60s you may have called free love. And we went there to teach a workshop.

Do you remember this? I do. And we’re having a game of Yes Let’s and basically everything became incredibly sexual really, really quickly. And it was quite, I don’t know how we handled it.

Well, I think in that situation, because one of the new conversations that started to happen, particularly post Me Too and also other kind of identity, after other conversations about identity politics, trans rights and stuff, is that people started to talk more actively about boundaries in improv classes and you would have people at the start of a course or at the start of a class just kind of mentioning either things which they can’t or won’t or don’t want to play or things which are particularly sensitive for them that evening. And I think the interesting, as people come from a professional performance background, I don’t really have a lot of boundaries because that was kind of beaten out of me. At an early age it was like, well, you’ve just got to be able to play and do whatever you want.

And I don’t agree with that. I think that’s a mistake of some of the training which I had. But it has stuck and that’s how I now am.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I remember my first day of my physical theatre degree. It was like, just do something performance art-wise that’s going to express yourself.

And a guy that none of us knew and we hadn’t had any conversations about just took all of his clothes off and walked around the room naked. We were all like 18-year-old girls and he was much older. But I guess the reason… One of my drama school teachers is still married to a former student.

Yeah, I mean, it’s a different time. No one was angry at the time. But going back to our commune experience, I guess what was kind of funny and interesting about that and the reason I giggle about it is because, first of all, everybody there was fine with it.

You and I were the ones whose boundaries were being transgressed in that moment because, I think, the exercise allowed the group to do whatever the group wanted. And I just remember a specific example of, like, let’s rob a bank, yes, and let’s get caught by the police, yes, and let’s be put in handcuffs, fill in the blanks from there on in. And I remember you and I just going, my gosh, we could give this group any suggestion and they would turn it into an orgy by the end of it.

Which somewhat amused me. I didn’t find… The thing I found uncomfortable was not the content. What I worried about was not knowing that group well enough to be able to have the conversations around to be able to ask the question, is everyone okay with this? Because, actually, it wasn’t a resident community, they were kind of brought together for this festival, so people had met, might have only met a couple of days before, they might have known each other for years, we didn’t know that.

And we didn’t, at that point, code of conducts and crisis communications, all that kind of stuff, weren’t really in existence. Certainly in that kind of context. So my discomfort with that wasn’t the content, my discomfort was not knowing to what degree some people there might have been uncomfortable.

And it’s certainly true that that organisation, which anyone who knows this can fill in the blanks, has had its reasonable and justified share of scandals on exactly this issue. Because there are certainly, there are definitely communities of… There are alternative lifestyle communities, like this one which we’re talking about, which are very vulnerable to people using it as their personal dating slash fuckpool, isn’t it, aren’t they? Sorry for the graphic language. Well, listen, you know, that was an extreme example, and I, you know, I think although we laugh about it, it is the sort of, one of the sharpest ends of the problem with the yes and right consent, and I think in that particular example, again, we were not in our own workshop so we didn’t have our own boundaries, but I certainly think it’s extremely important.

I’m so, so glad that in the last five to 10 years there are really useful conversations happening around how this idea of accepting and building on one another’s ideas on stage, which is incredibly positive, creative, momentum building thing, how that intersects with an individual being able to express what makes them uncomfortable and what their boundaries are in a class. And I, God, you know, we’re not perfect. We do have our way of dealing with it, but I think we’re getting better at it all the time, and I certainly think as a global community, improvisation is way ahead of what it was when we first started, and I’m really thankful for that.

But yeah, obviously, that is the, to me, that’s the sort of biggest hazard of yes and, something that I hope anyone who’s teaching improvisation has a useful framework for talking about. And I think there’s two things here, one of which is a very blunt instrument, which is a scene starts. I don’t want to play this scene.

Let’s stop the scene and either talk about it or not and then restart, which is a necessary blunt instrument, and I think that people should be able to stop scenes from inside the scenes. If you’re watching a scene which makes you feel uncomfortable, you should be able to stop it, absolutely. But I think that sometimes the overuse of that blunt instrument can conceal conversations about how you can deal with those things inside scenes without necessarily having to stop the scene.

And I’m fully aware of being a middle-aged, middle-class white dude talking about that, tall white dude, it’s all very easy for me to say, but I think the neutral way of talking about it is that by saying yes and, you are still making a choice, right? Give me a first offer for a scene, might be a first line or like where we are or who we are to each other or something. I’m going to get some popcorn for the movie if you want some. Great, so this sounds to me like a kind of younger character, American accent.

The accent to me sounds sort of 50s-ish. I’m imagining a kind of Greece kind of vibe, although I feel like that film was made in the 70s and set in the 50s, is that right? So I have a choice of a different, there’s a bunch of different ways in which I can say yes and to that because I could be a sort of, I could be a we’re on a first date kind of situation. I could be like a father taking their kid to the movies situation.

I could be excited by the fact that we’re at the movies. I could be resentful by the fact that I’ve been dragged away from the big game, which feels like very much in genre. There’s a bunch of different ways in which I can yes and that.

You could be fatally allergic to popcorn. Yeah, that’s true. I could be fatally allergic to movies.

Yeah, anything is possible. Which I kind of am. Here’s the issue with movies.

They’re too short. I’m just getting attached to people and then they all die. I haven’t got time for series.

Anyway. So I think that one of the things which is difficult to talk about when you’re first introduced to yes and is the fact that by saying yes and you are not, there’s not one inevitable way in which you yes and an idea. There’s a bunch of different ways and consciously or unconsciously you are making a choice by doing so.

Yeah, you were telling me about your Tuesday class, which is kind of an advanced scene study class and the different scales of yes and and I really love that idea of like, well, you can say yes to, for example, the last line or you can say yes to the genre that you’re in or actually I talk a lot about this in musical improv, the kind of yes you give according to where you are in the story. Yeah, for sure. You know, I mean, you’re probably not going to say yes to the proposal in the first third of a romantic comedy.

You mean like a proposed marriage? Yeah, exactly. Like the genre of a romantic comedy, right? It’s throwing lots and lots of obstacles in the way of the couple in order that they get together at the end. So if you’re playing the genre of a romantic comedy, you’re saying yes to that by constantly rejecting each other for the sort of first two thirds of the show.

I mean, that to me is a really, really clear example of where a no is a yes in a very black and white way. But I think, yeah, I love that idea you were saying of like, well, what is the yes and to? Because there is… Yeah, because with your previous example, if that’s the fourth scene and it’s been established that I am the sort of first date wannabe boyfriend, I am so nervous to be around you, a yes and to the whole show might be to immediately spectacularly vomit because I’m that damn nervous and you said something nice to me. Like there’s a yes and to the last line, there’s a yes and to the character, there’s a yes and to the scene, there’s a yes and to the show.

I think there’s even a yes and to the show that night. I think there’s even yes and to the show and the company. Like there are moves that you would make in a Mayday show which you wouldn’t make in a Showstopper show and vice versa, I imagine.

Like you’re yes anding the culture, that’s what it is, isn’t it? 100% and I think… I was actually having a conversation about this with some students a couple of weeks ago about how in some cases a no or a blocking of an idea or a denial can be a yes. So I think people were talking about comedy store player shows or like Paul Merton in particular, if you watch him, he’s a sort of master of getting a laugh. He’s a master of whitewater, isn’t he? By shutting things down and cutting across and sort of denying things.

And some of the players in the class were saying it made them feel uncomfortable to watch him sort of shoot down the other ideas on stage. And what I was sort of trying to explain was that in the culture of that company, because there’s an equality around the level of no’s and blocking and denial there is, it is a yes because it’s a yes to the style of comedy. They’re very, very short scenes.

They don’t have to build for very long. So if someone says, you know, put away your gun, that’s not a gun, it’s a banana. The audience will laugh and it won’t matter that the gun is actually now a banana because the gun doesn’t have to go into the second and third act.

It’s not going to destroy something that someone’s carefully set up. So I think you can get to the point where you can actually say a no is a… Not just a no in the context of a character, but actually an improviser flat-out denying someone else’s idea can be a yes if, as you say, the company culture and style of improvisation is that, that sometimes we mess with each other. Yeah, joyful messing around.

I have such a strong memory of P-Graph, who we haven’t met for a few episodes. Wonderful improv company. They do a show, which is my favourite show.

They have a bunch of different narrative shows. My favourite show of theirs is called Grimm, I think, or Grimm Fairytales or something. And the set-up is that you have the four of them sitting around as a family in a sort of a hut in a forest in a fairytale style.

And each of them tells a story and the story’s kind of interlinked and they sort of act out the stories as they’re being told. And I remember Casey, who’s the… I don’t know. She’s got a kind of young, peppy kind of energy to her.

I actually don’t know how old any of them are. I’m a terrible judge of age. But she’s got a sort of peppy, let’s just put the show on in the barn kind of energy to her.

And she started her story just by saying, once upon a time, there was a bear made of rainbows. And Kareem, who’s the grouch, just went, no, no, there wasn’t. And that story never got told.

Yeah. And it is very difficult to talk about that kind of context because if someone had done that in my Level 1 class on a Wednesday evening, we would have had a big old conversation about it. I’m like, why did you say no? What’s the effect? What does it feel like? But with the two of them in their home theatre messing with each other, it remains one of the funniest things I’ve seen on an improv set.

Yeah, totally. Context, context, context. It all comes back to context.

And that’s why the blunt instrument of, no, I don’t want to play that scene, it’s 100 times harder to talk about context and intention than it is to just say, I don’t want to be in that scene ever. Yeah. And both those things are important, but one of them is quite a quick conversation and the other one is an endless one.

I actually think I would love to, we should write this down, do a podcast about exactly that, right? Kind of tools and coping mechanisms and ways to sort of stay in the scene but deal with offers you’re not so comfortable with. Yeah, yeah. I think that would be a really good one.

Just slightly kind of stepping across, we’re talking about kind of… Are you about to yes-but our conversation about the dangers of yes-and? Well, we talked about, you know, when yes-and turns bad. I guess we’ve been talking about it from a sort of pastoral care perspective. But one thing we said we wanted to talk about was this kind of secondary thing of artistically, there’s definitely some teachers who are like, no, yes-and has had its day, it’s not relevant anymore, it’s not, I mean, our dear friend Dave Rosowski, for example, is not a fan.

You were going to talk about that a little bit, I think. Yeah, I think since this is, you know, Dave is a good friend of ours, but since this is the internet, fuck you, Dave, everything’s wrong that you ever say. That’s the kind of the vibe of the internet, right? Yeah.

I went there once. I think the… I totally understand why people who’ve been around improv for a hell of a long time or have seen a lot of improv sort of slightly roll their eyes and go, oh, it’s this old classic. And to me, I guess it feels a little bit like a real musician’s relationship with the four-chord song, where you’re like, ah, OK, it’s a bit of a cliche, but it works.

If you don’t know what the four-chord song is, look up the… Oh, what’s the wonderful comedians who put all the four-chord songs together? I’ll put it in the show notes down below. Can I ask you a question? Yeah. Do we ever put the things in the show notes that we say we’re going to put in the show notes? Yes, we do.

Because I can’t find them. Well, I suspect that’s more to do with your ability to interact with the internet than other things. Fuck you, internet! Fuck you, Rez.

But I think… I totally understand why people… Well, I think there’s two possible reasons. One is inevitable, which is, ah, I’ve been around this so long, it’s hard to remain passionate about the things which are necessary for absolute beginners when you spend your time with some very, very high-level people, which I think is what’s going on with a lot of the kind of criticism of the essay. But I think it’s also true that if you want to look like someone who is breaking down barriers and doing new things and changing the face of improvisation or changing the face of anything, particularly in art form, a good way to do that is to take a swipe at all the sacred cows and classic ideas.

And I think that, you know, as an improviser, you sort of need and want to have a good basis in all these things which have been core training for so long, but also understand that they’re not inevitable things which are employed in every single situation. So there’s a couple of things here. First, I want to ask you, what is the problem with this yes and? For those people who are like, ah, fuck yes and, what’s the artistic problem with it? Well, I think the artistic problem is that you don’t always have to say yes, characters say no, conflict is good, because I think that there’s often a confusion between yes and, which to me is about engagement and positivity, and the idea that not every scene has to be, again, to use a Wazowski phrase, happy kitty loves poppy town.

Yeah. But actually, yes and isn’t necessarily about positivity at all. It’s about engagement with the situation, engagement with the person, engagement with what’s going on, leaning in rather than leaning out.

Okay. So to me, that is a better way of thinking about yes and, because if any improv show was all positivity and shiny happy scenes, it would be challenging to maintain. Yeah.

Okay. And then I suppose, as you say, this is sort of, there’s an inevitability and a, I guess, a healthy cycle, which is when you’re taught anything, it gets to the point where you need to sort of reject some or all of what you’ve been taught, right? And I think that’s something that I’ve certainly done in my improv career. Many things I think I’ve rejected and then come back round to and reject it again.

I mean, I think that’s all part of your development and taste as an artist of any kind. I think in a lot of contexts, you don’t reject them, you transcend them. Yeah.

You go, this is not useful right now, or I’m doing something else right now. But I think, I think getting to a high level of improvisation and having never engaged any of those ideas is a pretty hard, possibly impossible task. Yeah, I think, I think this gets really interesting because even if you take out the, the language of yes and, or even accepting and building, I mean, exactly as you say, I’m finding it hard.

It’s definitely not impossible, but I’m finding it hard to imagine any collaborative improvisational process that wouldn’t involve you riffing on each other’s ideas in some way. Even if you take out the language of yes and, or accept and build, I find it hard to imagine what an improvisational relationship would look like which didn’t involve riffing off each other in some way, you know, like. Building something collectively.

Something, yeah. Being in relationship to each other. I mean, ultimately that’s the heart of what yes and is, is like what I do is in relationship to what you do.

And even if what I do is completely random, if I’m not seeing what you’re doing, the audience is making those connections anyway because brains see patterns and connections and links even if they’re not intentional. I think that’s, I think that is great. I think that’s a really good way of defining it actually in the end because I’d be really happy to do away with the, the words yes and, or accept and build if I could find a more concise way of expressing it.

I just. More concise than six letters? Well, this is what I mean. I mean, for me, it’s a brilliant piece of language, but also I think, a thing we haven’t talked about, I would just like to mention is just yes and as a tool for anything.

Right. You know, for life, for life outside of the stage. I mean, I feel I’ve learned so much about myself as a person because of my relationship with this idea of yes and, and yes but, and just knowing what kind of an interaction I’m having at any given time.

I actually find these podcasts really interesting because they’d be boring podcasts if we agreed about everything and had the exact same opinion about everything. But also nobody wants to listen to two people arguing forever. No, wait, shut up.

I disagree with you. For half an hour. So like always being able to ride the line between, as you say, how are you in relation to somebody else’s idea? When are you building it in a flow state and when you kind of interrupting and it’s just fascinating to me.

And I think like the tools not rules is something which I can’t remember when we first heard that phrase. It’s a decade. Also earlier when you said five or 10 years, it’s 10 or 15 years.

The, the pandemic just happened and everything is longer ago than we thought. I know that’s the same. Yeah.

Exactly. Put some reverb on that. I’ll put some, I don’t know how to put reverb on, but we’ll see if, we’ll see if I’ve put, worked out how to put reverb on by this point.

I think the thing with the yes and idea is that there are definitely artistic contexts in which you might go large chunks of rehearsal not having used that vocabulary. However, you would have a really difficult time teaching a level one course or teaching an applied improv session without a vocabulary because it, it so quickly gets to the heart of what we’re doing. Supposedly, there’s a couple of really interesting guys who are, he, he, I got rugby into it sooner or later, who are taking rugby into a whole bunch of context where it’s not traditionally, it’s particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly South Africa.

And they don’t, rugby is very complicated rule sets. They don’t teach any of the complicated rule set. They say all it is, is run forward, throw the ball backwards.

You know, that’s, you know what, that’s enough. For your first day, for your, probably for your first week, that’ll get you going and that’ll get you doing stuff. Probably if you’ve got to the end of this conversation about yes and, and you’re on your second or third improv class, you’re going, oh man, this seems so complex.

It’s, it’s okay. Actually, you can forget this whole conversation. Don’t forget the stuff about consent, that’s really important.

But like, you can forget a lot of what we’re saying and just go for the yes and thing. It’ll get you quite a long way. Like run with it until it causes a problem rather than trying to predict those problems before they happen, I think.

Yeah, I mean, you know, my, my go to is always yoga and I think practicing a regular sequence of postures is really interesting as well because it’s so full body, full mind as, as improvisation can be. And I always used to find that it was really helpful for me to just pick one area of focus. And I think I do that for improvisation as well.

You know, like, but if it was yoga, I might say, I’m just going to work on my poise and my grace today. And another day it might be like, no, today I’m really going to stretch. But you’re so graceful.

Oh, very funny. Um, and other days it might be, no, today really is about pushing myself and really going for that extra bit of stretch that is going to be painful and difficult and awkward, but I’m going to get there. And I think, um, improvisation can be the same.

You know, today is about, today is just about listening or today is just about affirming the other person, you know, um, that’s all. That’s all you can do. If, dear listener, you have a simpler and better way of getting to this idea of collaboration and being in response and being in relationship, do tell us.

we’re always interested to learn. But, um, I don’t think we’ll be chucking the yes and out with the bath water any time soon, will we? No. We didn’t even set that up.

Thank you. Bye bye.