Hoopla

Wednesday, 1 May 2013

CHAPTER SIX: FUTURE. Historical influences on improv. Why did impro start when it did and why did it grow?

Blog by Steve Roe, co-founder of Hoopla Impro. Hoopla run improv courses, classes and shows in London and across the UK. Twitter: @HooplaImpro. Facebook: HooplaImpro. Website: www.HooplaImpro.com.

This chapter is part of a series of blogs about my personal opinions on the historical influences on improv, why it started when it started, why it survived and then flourished, and where it fits into the wider scheme of things.

CHAPTER 1: TV
CHAPTER 2: CENSORSHIP
CHAPTER 3: AUDIENCE
CHAPTER 4: EDUCATION
CHAPTER 5: COLLECTIVE JOY
CHAPTER 6: FUTURE

Team Creativity

In many circles Creativity by Committee has a bad name. "We did a brainstorm once, it didn’t work" said Tom Logan, Manager. In Britain especially we celebrate the solo creative genius in arts and science; Danny Boyle made the Olympic ceremony, Frank Whittle made the jet engine in his shed, Isaac Newton invented physics. But I think it's actually because that's how we’ve been educated; most people haven’t been trained to work creatively together yet. In fact they've been actively untrained in team creativity.

Where this is changing fast is with comedy writing teams in America. They are trained in improv and work creatively together as teams, generating more and better content than individual writers. With further training this might start to spread into other areas of life.

At the moment improv creative skills are mainly used for entertainment, making up comedy shows. But at its core it's about groups of people making up stuff that didn't exist before. That's a pretty helpful and beautiful skill to have, and could apply to many other professions and industries beyond entertainment. Architecture, Technology, Engineering, IT, Business. Creating ideas from scratch as a team can apply to everything and is at the route of progress.

Playing and working together as one group is when we thrive, it is our strength as humans, and collective joy is actually a step forwards in evolution not backwards.

Complexity Demands Teams

The Universe is more complicated than one mind alone can comprehend. Not long ago it was possible to read all books on science, philosophy etc in fact they were all wrapped up together into one subject.

Now the expansion of total human knowledge far outstrips the ability of a human to keep up with it, and is rapidly growing. You are never going to understand the whole world, there’s too much to understand, but you can understand bits of it and enough of it.

Perhaps group mind in the future is not only an option, it’s a necessity. We have to be able to listen to each other and work with each other. Otherwise our individual highly trained specialists are prone to go off in one direction just because they can, without any consideration of other consequences and call it progress instead of destruction.

Improv Activating the Subconscious and Intuition

For years humans were pursuing the spiritual and theological, and then following the appearance of modern science man explored the limits of reason and the conscious mind. More recently with Freud, Jung, and Joseph Campbell we explored the subconscious and collective subconscious. Improv feels like a step towards understanding how to actively use the conscious, subconscious and collective subconscious all together to be fully human. Instinct, Intellect and Intuition working in balance. It's so exciting to be around at the start of this step.

Doing loads of improv you develop quite a good relationship with your subconscious and intuition, even collective subconscious, and also develop an interesting relationship between reality and the imaginary world. In fact you become rather good at making the imaginary world the new reality, which feels like magic when it's going well.

In improv the conscious mind can deliberately give itself tasks that unleash the subconscious, and can then channel this to create story. Dreams can become instant reality on stage to the actor, that hopefully the audience also start to believe.

For instance if I’m in a scene and I'm in my head, stuck, I hold out my hands and pick ‘something’ up, the subconscious comes into play and tells me what it is. Unblocked, it turns out to be he best choice. Similarly I can say “I’ve got some news for you”, “I’ll tell you 5 things about”, “this makes perfect sense” and the subconscious is thrown into action, feeding the conscious mind. The subconscious is much better at improvising than 'us'.

This is a skill that is helpful way beyond the impro stage, how to feed and use your subconscious.

Emotions and the Subconscious aren't Unprofessional

From going on a number of Management and Assertiveness training courses with work I've noticed that their syllabus is almost the exact opposite of an improv sylabus. Sometimes 'Being Professional' at work seems to be pretending, inauthenticate and fake. Modern offices make me feel sick because of this.

Emotions and the subconscious have for too long been treated as enemies of being professional, but maybe now is the time to use them. Yes, there is often a lack of reason and intellect in the world, but there is more of a lack of empathy, compassion, emotion, intuition, awareness, happiness, love, listening, understanding, creativity, connection, care. Impro seems to accidentally teach these things as a pleasant side effect of making things up on stage.

The fact that we're human and have emotions doesn't make us less capable in the future, it makes us more so.

Professionalism shouldn't be about hiding emotions. Emotions from a well-informed intelligent person don’t halt progress, they drive and shape it. Our complex emotions aren’t something to be ashamed of from our animal past, they are what makes us great and they are why we’ve evolved and what makes us strong.

Just doing things because they bring you to life and excite you might not have any inherent meaning. But then again deliberately not doing those things doesn’t have any meaning either. So you might as well do the things that excite you and bring you to life. After doing them you might intellectually find the meaning that was there all along, the subconscious can be a good driving force.

In technology there seems to be a growing idea that if we can do something we should do it, regardless of whether it is actually a worthwhile idea or has any virtue or integrity. Look at Google Glasses for instance, is that really what the human race needs? Yet another shield between us and reality?

Turning off our emotions because they are ‘unprofessional’ when making decisions is also turning off our values, our humanity and our life.

Emotions and collective joy don't make us backward and unevolved, they are what made us a great species in the first place. Selfish individualism is what makes us weaker as a species. We are funny little creatures with no fur and not much physical ability, we get out-lived by trees, but we grew strong by our ability to work together as one.

I want to send the author of "Physics of the future" on an imporv course. And improvisers on a physics course. Actually I'm about to start an Open University Physics course, so there you go, let's find out what happens when the two worlds meet.

Blog by Steve Roe, co-founder of Hoopla Impro. Hoopla run improv courses, classes and shows in London and across the UK. Twitter: @HooplaImpro. Facebook: HooplaImpro. Website: www.HooplaImpro.com.

This chapter is part of a series of blogs about my personal opinions on the historical influences on improv, why it started when it started, why it survived and then flourished, and where it fits into the wider scheme of things.

CHAPTER 1: TV
CHAPTER 2: CENSORSHIP
CHAPTER 3: AUDIENCE
CHAPTER 4: EDUCATION
CHAPTER 5: COLLECTIVE JOY
CHAPTER 6: FUTURE

CHAPTER 5: COLLECTIVE JOY. Historical influences on improv. Why did impro start when it did and why did it grow?

There’s an amazing book called ‘Dancing In The Streets’ by Barbara Ehrenreich that talks about The History of Collective Joy regards festivals, dance, theatre, carnivals and shared human experiences. The Collective Joy of finding ecstasy (the emotion not the drug) by being at one with fellow humans, rather than being purely individualistic, competitive, defensive, isolated and depressed.

Much of this chapter is a summary from ‘Dancing In The Streets’:

It appears that The Group Mind might not have been a new discovery by Del Close, but actually an uncovering of what was previously the normal way of living for tens of thousands of years. If anything there was a temporary interruption of Collective Joy, slightly at first by the overwhelming authority of The Roman Empire, then The Catholic Church, and then mainly by a deliberate and systematic removal by Reformation, Puritans, Calvinists, Industrial Revolution and Mechanised War. There was a deliberate removal or controlling of human collective joy in order to create obedient factory workers, parishioners, and soldiers.

Now that we’re through the industrial revolution and World War it might be time to go back to being human. Can we have our collective joy back please? Yes?! Hurrah! Oh and by the way you don’t have to wait for permission to get it back. You don’t have to go to a night club sponsored by a vodka company, you don’t have to spend a week’s wages on Glastonbury, you don’t have to seek Arts Council funding, you don’t have to wait until a member of The Royal Family get married, you don’t have to gamble £2000 on Olympics tickets. You can just do it now, don’t ask permission, just do it.

It’s definitely not online though. In fact with everyone spending so much time on facebook collective joy events feel more important than ever (because they are). The digital will never take over completely from collective joy and genuine human connection, because we’re human and it’s in us.

In modern times there has been resurgence in Collective Joy. According to Dancing in the Streets this can be seen at first in things like the introduction of rock music. The birth of modern impro also coincides with the birth of rock & roll (late 1940s and early 1950s) and the ultimate expression of modern collective joy – the rock concert. While some people were screaming at The Beatles, others were uniting in improvisation. The swinging sixties was probably the exact right environment for propagating impro.

An early hint of this comes from David Cregan, a director at The Royal Court Theatre, who said way back in 1958 that Keith Johnstone knew ‘how to unlock Dionysus’. Sometimes it’s scary to see our animal side, but it’s also exhilarating and liberating.

We look at impro as a new thing, but actually it’s one the earliest forms of theatre and as old as mankind itself. People were coming back from their days, telling tall tales, passing on stories and immediately re-enacting events way before they were writing down scripts. Keeping it alive is important because there’s something simple, fragile and human about it.

Impro's Glorious Lack of Permanence

Impro has a joyful lack of permanence.

So much these days seems to be recorded and monitored. If I go to a party someone takes a photo and immediately puts it on facebook which I then immediately see on my phone and realise what an ugly fuck I actually am. Moment gone.

People sometimes wonder why I don’t film impro shows or write down funny impro scenes from workshops, but that’s missing one of the points of what makes impro good in the first place.

Impro is something that happens in one room, right now, just for those people, in The Moment. That's so beautiful. It's like watching your breathe on a frosty morning.

I used to want to do impro in order to eventually do a TV programme of impro (performing or producing it). Now I think TV doesn't deserve something as beautiful as impro. Every Thursday I see a total beginner at impro workshops make up something in the moment that is funnier and more beautiful than an entire multi-million pound production team could make up in six months working full time.

Teams of TV Development twats sit around in hot tubs of latte and come up with “I’m a celebrity get me out of here” and think they’re the Beethoven of the screen. They aren't. The world doesn’t need TV (I previously worked for five years as an Assistant Producer in Television before fully comprehending this. I was a twat. I still am, but don’t work in TV).

CHAPTER 4: EDUCATION. Historical influences on improv. Why did impro start when it did and why did it grow?

Keith Johnstone and Viola Spolin developed their ideas through working with children.

Both Keith Johnstone and Viola Spolin formed the seeds of their ideas through working with children. Keith Johnstone was hugely critical of his own education and the education system in general. He says that his education made him shy, closed off, awkward and unable to speak. When he started teaching improvisation he wrote down everything his teachers taught him, and then attempted to teach the opposite. A huge chunk of Keith Johnstone’s book Impro reads like an education book rather than impro.

For years growing up we are segregated in schools by age, sex, location, ability, class, wealth and even alphabetically. We then fall off the conveyor belt into the adult world where its actually one big confusing mess. It wasn’t until I was 25 that I fully realised I could chat to people 10 years older than me. We learn why waterfalls make gorges, but not how to say how we feel, assert ourselves, work with others, move, speak out loud, listen, use our intuition, express ourselves, build relationships, read emotional cues, create things together. Impro seems to have the pleasant side effect of delivering these missing qualities.

Drama is often taken off the natioanl curriculum, or taught merely for intellectual reasons as if it was an off shoot of literature. We constantly tuck away human things as if they are embarressing and not worth learning, only to then seek a therapist years later when we realise it's the human things that make us us and that we can’t cope without.

I studied Engineering at University and felt a bit 'damaged' by the end. I didn't know why. When I started improvising I felt like I was learning the other side of life, the human side.

Good book about this: John Taylor Gatto’s book Dumbing Us Down.

Learning through play.

Also impro feels more like a more natural way of learning than schools. Learning through playing. If you are reading this then at some point you learnt the use of language, that’s amazing. We don’t all learn quantum physics or become a doctor, but we all learn language, even though if you were to start now they’d be really hard. We also learn to stand up and walk, AMAZING! At a really young age too.

How does a baby learn? By playing, from mistakes, copying. Doing. A baby doesn’t sit there and intellectually think about how to walk and talk. They opens their eyes wide, look, see, laugh, copy, respond, connect.

I had the pleasure of helping to teach my little nephew Toby how to stand. This involved holding him up lightly, him pushing down with his legs, me letting go a bit and him wobbling, and me catching him if he started to fall. He laughed constantly, especially when he got it, and I laughed too. Sometimes he’d get pissed off, have a little rest and play on the floor, and then he’d be back for more. It was a massive game to him.

Some of the hardest things we ever learnt to do we learnt through play and games. I believe that by putting games and play back into adult life we open up this style of rapid learning again, being flexible and open to change rather than frightened and static.

We are discovering the world we are in as we are in it, and we’ll never fully comprehend it because it's always changing.

Blog by Steve Roe, co-founder of Hoopla Impro. Hoopla run improv courses, classes and shows in London and across the UK. Twitter: @HooplaImpro. Facebook: HooplaImpro. Website: www.HooplaImpro.com.

This chapter is part of a series of blogs about my personal opinions on the historical influences on improv, why it started when it started, why it survived and then flourished, and where it fits into the wider scheme of things.

CHAPTER 1: TV
CHAPTER 2: CENSORSHIP
CHAPTER 3: AUDIENCE
CHAPTER 4: EDUCATION
CHAPTER 5: COLLECTIVE JOY
CHAPTER 6: FUTURE