Can you hear me?
The dangers of asking too many questions
When I started teaching impro, it was common knowledge that you shouldn’t ask questions, especially not at the beginning of an improvised scene. It was deemed weak and cowardly, a way to let your partner do all the heavy lifting. It showed that you couldn’t be bothered to make a statement or perform a positive action that would help your story taking shape. So instead you were asking questions, like a lazy rascal, which would almost invariably bring the energy level of the scene down.
I was young(ish) and conformist at the time, so I embraced the rule and told my students to stop asking questions, especially at the beginning of scenes. It didn’t work. I asked time and time again, to no effect. After a while, I realised that I was wrong-footing and censoring people who had come to me for help, which is a poor (if popular) way to teach impro. My impro students were asking questions at the beginning of their scenes to mediate their anxiety and telling them to stop doing so was triggering their anxiety even more. I’d set-up shop to use improvisation as a path to freedom, and here I was, instructing people to dissociate from their truly-felt selves and embrace a dogma instead. And if this wasn’t bad enough, by doing so, I was also breaking improvisation most useful and beautiful covenant: use what’s there.
You need pools of patience to facilitate improvisation, and the ability not to take things personally. Yet here I was, feeling angry and betrayed each time my students ignored my instruction. It was getting ridiculous. Something had to give. So instead of being resentful, I became curious. Could those questions serve a purpose rather than stand in the way? Was it the questions themselves that robed the scenes of their energy or something else? What would happen if we let things run their course?
As I became more aware of the questions we ask, in real life as well as in improvisation, I noticed that they had more to do with power than information. Just like politicians, we rarely supply a straightforward answer to a direct question. We tend to answer the question we would have liked to be asked instead, or a more comfortable version than the one put before us. Sometimes, we avoid answering altogether by asking another question instead, jumping to another subject or diluting the issue into oblivion — something the French call “drowning the fish”. But why?
We spend a lot of effort and time maintaining our station in life, both consciously and unconsciously. On the one hand, we would rather have other people reading our minds instead of having to articulate our needs. On the other hand, we sometimes resent the straightforwardness of a question and will do all we can to elude it. This is where the real problem lies for improvisers. If I ask you a question and you don’t answer, it means that you are not listening or that you are refusing to be changed by my action, making it impossible for us to build a shared universe. A question is an invitation for you to join me in my world. It’s like a little game we can play together for a while. I provide a frame with my question for you to come and dance on my stage. If you answer trustfully and informatively rather than cynically or flippantly, we’ve created a playing space that can be nurtured and nourished by us both. An ebb and flow of questions and answers will feed information into our interaction and make it increasingly more fluent and intimate. So not only have I got to listen to your questions, but I also have to listen to my curiosity toward you. Listening is an improviser’s duty, pleasure and salvation.
As it turns out, using what is there gives us a way to improvise grounded scenes and stories without getting trapped into a dogma or a teacher’s favourite way of doing things. The problem was never the question, but the lack of a straightforward and informative answer. Here you have it folks: answer questions informatively, and you will experience a creative lift in all manner of relationships, on and off stage.
