Focus on giving
Lessons from improv, part three
Once a beginning improviser acknowledges (learning it takes a lifetime) that she should be present and available over being clever and funny, the next most important lesson is to focus on giving to your fellow improvisers.
Instructor Dan Klein repeatedly exhorted the class to “take care of each other,” and many of the in-class exercises drove home that point.
Protect
An early exercise involved walking around the room, silently identifying a classmate to imagine as a threat and one to imagine as a protector, and then placing the protector between you and the threat. Next, we would identify a victim and an aggressor and place ourselves between the two as protector.
It’s an exercise that embodies a number of lessons, including being present and making constant adjustments.
Klein made one of the lessons particularly explicit. Notice, he said, how protecting the other person made you feel stronger. He claimed it actually made each of us more attractive.
Take care of each other.
Give
Beginners have a tendency to attempt coming up with some clever or bizarre line that puts the focus on them. Or they do the opposite and try to put the burden on partners, forcing them to answer a question or fill-in most of the details in order to keep a scene going.
Both make for a bad improviser, and both steal life from the scene.
There is a singular solution to these opposing tendencies: focus on giving to scene partners. Give them something to use.
Several exercises played with gifting each other with endowments. We would practice making up traits about a partner or an environment and incorporating those into our lines as gifts. We were asked to notice how freeing that was when we were on the receiving end. It took the burden off of the recipient to develop his characters, environments or lines from whole cloth.
Our focus should be on giving the other person something to work with. Doing that, scenes just flow, from gift to gift.
“Take care of each other.”
Receive
As the endowment exercises illustrated, it’s also important to know how to acknowledge and graciously receive a gift.
Numerous exercises tried to help us develop this skill. It’s remarkable how strong and subtle is the urge to block offers instead of accepting them. This is why the most common improv less is “Yes, and.”
I’d heard that lesson so often that it had lost its meaning. But the exercises in improv, as well as in d.school and business school, illustrated how hard that is to do in practice.
We have such a tendency to say no, to direct a conversation to something more aligned to what we were already thinking or to deflect the attention away from us altogether.
Even simple exercises illustrated how hard gracious receiving can be. During a Strategic Communication class at the Graduate School of Business, students had to repeat a complement from the instructor in the first person. “You are thoughtful.” “I am thoughtful.” During our latest JSK planning session with Tran Ha, each fellow had to stand in the center of a circle and receive applause. Both were remarkably uncomfortable, but ultimately helpful.
Being able to run with what a partner offers is a gift to the partner and freeing to you as an improvisor, and it builds relationships.
As Patricia Ryan Madson says in Improv Wisdom, “A good improviser is someone who is awake, not entirely self-focused, and moved by a desire to do something useful and give something back and who acts upon this impulse.”
Lessons from Improv
Part One: Be present, available and obvious
Part Two: Ready, fire, aim. Repeat.
Part Three: Focus on giving
Part Four: Perfection is boring. The good stuff comes from taking (measured) risks.
