As long as you seek for something, you will get the shadow of reality and not reality itself. - Shunryu Suzuki
Viola Spolin used many Zen ideas. Many of the concepts she developed within her body of work, pointed the way towards a mind, free of preconceptions, judgment and opinion in the same way Zen asks for the same thing.
“Opinions and judgment are in your head!” she would say. “We are after a direct experience!”
Rather than simply experiencing something without comment, we are conditioned to assign it some value; we are eager to see how it pertains to us; to consider how it affects us. ‘Oh, this is interesting!’ or ‘this is stupid...’ or ‘I don’t understand. Uh oh!’ or ‘what has this got to do with anything?’ We constantly talk to ourselves as we try to experience the world.
We want to know immediately what it is, what it is good for and if how it might affect us. When we do this, we remove ourselves from direct experience and go into our head and label what we are experiencing. This internal commentary on our experience happens subconsciously and continuously and it obscures objective reality.
Viola would counteract this in her Spacewalk exercises. Spacewalks are exercises to increase your awareness. She had a spacewalk for practically everything; one to make you aware of your body, another to make you aware of the environment and another one to make you aware of your relationship to yourself and your fellow players. There are several Spacewalks.
She had one Spacewalk to help us to see in a new way. Viola used to coach us during a Spacewalk, to Look unlabeled - see something without labeling it." Try to do it" she would say. "It’s not easy, but it is possible."
I tried. I would look at a light switch on the wall, I would see a cream colored plastic nub and the next moment, my mind said ‘light switch’. My next thought was something like ‘Damn! I’m commenting to myself! Look for something else and try not to recognize it.’ Nope, I wasn’t getting it.
"When you know you've labeled it, don't do anything about it and don't not do anything about it. Then move on." She coached.
“Don’t do anything about it and don't not do anything about it.” That phrase bedeviled me. More times than not, it took me out of the exercise as I pondered this "koan". [1] I wanted to do what she wanted us to do and this coach was a paradox.
She would also coach us to stop for a second, and close our eyes. Then she’d say “When you open your eyes, take your next step as if it is into a new space you’ve never seen before.” I would try, but when I opened my eyes, all I saw was the theater space and the other students. I thought maybe for a split second, it was something I hadn’t seen before, but in my head I said, “No. You know where you are. This is an improv class and you are here to learn how to be a good improviser.” I was a compulsive thinker.
Eventually I just gave up questioning what I didn’t understand. I ignored the ponderable and just did what I could.
An interesting thing began to happen. I began to relax. I came out of each Spacewalk refreshed and energized.
The minute I stopped trying to get it – I began to get it. It started to work. I could quiet my mind.
When I got this insight, I understood that playing without judgment was the key. Being non-judgmental about myself and my desire to ‘want to get it’ activated my intuitive self and I began to have moments of insight and flashes of truly original work.
| "All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness” Eckhart Tolle |
The Information Trap
I have a notion that may explain why a lot of improv bogs down with information and becomes tedious.
We (generally speaking) are no longer capable of easily having a direct experience. It is cultural. We are after all living in the Information Age.
But improvisation has the power to release us from this trance. Simple warm-up games and Spacewalks and Mirror can be used to get a direct experience.
As I’ve said, it is amazing how quickly our mind wants to assign a word, a judgment or opinion on what we’re seeing. We so diligently inform ourselves about what we are seeing that we don’t really see it.
Normally when you see something the first thing you want to do is assign it a name and a function (or non-function) for future reference. ‘Oh, that’s a door,’ or ‘that’s a brown table lamp’. In it goes to the file cabinet of our mind and when we encounter that object again, we refer to that memory. In doing so, you gloss over the reality of the thing itself.
We do the same with people and relationships. They become templates in your head and when you use them you operate from your idea of ‘a relationship’, ‘an occupation’, or ‘a storyline’. Those are all clichés. They are part of your past. Paul Sills called it ‘the trap’ in scene improvisation.
People: A mom is usually a stereotype we work from. So is a cop, a boss, a teacher, a wife, a salesman. Without thinking, we use a template to create these characters. We hardly contemplate what it means to actually be these occupations. We just pull these templates out of our heads. They can only be superficial and stereotypical.
Viola has a game called “What is my Occupation?” It is a variation of “How Old Am I?” In How Old am I? The sidecoaching asks us to put the age in your feet. Put the age in your chest. Send the age to your eyes, etc. And with occupations the same applies. Put the occupation in your hands, your feet, your chest, the tip of your nose. Everywhere, but your head! Your body will respond and this will organically give you your Mom, or Cop, or Butcher.
Relationships: A marriage has a few different templates we think of – unhappy marriage, newlyweds, etc. We typically consider siblings need to be in conflict with each other or are always running to mom and dad to have them mediate a fight. When we play children we jump to a Saturday morning TV version of what a kid is. Family is a template. Customer and salesperson has a template we work from and so on.
Players working this way are in their heads. Players tell what they are seeing rather than seeing it. They tell where they are, rather than truly being in the where. They tell their relationships (usually one - dimensional) to each other rather than being in relation to each other.
Then, as we get more and more information, it piles up and has to be sorted into a story – a familiar one that you remember and can share as a common reference with your fellow players. You may think you’re offering a new character or action but you and your fellow players are labeling what you’ve introduced. You all share these common references and it can only result in tired, trite, simple characters and situations.
Now you’re stuck and have to ‘tilt’ the story or go against the predictable to get a laugh or to shake it up a little. Current improvisation training finds lots of ways to introduce these ‘tilts’ (things like “Ding” or Sit, Stand, Lie Down) - Those little bumps in the predictable. This is what the audience sees as funny. And it is, but it does not have the power of what Eckhart Tolle calls the Now.
This is a major problem when I see students as well as many experienced improvisers create scenes. Good sidecoaching selects a focus that will get the players out their heads and into the Here and Now. A knowledgeable sidecoach will steer players away from old frames of references. In doing so, something new and fresh will emerge. This is what Viola was after.
When players go for jokes and stereotypes I stop them. Sometimes I’ll do a Spacewalk. Spacewalks help you to spend time in the present without opinion or judgment. In doing so, you get out of your head. You practice being in your body. You practice altering your sense of time (slow motion and no-motion); your sense of space. (Space: the material that connects us and surrounds us and which we can utilize to create objects and environments.) You practice seeing – really seeing.
In one particular spacewalk (available at www.spolin.com on the CD Spacewalks led by Viola Spolin) she would say “When you feel you are really seeing something, let what you’re seeing see you!”
This is a wonderful sidecoach. For me, this means that while you are there experiencing the world, the world is experiencing you. You are not the center of the experience, only a part of a larger whole. It takes the “I” out of it and helps moderate the ego.
Then she would say” You are in relation to it, rather than having a relationship with it.”
That one puzzled me for a long time. What’s the big difference between relation to or having a relationship with? I now understand that what she meant. Relation means you are relating to something right now. It is a more potent word and keeps you in present time. Relationship has that static feel and easily puts you back into memory where you can recall a template (reference) of a relationship and act it out.
In its highest form, improvising is a kind of transcendental meditation.
I call Viola’s Spacewalks a kinetic meditation. Just as a martial art is practiced with various physical exercises to develop skills and awareness; the highest achievement being to transcend it and achieve a state of meditation while in the midst of action, so Viola’s aim in improvised theater is the same. Her games are exercises in spontaneity, theatrical skill, and prepare us for true playing.
Meditation itself has a particular connotation. It conjures up an image of sitting blissfully in silence, focused on a quiet, waiting mind - Very passive. But there are other forms of meditation that involve action. Sufi dancers known as dervishes, whirl around for long periods of time to achieve a state of mind that opens them to the unknown.
In the Islamic tradition there is a new pseudo - religion created in the early 1960’s called Subud. It uses a form of meditation called “Latihan”, which means spiritual exercise. A group of individuals sit or stand in a room and consider their connection to a higher power (i.e. God in whatever terms feel right to the individual). In this connection they move, sit, stand or do anything that moves them to stay connected to this experience.
I experienced this practice and I found it to be akin to a Spacewalk and an advanced Spolin exercise called “Excursions into the Intuitive”; a non-directed improvisation with no stated ‘who’, ‘what’ or ‘where’. (pg. 191 “Improvisation for the Theater”) “They are to force nothing, to think of nothing. When and if anyone feels the urge to go up on stage and do something, he is to do so.”
The exercise, Excursions into the Intuitive comes towards the end of Viola’s book for a good reason.
All her previous games prepare us for this. When any game is played successfully we touch the intuitive and create amazing improvised theater.
Wouldn’t it be great if all of us could achieve this state of consciousness regularly, where all players meet on a blank stage where no agenda exists and each player acts on whatever is happening in the moment?
Improvisation at this level becomes a way of life and a practice that makes us truly ourselves – unique beings with inexhaustible creativity.
Can it be done? Viola thought so.
I think so too.
[1] A koan (pronounced /ko.an/) is a story, dialog, question, or statement in the history and lore of Zen Buddhism, generally containing aspects that are inaccessible to rational understanding, yet that may be accessible to intuition. A famous koan is, "Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?"
“The purpose of the koans is to break the mind of logic. What the master wants of the pupil is not understanding in any usual sense. He wants to "burst the bag," and drive the pupil with whole-souled precipitation into the Great Emptiness, the Great Stillness - where all things stand without being touchable; where all sounds are,
without being heard.” - Mumon
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