Beginner's Mind

“In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few...” Zen master Shunryu Suzuki

Beginner’s mind is experiencing a thing for the first time. “Firsts” are always memorable. Improvisation is a constant search for ‘first times’.

I once did a wonderful improv scene in Viola’s class using the game of “What’s Beyond?”

What's Beyond is a game where you keep some event, past or the future, alive (in No-Motion[1]) without ever bringing it on stage or referring to it directly in dialogue. Yet, the holding of the “What’s Beyond” colors the scene and produces a very dramatic, dynamic scene.

I remember doing a “What’s Beyond” scene where my wife and I were setting up the table for a dinner party having just agreed, after a spontaneous fight, that we should get divorced.

Our guests were on their way over and we were going to go through with the party; it being understood we would not mention our divorce. The ‘What’ of the scene was just us setting the table and putting out the h’ors d’ouvres, before our guests arrived.

It was brilliant! It was very dramatic and every action and moment was filled with the ‘what’s beyond’ between us.

I took a vase from the cabinet while my wife cut some flowers. We met at the head of the table to arrange the flowers.

“My Aunt Mary gave us this.” I said.

My wife nodded. “When did she die?”

“Last year.” I said matter-of-factly.

Then she said, “She went quickly - that was a blessing.”

My wife said it with such disdain in her voice. It reminded us of our year of pain as our relationship died. It wasn’t the vase we were discussing. Our marriage died last year. A quick death is better than a year of slow dying. We both knew it. The scene went on in this fashion and our 'What's Beyond’ was clear to the entire class. It was all there. They knew it, felt it and the class applauded at the end. Everyone agreed it was a very powerful scene. I had such a good experience with What’s Beyond, I couldn't wait to repeat it.

We did “What’s Beyond” in class again, some several weeks later. I jumped up first and got another female partner. I used the divorce premise again with a few alterations. It bombed.

My scene partner and I had no dramatic tension. We looked sadly at each other, played a very maudlin scene until the doorbell rang and we called ‘curtain’.

Viola got up and came down onto the stage. I braced myself. Here it comes.

“What were you DO-ing!” Viola yelled. “You just went about your business, da-dee-da… and so what!? You were sad, we got that. You two were acting your heads off!”

“What was your ‘What’s Beyond?” she asked.

I said “We just agreed on a divorce and didn’t want to talk about it while we set the table for guests.”

She stopped. “That’s a good one.” Completely forgetting about the scene we did a month back.

“I know” I said. “I used it with Susan a few months ago. It worked great!”

“You whaaa-t?” Viola said incredulously.

I was bracing for a real bawling out.

“That’s it! You were caught in memory!”

“But isn’t an actor is supposed to be able to repeat a scene with the same intensity?” I came back. “I had the same focus, the same who, what and where and I should have been able to do it again. I really had a strong focus the last time and really had a great scene. Why did it work before and not now?”

"You had nothing to base it on the first time! You had a beginner’s mind!! It was new. You were really improvising.”

I was still a novice actor. I had not developed the craft of finding feelings anew - of going for process and not result. It was a great lesson.

Beginner’s Mind is Zen practice in action. It is the innocent mind that approaches experience free of preconceptions and expectations, like a child who looks at objects and experiences them without any prior knowledge. Every object and interaction is approached with wonder and amazement. It can’t help but be exciting.

Imagine looking at a deck of cards as a child. It is a stack of uniform colored squares. So many of them! Smooth! Funny pictures on the other side: Black and red things and pictures! What can be done with them? So many things. They cover the floor; they slide; they stick to a wet face; they bend and stay bent and on and on.

Adults see ‘a game of Gin Rummy’ or ‘Poker’ or ‘a house of cards’. Why? - Because we’ve used them in that manner before. There’s nothing inherently wrong in that. It is just we now jump to a limited set of possibilities based on past experience.

The same is true of a lot of improvisation. Old frames of reference limit our choices and we’re so often not even aware of it. Even trying to recreate something you once discovered as ‘original and exciting’ because of Beginners Mind, can be eviscerated by trying to capture that lightning in a bottle a second time.

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[1] Spolin calls No-Motion The eye of the storm (stillness amid action), A state of waiting (not waiting for, but just waiting) Being ready, connected to the ongoing action in stillness. Action at a simmer.

How Viola Spolin Helped Me Overcome Self-Pity

Tales of Viola Spolin:
How Viola Spolin Helped Me Overcome Self-Pity

“Poor me. Nobody loves me.” Underneath my cheerful façade, underneath my very well developed sense of humor, I walked around Hollywood with that deeply embedded in my soul. I was working as a bartender, ministering to and medicating others’ pain with banter and booze while chasing the dream of being an actor in LA along with thousands of others.

My story is typical: I was the product of a childhood filled with family dysfunction - family chaos: Parents who did their best, but were totally unequipped to bring up a child with love and kindness. Instead, they were angry, spiteful and self-involved children themselves, who had created a family before they knew what they were doing. They resented the fact that they were now saddled with children and responsibility. They raised me and my brother and sisters with anger and resentment. How could they not? My childhood sucked. They loved me in their own way I guess, but as a child, I couldn’t see it. Poor me.

As I grew up, I wanted to be an actor. I wanted to get out of my own life and into another, more interesting life. I wanted to be someone else and be rewarded for it with fame and love. That was my goal. A misguided motive for the theater, but there you have it.

When I arrived in Hollywood, I took acting classes and improv workshops - the usual regimen beginners do when starting out. I was a terrible actor. I was amateur and awkward and had no clue what the art of acting was really all about. Still, I was determined to make myself an Actor – capital “A”.

Things changed when I found myself in Viola Spolin’s ongoing Wednesday afternoon theater games workshop. (See the article: How I met Viola Spolin)

We went through many hours of different kinds of games and exercises in that first year. I did my best, but felt frustrated by much of it. I looked at the others in the workshop who seemed to do good work and envied their talent. They are really good actors, I thought. I am not.

“You’re trying to act,” Viola said to me. “You’re acting your head off! Don’t you see that? – It’s not about acting out or imitating. It’s about YOU being there! YOU! Not some idea of how you should be. That’s in your head!”

Intellectually, I knew what she was talking about, but had no clue how to avoid it. I reflexively had to ‘act’. I was in my head. I was not about to analyze my underlying problems (of which I was hardly aware anyway). Nor was Viola. She would often say, “This is not psycho-drama. I’m not interested in your personal emotions. I want to see the emotions and actions of the scene. Don’t work out your personal problems on my stage.”

No, my personal problems were my own cross to bear. I was busy covering up my feelings of inadequacy with humor and charm. (I’m sure I was not alone in this. If this rings a bell with you, dear reader, read on.) I thought, “That’s what you do in improv – use wit, humor and charm. Try to act like those others you see and admire.” Fake it, in other words.

We met once a week at the Cast Theater on El Centro Street near Melrose. It was a small 99-seat theater a few blocks away from Paramount studios. Ah, Paramount - it seemed to me a monolithic ivory tower of success that I would never penetrate, acting-wise. Maybe I could get a job there in the cafeteria or something. Poor me.

Week after week Viola witnessed my struggle to do good work in her class. Sometimes she would yell at me “What am I going to do with you?” I was tempted to ask ‘what should I do, then?’ But I knew better. You never asked “how to” in Viola Spolin’s workshop. Viola was all about you figuring it out.

If you asked ‘how do you want me to do it?’ she would blow up at you.

“I DON’T KNOW! I’m not the answer book!” she would shout.

No, with Viola, it was all about getting out of your head and into the body, into the space and making these discoveries on your own. All she would do is point out when you weren’t doing it and when you were in your head. I did scene after scene, exercise after exercise but could not understand what was in my way. If Viola knew, she wasn’t telling me.

I’d leave class some days so frustrated. I can’t act. Who am I kidding?

Over the year, Viola and I had become friends. (See “How I met Viola Spolin”) and I usually sat next to her while she coached. She could get such incredible scenes out of so many of us. My work was still pedestrian – nothing special, nothing to write home about, but I was there, man. –

We did an exercise called Intensify Emotion, a game where the sidecoach, in this case Viola, watches a scene between two players and calls on them to heighten and intensify the emotions that emerge for each player out of the playing. If one actor is feeling happy and the other is doubtful, she would coach each respectively to heighten that feeling. Viola would call out to the players, “More Happy!” “More! Even more happiness!” “ Feel happy in your chest!” – (to the other actor) “More doubt!” “More!” “Put the doubt in your face! In your fingers!” “More! - Heighten it!”

What began to happen to the players onstage was amazing, funny, exciting and wonderful. Happy turned to joy. Heightening joy became hysteria, hysteria morphed into giddiness and so on. Doubt turned to concern, to worry, to panic, to fear, to terror, etc. Intensifying Emotions created transformation. It was absolutely astounding to see such emotional energy move the players in such surprising ways. Great theater.

Now it was my turn. I was paired with a very attractive, sweet woman named Susan. We chose a scene (who, what and where) that had a good emotional starting point. A scene we knew had built-in emotional potential for both of us. We were in a prison meeting room, separated by a glass window, with phones on either side. I was the prisoner and Susan was my wife coming to break the news that she had fallen in love with someone else. Oh, this was juicy.

The scene began:

Me: Hi honey. (with love) Gee, I missed you.

Susan: (tentative) Hi Gary.

Viola: (to me) Heighten glad to see her!

Me: (sensing something wrong) What is it, darling?

Susan: (eyes downcast) I… I…

Viola: (to Susan) Heighten that feeling! Put it in your shoulders!

Susan: (Crying)

Me: What’s wrong?

Viola: Concern! Heighten concern!

Me: What is it, honey? What’s happened? (deeply concerned)

Susan: I’m in love (still crying) with someone else. I don’t love you any more.

Me: What?? (I have a look on my face of bewilderment and shock. I get a sinking feeling in my stomach.)

Susan: I’m so sorry, honey. I’m so, so sorry. It just happened. I’ve been seeing him for months now… We fell in love.

Me: (crestfallen) Oh.

Viola: (to me) Heighten that feeling! Put it in your stomach, throat, face!

Me: I see… (Completely numb, shocked, sad)

Now I almost stop hearing Susan and what she is saying. All I begin to hear is Viola’s coaching to me.

Viola: (to me) Intensify it! Put it in your chest!

My shoulders slump. I look down at my feet. I bow my head. I think to myself, ‘No one loves me. Poor me.’

Me: Of course, this is what I get, what I deserve. Shit, why does it always have to be me?’

Viola: More! MORE!

I begin to feel sick to my stomach. “Poor me” is coursing through my whole body. I can’t even look at Susan who, I imagine, Viola must be coaching too, but I am too involved now with my own pity to notice.

Viola: More! EVEN MORE! Put it in your nose! Your eyes, your legs!
INTENSIFY IT!

I am covered in self-pity.

Viola: Heighten the self-pity! Poor me! Say it in your feet! Put it in your spine! C’mon, even more! Heighten it!

I am revulsed by self-loathing. I begin to feel exposed. Naked. The whole class is watching this. Seeing me – the real me. I am no longer playing a prisoner in a cell talking to his wife. I’m me and I’m the only one who feels sorry for myself in the whole wide world. I am so sorry for myself I could puke – literally.

I feel so ashamed. Everyone is seeing me like this. My true self - Oh, god, I am so ashamed. I can’t stay here. What am I doing here? I can’t act. Now everyone knows it. I slowly get up. I don’t look up; my eyes are glued to the floor.

The cell window is gone. The phone is gone. The scene has dissolved. I am not in the scene anymore. Susan, I think, is still in the scene playing my wife, I don’t know. Maybe she’s just gawking at me like everyone else.

I have to get out of here. I begin to walk across the stage floor, slowly, deliberately. If I run I am a coward, but if I walk I might be able take the last shred of dignity I possess with me. “Don’t work out your personal problems out on my stage!” Viola’s words echo in my head. I make it to the door. I walk out.

Viola: COME BACK! Come back!

I open the door into the bright, sunny afternoon. It is such a contrast to the dark little theater space, but it is a dull, lifeless bright. The sun cannot penetrate my despair. I get in my car and drive home. I have no thought; I just drive like a zombie. I get home. I lie on my bed. I am a husk; dried up, empty. I have no feeling anymore - maybe a little residual of shame, but it’s hardly worth mentioning.

Time passes, I couldn’t say how long, but it was the same day.

The phone rings. It is Viola.

Me: Hello.

Viola: Gary! What were doing!?

Me: Viola, I had to leave. I couldn’t stay.

Viola: Oh, honey. If you had only stayed…if you had only stayed—I’d have cleaned you out of it!

Me: (listless) Yeah.

I hang up. I lie back on my bed. Soon, I begin to feel unexpectedly better. I put my hands behind my head, look up at the ceiling. I am pensive.

Lying there on the bed, I feel my body, my feet, my legs, stomach and hands. They feel good. They feel new.

I have the distinct image that if I were being filmed, the camera would be above me on a crane, slowly pulling back ever further to see me; me on the bed; me on the bed in the room; me on the bed in the room in the apartment; in the apartment in the building; in the city – in the world.

I feel good. I inspect my emotional self, still lying there on the bed. I feel pretty good. No self-pity; No shame; No embarrassment, even.

Hey! I feel pretty damn good! In fact, I feel terrific. What is going on?

I’m hungry. I get up and go out.

I am going out to get something to eat. I’m alive and I am hungry. I am an actor in Hollywood going out to get something to eat, because I’m famished. I’ve got a career to go after. Hey, life is good!

Epilogue

Ever since that day I have never ever felt sorry for myself. Viola’s coaching and the game itself banished that unproductive emotion from my psyche forever.

Self-pity, many acting teachers will tell you, is the poorest choice you can make for a character. It is an unpleasant emotion to witness, an excuse for the self to stay hidden, a paralyzing emotion. Self-pity keeps you from having any contact with the outside world and useless in real drama. Useless in life.

Soon afterward I began connecting with my acting; going on auditions and getting callbacks and some acting jobs. I still had a lot of other emotional problems (who doesn’t?) but self-pity was not among them.

Postscript: Viola did not intend her work to be psycho-drama. She used to say “Never use your own tears! Use the character’s tears!”

That her work did help me out psychologically was only a side-benefit of her connecting me with my real talent and the beauty and profundity of her philosophy. Yet her work, at a deep level cannot help but be transformative.

Out of the Head and Into the Space!

Out of the Head and Into the Space

Discovering space as substance and a new reality

Preface

I started my performing career as a mime. Mimes in the mid 1970's and 80's were synonymous with corny uninspired white faced buskers who went around mimicking passers-by and asking for money. I became a mime at the age of thirteen in 1964. In the 60's it was still an art.

I copied other performers I admired including Red Skelton, Dick Van Dyke, Danny Kaye and Jackie Gleason. I also got a chance to see the great Marcel Marceau.

I studied dance and mime for a year in college and developed my skill at the National Mime Theater in Boston. When I headed out to California in late 1975 I was already an excellent mime.

I performed mime on street corners and in cafes and because it was LA and not Schenectady, New York (where I'm from), I met a lot of performers who told me to study with Richmond Shepard, a well known mime teacher in LA at the time. I did. And although he did not teach me anything about mime I didn't already know, he did invite me into his troupe and I began making a living as a mime.

I was making an income from mime, performing on the Queen Mary in Long Beach California when I got hired to teach mime at the American Academy of Dramatic Art in Pasadena, CA.

I had been in Viola's class for about a year. We worked on space substance a good deal of the time. I had very little trouble visualizing the where and handling basic space, and Viola knew it. And although I had difficulty with many areas of her work at the time, SPACE was not one of them - or so I thought.

With mime, it's about having a clever idea and then rehearsing it and executing it to perfection. By the time I was 26 I had had enough of this. I was getting bored by my own mime performances. It was another reason I began taking acting and improv.

I wanted my work in Viola’s class to be good! I wanted to be liked and have her approve of me, and so I felt I had to know what to do in a scene before I got up to do it. I realize now that was not the point – at all! I knew it too, but could not help myself. I feared that my getting it wrong or looking stupid for not understanding what she wanted, would disappoint her. I was caught in what Viola called the Approval/Disapproval Syndrome.

In class, Viola would set up a game, describe the focus and then sit down and ask, “OK who wants to go first?"

I never went first. I wanted to see what the game looked like before I would try it. I had to watch while others did the scene. I watched and tried to understand what the game was and what it did for other players first.

While watching, I began to think "Ok, I could be a doctor and Susan my patient…" or "I could come on and say… and then he might answer…X.' Or "I'll come on with a horse to trade…'. I was trying to write the beginnings of a scene so I wouldn't go up 'empty' and look like an idiot without an idea.

"No playwriting!" Viola would shout from the sidelines. She'd see others playwriting an improv when all I could see was a passable scene.

"There are wonderful writers in their garrets with their typewriters and quills - writing things a lot better than you!"

She would often shout "Show us, don't tell us!"

Some players could not help just talking through the whole scene. They were not able to show the where and many players would not understand the difference – they would talk about where they were or what they were looking at instead of using the where and handling objects. Viola would get cranky.

"What are you DOING!!!?" she would yell.

"You’re just talking and telling us! If you can't show us - don't keep talking!!! Use your where! If you can't see it, look for it!" She then would either launch into a lecture or just stop the scene and try something else.

Sometimes she would just ask the two talkers to sit down and ask for two more. She would holler, “The Where will support you! You cannot just talk about it!”

Some players couldn’t take it. They thought she was telling them they were a failure - that they were no good, even though she never ever used words like good or bad when discussing our work.

“Were you able to achieve the focus? No. Sit down. NEXT!”

Although she yelled, many of us understood it was her frustration at not being able to get the game to work. Some took it personally and would leave the workshop, stung by her anger.

Viola's shouting always showed me her passion and I never took her raised voice personally. Still I was not going to go first and frustrate her. I wanted to do well. I'd be up in the last row, knowing I shouldn't playwright but I would do it anyway.

By now I knew enough about improvisation to realize that it is a good thing to go up without a thought. Just go! Trust that something would happen, but I couldn't. My mind was constantly feeding me with ideas – I couldn’t stop it. I was like a harried and desperate writer pitching ideas to a producer who did not want to listen.

Every time I caught myself thinking up an opening or a good line or a situation I could use, I would slap my face just a little, to remind myself to ‘stop it! Stop thinking ahead!’ I slapped myself a lot in the early days.

I wanted to improvise, but I also wanted to be good at it - right now. I had no idea that my all my clever ideas where things Viola had seen countless times before - I never realized it until I began to teach the work.

I tried to be original, funny and clever. And sometimes, in spite of myself, my trite scene premise worked only because Viola would call out some coach that would let me out of my fear and connect me some way to the scene, the other player or the where and I would get out of my head and something new would happen. With her sidecoaching, you often couldn’t help but do wonderful work.

I would get up time after time and try to erase all my pre-planning, often to no avail.

My first epiphany

One day we did an exercise called "Begin and End".

It was a solo exercise - my favorite kind. We were to handle an object, then break it down into 'beginning and ending' sub-movements calling out loud "Begin!" and "End!" then re-do the handling of the object to see if it made more of an 'appearance' in space. To me this was mime - my meat!

Viola developed this kind of an exercise to help people really see space physically and have it be a reality for you rather than pretending.

“Out of your head and into the space!” she kept reminding us.

Being in your head in this exercise, means that an object is referenced rather than actually handling it as a space object. This leads to telling and not showing: Using a pointed finger for a gun, or index and middle finger opening and closing for a pair of scissors or a thumb and pinky being spread apart and held to the ear to represent a phone.

Begin and End would break your movements down into 'beats' to allow time to see the various parts of the action. Once broken down and then reassembled, an object would appear in the space and be seen by the audience. So many players would use space badly and when they did use an object, we often would have no clue as to what it was. Space is tricky.

The undisputed master of this kind of space work was Richard Schaal, a member of Paul Sills' company and an original Second City cast member. He had the ability as Viola would say ‘to make the invisible, visible’. (More on him later).

“We’re going to do an exercise called Begin / End.” She announced.

Again I did not go first, hoping to see what she was after, knowing I could do this, but wanting to make sure. Sure enough, a student came onstage and quickly and clumsily unwrapped a stick of gum. We had no idea what he was doing until he put something in his mouth and started chewing. He then broke it down into Begin – End and then re-did it a third time. The third time we could see clearly the pack of gum, the wrapper and the single stick of gum he popped into his mouth.

"I get it" I thought to myself, feeling very cocky. I decided on pantomiming a cigarette pack and getting one out of the pack and lighting up.

I did it just as I had many times before in mime scenes. I then broke it down using Begin/End and then did it normally the third time.

In my evaluation, after the third time, Viola asked the class “Did you notice any difference from the first to the last time he did it?”

"No." said the class. "It was just as clear as the first time."

I beamed, feeling very pleased with myself. Little did I realize that Viola was not after a mime performance. She got up and came over to the stool I sat on onstage.

"Let me ask you a question." she said.

"Were you actually handling that object or were you drawing us a picture?"

My stomach sank.

"I was drawing you a picture." I said.

"And it was a very nice picture. We all saw it. But did you really see it?"

"Yes."

"No. You saw an outline of it." She said. "You made us see what you wanted us to see without seeing it yourself. You were playwriting!"

She caught me.

"I'm going to ask you to do it again. And this time I'm going to ask you to break it down many more times than you think. I'm also going to ask you breathe out fully on the 'End' part. Expel all your breath and shout very loudly on the 'begin'.”

I had no time to think of what to do. I had to pick a new object and start right away. No forethought. That was good, but that was only part of it.

By asking me to break it down even further, she meant to go beyond my outline. Beyond the gestures that would say just enough about an object so the audience would understand what it was. That was what my mime training had taught me. She also had me focus on breath and volume. I had a multiplicity of focuses, to occupy me and keep me from my old well-trained habits - to shut off my head.

I decided to peel an orange. I dug my thumbnail in and peeled the rind, piece by piece, putting the pieces on my lap.

"Now do it with BE-ginnnnn!" she loudly emphasized "and ENNNNDDDDDuh -!" she demonstrated emptying her lungs of air.

I began.

I found it was not difficult to break the movements into smaller parts.

I began by seeing an orange on the table. Seeing was a BEGIN!

Deciding to pick it up, an ENNNDDDuh!

“BEGIN!” I placed my hand on the orange.

“ENND!” - expelling all my breath, I let my hand rest on the orange.

“BEGIN!” I raised the orange.

“ENNNDDDuh!” I brought it in front of me.

I got occupied with that glistening rind. I saw it.

A shiny orange with a pebbled skin - a large juicy navel orange. I even noticed the 'navel' part.

“BEGIN!” I dug my nail into the orange. I thought to myself, it’s a real oily, ripe orange, this one.

“ENNNNNDuhhhh!”

I pried open the first part where I could see the orange section like a whitish placenta-like embryo with veins and shreds of pulp.

I lost track of how many times I did it, I do remember my voice was wearing thin with all the volume and my breathing was getting me very energized. I gulped in air for 'begin' and expelled it all on 'end'. It was just me and this particular orange. Not a generic orange, but a unique one. I even remember recalling it had a blue stamp on it like some oranges have when picked and labeled by a grower.

"Now go back and peel it again, without Begin / End." Viola instructed.

This is where I have to say, it really happened folks, because it really did. It might sound like some grandiose recollection, but I promise you this is no overstatement or exaggeration. I peeled the orange again. When I stuck my thumbnail into it, I saw, as clearly as I see this computer screen I'm writing on, the spray of orange oil come out of that very ripe orange. The entire class gasped. They saw it too! I continued to peel that orange and I can still see it vividly to this very day.

"There." Viola said. "You saw it and we saw it." She smiled very broadly. "Whoooo! That was something!"

She then turned to the class. "I don't care how skilled you are - if you see it then we will see it. If you don't see it, you're cheating yourself!" she hollered with emphasis.

She turned back to me. "I'm going to ask you whenever you do this exercise, Gary, to do that - break it down as much as possible and breathe! – This is a breathing exercise. And then, in your case, I'll ask the class not only if they saw it, but what color or texture it was."

Later when we did this exercise again, I tied a tie. When I was done Viola asked the group what color it was and what material. The majority of the class said it was a knit tie, maroon or red.

Bingo! It was a maroon, fuzzy knit tie. That’s what I saw. I saw it- Really saw it. And they did too.

This was my epiphany. I had to get out of my head in order to generate energy and true spontaneity. Breaking it down so many times, combined with the breathing and the loud voice put my focus on the object and not the audience or myself (who was still obsessed with how the audience was seeing me).

I had produced, in space, a real orange and a real tie. It was real to everyone who saw it. Invisible space made visible.

I now saw mime as a tired and boring way of moving your body to describe objects – it was just another way of telling and not showing. I immediately began teaching space object work to my mime class at the American Academy, totally doing away with rote exercises in rotations, inclinations, illusions and the like.

I was fired.

So be it. I was on the path to something much bigger.

A Sense of Urgency

These next posts are stories and observations on my experience in Viola Spolin's workshop early in my training. I hope you can relate to being a novice improviser and see how her sidecoaching transformed me and how it might transform you.

This entry is about using Slow Motion counteract Urgency.

This happened in a workshop with Viola when we were working on “The Where”.

The scene is a spaceship. I’m the navigator. Andy is the captain, and we have two prisoners from another planet on board. I sit placidly at my controls downstage. The captain yells a heading like a pirate.

“Sou.. by SouWest!”

I say, “Sou by sou west, aye!” Thinking to myself that’s what he wanted me to say, but shouldn’t it sound like a numbers and degrees and bearing call? I’m thinking of how to add to that in when one of the prisoners says “There’s no south in space!”

Who do I support? What does Captain Andy say to that? Should I say something? I think if I support the prisoner - the scene could go into a mutiny, which would be funny. Or do I defend my captain and create an opportunity for doing a captured prisoner scene.

Andy says something I miss. The prisoner shouts, “My people are coming for us!”

I say “What should I do Captain?”

Viola yells “No Questions!!” I understand what she means. Questions signal you abdicate responsibility for adding to the scene and asking for someone else to direct the action. It’s a cop out. Yet I think, that’s a good question. My head swims with possibilities and I’m getting a little flustered. I'm in my head and I feel the pressure to make something happen.

Andy and the Aliens are into some kind of dialogue when they begin yelling “We’re under attack!”

I mess with the dials and run around trying to take ‘evasive action’. I am feeling totally disconnected to what the others are doing.

I start talking about the pounding the ship is under and yell “damage to our hull!” We’re all running around. I can’t even understand what the others are saying. I’m panicking. I try to make my character into a panicky person. I’m panicky, not my character. I am lost in the scene, not really that aware of what others are saying or doing. I’m just acting hysterical - thinking this will add to the scene, somehow. It’s active and big.

I always heard ‘you can use your nervousness to inject energy in a scene.’ I chose panic as a focus or should I say, panic chose me. I was shut off from the others.

I wondered what they wanted. How can I tune in to what they are doing? What could I contribute to the scene? How can I figure out what they were doing and let them know what I was doing?

What was I doing? What should I do? What was going on? "No questions!" I remembered. My breathing got shallow and hurried. My mind raced. No questions! Just react! React to what? Questions again.

“No urgency!” Viola intoned from somewhere 'out there'. The rush of my own urgency was roaring in my head and I barely had time to listen or respond to the other players. I wanted something to happen! I wanted it to be good! I wanted everyone to think I was good at this. I grabbed at any comment or behavior and tried to ‘make something from it.’

Maybe I could say things I thought were funny or interesting and hope the other players would pick up on it. Momentum built as I lost further control and then I heard “SLOOOOOWWWWWWWW - MOTIONNNNNN!” yelled to me from within my vortex. “Everyone! Veeerrrryyyyy Sloowwww Motionnnnn!” Viola coached.

I began to concentrate on slowing the space around me. Slowing my speech. I begin to get that wonderful warm feeling of slow-motion space wrapping around me like a blanket. I begin to notice, the other players jumping on Captain Andy and slowly wrestling him to the ground. I glide over to the door and yank on the wheel to open the hatch. My movements flow and feel natural. I notice that I’m blocking the upstage action with Andy and the Aliens. I need to show the audience what’s going on. I roll in slow-mo toward the door at the side of the stage and a great idea hits me. “We’re going to implode! - Abandon ship!!”

The Aliens let go of Andy and slowly lurch for the door. I open the door and they go for it. I slowly put my foot on the second alien’s behind and nudge all of them out and slam the door.

Since the whole scene took place on a bare stage with two chairs, the aliens could be seen clinging to the outside of the ship in real slow motion, pounding and yelling to be let back in.

The class laughed. I reach for the captain and set him up in his command chair and get back to my console. “Sou -by sou West!” I say over my shoulder, smiling. Thanks for the signal Captain. Andy leans forward and says “Aaaarrrrgh! - now go to warp speed at zero nine four degrees mark three!” aaand blackout.

How many times at auditions or other interviews, you hear “Take your time” and it’s just a bunch of words. You are so nervous you simply nod at the advice but don’t really understand what that means. Everything begins to rush around you and you feel like Keir Dullea, the astronaut in 2001 A Space Odyssey as he travels through the whooshing psychedelic interior of the mysterious black monolith -Speeding up with every passing second.

The world whirls past you in a fever dream and you try your best to not show how scared you are. You are in the grips of panic and fear and all you can do is try to maintain some control. There's no presence of mind. No time to make a connection with others. Very often people feel this out of body sensation. In essence it is a low level panic attack. You can control just enough behavior to not totally loose it, but you are paralyzed creatively. You are in reaction not relation.

Slow Motion is an amazing tool. It gives a focus that allows time for you to take in all you need to, in order to stay in the scene. In many cases it can allow actors to reconnect to each other and the environment while in a scene and take a mundane, trite scene and give it new life.

Many actors 'center' themselves before making an entrance. It is a way of calming and focusing, ridding the mind of 'what to do' thoughts and just being. What can you do once onstage or in a scene? Slow motion is not exaggerated slurring and slowing, but an altered experience of time. It is literally 'taking your time'.

Urgency is a desire to 'make it good', be seen, get a laugh, despite the fact that you have very little awareness of what's really going on. Urgency narrows your field of vision and soon it all becomes about you.

Novice improvisers or poorly trained ones or exhibitionists find ways to use urgency to 'shake it up' or make something happen. What they are really doing is forcing other actors to deal with them. They become the focus of the scene, very much like a drowning person gets everyone on the beach focused on their emergency. Many times the player is unconscious of this behavior. Since it always gets something to happen onstage, it can become a pattern and a habit. Soon other players will find exits when they see this kind of player enter the scene.

Viola recognized urgency as a cry for help. Her first comment was to alert me to the Urgency early in the scene. Sometimes awareness can avert the problem. When urgency overtook me, another focus was needed to counteract the urgency. Since Urgency is about uncontrolled speed, Slow Motion is the perfect antidote.