Juilliard School in New York, where the students were far more skilled musicians than I will ever be. One afternoon a group of students, who had never previously improvised, progressed from singing some amusing gibberish pieces to picking up their instruments and playing full-on spontaneous music. They played two exquisite improvisations — beautifully organized, emotional pieces. They were connecting with, listening to, and supporting each other. The other musicians, listening in the circle of support, could not believe that these pieces had not been composed. Then the group played a third piece, in which they were a bit out of sync and out of tune with each other. During the discussion following that third piece, the students’ faces were drawn with guilt, feeling that they had screwed up. “Mistakes” in improvisation are hard to define, but people recognize when something works and when it doesn’t.
The ghost of Beethoven’s father was stalking us with his stick, whacking those students on the fingertips for making a mistake. So I thought of prescribing an antidote. I asked them to put their instruments down and do some finger-kissing exercises. They simply walked around the room kissing their own fingers, contemplating and appreciating all ten of them. Finger-kissing is easy. Anyone can do it. In fact, I suggest you try it right now.
A student asked me why I didn’t stop the “bad” piece and say something right then. We all have the built-in expectation that a conductor or teacher will wave a baton to offer corrections. Rehearsals and lessons are usually a matter of constant starting and stopping to point out errors. With a large orchestra rehearsing an hour-long Mahler symphony, it’s hard to avoid this, though conductors vary widely in the emotional tone of their interjections. But these students, playing brief improvisations in a small group, knew quite well what they liked and didn’t like about their piece. It was there in front of everybody’s eyes, ears, and minds.
The group went on to play more pieces, which were increasingly strong, varied, and interesting. The more pieces they played, the further away they got from ideas of good and bad. Each piece became its own little world of relationship, information, and feeling. Listening to each other, stepping back from attempting to be individually excellent and pass some imaginary exam, was the key. What they needed at that moment was not assessment; it was mindfulness.
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Finger-kissing is simple, but it rakes up all kinds of wounds. In our own lives, we often betray ourselves by allowing a fixed identity to be attached to us. I have run into many people who were told in the fourth grade that they couldn’t carry a tune or who tried to play the piano and were told they were making too many mistakes. They were scolded about these mistakes in a way that stuck to them, that made them want never to touch another instrument again, never to sing again. Or they may wish to sing again, but they believe that they can’t, that they lack the fixed, identifiable “quality” of musicality. Some teacher has laid a container around them, laid an identity on them as somebody who isn’t musical. Many of us carry similar stories with us, a semipermanent part of our life baggage. The entertainment industries, by pushing highly produced media before our eyes, by emphasizing the importance of superstars, do the same thing. Why try being creative when there is such a gap between what we can do and what is promoted “out there”? We carry many limitations with us, thinking they are part of our identity. If we’re lucky, we may later discover that we can step out of that characterization, that the label laid on us does not confine us.
Working together, learning together, is not always a smooth process. We experience interjections, interruptions, awkward silences. As carefully as we might listen to each other, there are places where we blurt out a thought, a feeling, a sound that pushes boundaries, that opens up old or new scars. The engines of guilt — finger-slapping, finger-whacking, finger-pointing — are endemic in our society. In school, in the workplace, we are inundated with assessments and evaluations. These assessments are backed up by threats. Students take standardized tests; teachers in public schools, and the schools themselves, are evaluated by how well their students do on these tests. Probably every student, especially students in the arts and humanities, has experienced the psychological threat of burger flipping — that you may spend the rest of your life doing menial jobs. We fear falling off the treadmill of constant assessment. That mindset doesn’t end with school. It pervades much of our society, particularly in the wake of economic recessions, when many of our institutions have been fine-tuned to present an atmosphere of permanent scarcity. And behind all this fear, deeply ingrained in our collective values, is the idea of a God who punishes our transgressions. Students often believe that if they make a mistake it is because they are bad, stupid, or unworthy. This is the cultural background that we’re trying to overcome by getting people to open up.
This is the unsettled, uncomfortable aspect of art, of theater, of teaching. This is the subtext of fear and consequence that underlies students’ anxieties and inhibitions, that leads them to conflate their own mistakes with ineptitude — believing that they aren’t good enough, that they aren’t among the chosen few. We are out on a perilous ledge, working in ways that scrape against the established modes. The discipline of improvising is being comfortable with being uncomfortable.
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One of the finest teachers of improvisational performance I have known is Al Wunder, an old friend from Berkeley who now runs the Theatre of the Ordinary in Melbourne, Australia. Wunder wrote an influential paper called “Positive Feedback Only,” reprinted in The Wonder of Improvisation. He points us to an experience that many of us have had, being in the room with a one-year-old baby who is walking for the first time:
When the adults realized what was happening, they all sat in a circle. The young performer teetered and wobbled from the outstretched arms of one adult to another — ooo’s, ahs, smiles, cheers and hand claps all around the circle. There was a huge, beaming smile on the child’s face. Not a single adult thought of saying, “That was lovely (insert your own name), now if you could just hold your back a little straighter and lift your knees higher, you will walk even better the next time.” Why not? The child certainly was not walking well. Yet we, the adults, knew that the child would continue to develop, on their own, the skills of walking, of running, skipping, hopping and other forms of exciting locomotion.
Fine musicians and artists teaching master classes, with the best of intentions, often fall into the trap of making helpful suggestions. It is much more challenging to allow the mistakes to hang silently in the air and instead have the students speak about what they enjoyed in each other’s performances. Reinforce what was interesting, and it will be stronger next time. Once a nurturing environment has been established, it is possible to give and receive criticism without wounding. Even then, it is better to use our discernment to find the good, the interesting elements in the work, the edge of exploration that leads to the next work.
What if the dignity and encouragement we show to babies were a model for all our educational systems?
“Positive feedback only,” as Wunder describes it, does not mean pretending that everything is uniformly good or that our critical faculty is to be disabled. It means that by searching out the aspects of a performance that we enjoy, we are strengthening them. We can only identify these aspects and figure out how to reinforce them if our brains and perceptions are fully engaged.
In the face of institutional mania for evaluation and the accompanying threats of failure, more positive approaches have also arisen, from the practice of appreciative inquiry in the world of business and organizational consulting, which has spread widely from its origins in the Cleveland School of Business, to some of the methods of legendary basketball coach Phil Jackson (who introduced his players to Zen meditation and mindfulness techniques as part of his training regime) and his Positive Coaching Alliance, an antidote to the popular conception of sports coaches as militaristic, punishing martinets.
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At this moment you might be sitting, standing, lying down, or walking. Wherever you are, try gently shifting
