the gurus of instant theater, said that your job as an improviser is not to come up with clever lines but to make your partner’s shitty line sound good. Keith Johnstone describes this principle using the wonderfully old-fashioned word chivalry. This is something we seldom see in the public sphere: mutual respect, mutual support, building something together that we might never have dreamt of on our own. Improvising is all about human relationship. It is about listening, responding, connecting, and being generous. When a group of free players gets together and unfolds a coherent and interesting piece without a prior plan or template, it is like watching separate beings become integrated into a single nervous system. It is a partnership, with each other and with the audience, in the deepest sense of the word. I even get this feeling when I am playing or hearing a solo improvisation. Each tone and gesture can be seen as an invitation to deepen the information and feelings that are unfolding. The discipline of improvisation involves sensing invitations, accepting them, and supporting each other. There is not much room to be egotistical or greedy for attention. Leadership might be clearly visible at one moment and subtler at others, but it is fluid and shared; it slides around from person to person, like a fugue. We are able to engage in the give-and-take of communication. Exchange, flow, listening, responding: our improvising can become a mini-economy, a mini-ecology, a template, in fact, for a self-organizing, organic form of democracy.
Artistic creativity won’t heal the horrors of the world; it won’t save anyone or anything. But it is practice — and through practice we change the self, and the relationship of the self with all things.
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Union organizers have a technique for bringing a factory to a standstill without actually going on strike. It is called an obedience strike, or work-to-rule. Quite simply, the workers follow every rule and regulation to the letter. We’re going to do our job exactly as it is stipulated. The problem is that no one can design a formula, job description, or software algorithm for every contingency. Soon everything grinds to a halt. If management wants to frustrate the work-to-rule action, they have to command the workers as follows: you must interpret your jobs freely, using personal judgment about each case based on context. What a marvelous double bind! “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” — one of the most practical statements in the Bible.
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The pioneering theater and film director Peter Brook pointed out that in the days of Ibsen and Chekhov, people went to the theater to see well-written plays acted out with the magic of lights, sets, costumes, and so forth. Today, with movies and TV, many of those elements can be realized far better than on the stage. So what now is the function of live theater, whether improvised, composed, or a hybrid between? Brook’s answer is that we go to the theater to be personally involved in an event that can only happen in this place, at this time, at this temperature, in these acoustics, with these people. We come for an experience of presence. It is that sense of concrete immediacy and impermanence that theater must provide.
The unmediated presence of players with each other, with spectators, is the true purpose of live art. A young man at one of my university workshops remarked that during the two-hour session of a hundred people playing together, he was not once tempted to take out his phone. He said that every time he was at an event that interested him, he compulsively shared photos or videos. But this time he realized that the essence of the experience was being there. The more our society dissolves into a mirror labyrinth of screens and telecommunication, the more vital is the experience of simply being with each other.
There is such a ferment of artistic exploration today, occurring almost entirely below the radar of both mass media and high-culture media. These encounters bring forward the element of music that is more important than sound, of theater that is more important than story, of art that is more important than imagery. That element is people, interacting and present for each other. At each moment we are there to witness an event that has never taken place before and will never take place again. This is true not only of theater but of every instance in life. The key to creativity is other human beings. As we realize this in our day-to-day practice, our art becomes, in the words of the musician and scholar George Lewis, a power stronger than itself.
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There is a word from the South African Bantu language, ubuntu: mutual humanity. In the related Zulu/Xhosa language, they say, “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.” “I am a person through your being a person.” Ubuntu is intimately related to Buddhist ideas of interdependence, and as Archbishop Desmond Tutu explains, it is the opposite of Descartes’ I think, therefore I am. It is the opposite of our idea of the solitary genius-creator-intellect who produces masterpieces in a room.
Clarence Jones was the speechwriter and close friend who happily watched as Dr. King pushed aside the text he had helped prepare. Jones reports that King had used the phrase I have a dream in a previous speech with little effect on the audience. That day in August of 1963 was different. “The power is not in the words themselves. Nor is it in the speaker. The power was woven into the feedback loop that jumped between the words, the speaker, and his audience.”
Ubuntu is that feedback, looping around to weave a network of reciprocity. Doris Lessing called it “substance-of-we-feeling” — awareness and sensation flowing throughout the body and between self and others and environment. We think the body is in the body and the mind is in the head, but actually, down the pathways of communication, through our limbs, and the instruments with which we extend ourselves, through the resonance of a room as sounds return to us, it is all an indissoluble continuum of conversation.
Art activates empathy, and creates the opportunity for it, inviting us to see for a while through someone else’s personality and experience. Gregory Bateson said, “It takes two to know one.” We know ourselves through each other. That is why, if you stand up and play a solo, as a storyteller, dancer, actor, or musician, you are still operating in this infinite nexus of relationship, listening and responding. We come to see individual and collective experience on a continuum, just as improvisation and composition occur on a continuum. We become stewards of these newly discovered relationships with our partners and our environment. With practice we can make those relationships richer, more interesting, more generous.
Improvising makes visible some truths of daily life that we experience but seldom think about: that we can navigate our way through complex systems in the simple act and art of listening and responding; that creativity is the property of everyone and not just of a chosen few; that the ordinary, everyday mind is expressive and creative. From this magical interaction the work is born.
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The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me,he complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
— Walt Whitman
I was in London for a few days before traveling to a conference on improvisation in Wales. I walked along the South Bank of the Thames, taking in the sun and puffy clouds reflected on the water, gulls wheeling and yawping overhead, and crowds of mostly happy-looking people strolling up and down the walkways, each involved in his or her personal mixture of business and pleasure. I was supposed to give the keynote talk at the conference, which gathered international improvisers from across the arts, including musicians, theater people, dancers, visual artists, filmmakers, educators, psychologists, and others, for a series of talks and performances. While I was looking forward to this conference, as usual I didn’t have the foggiest idea what I was going to
