Impro is people improvising games, stories, scenes, songs, in a performance context,or in a workshop, and this is not considered spiritual by the majority. Spirituality is always seen as something elevated and refined and what happens when you free associate, is a load of repressed sex and rage type stuff comes up, and this seen as low. Base. Not elevated. Impro also seen as people being witty & flippant, entertaining and funny. Something clever and heady. And again that show-biz, not spiritual. And this is product of turning impro, into an entertainment. A comedy producing machine. It’s as well to remember though that Keith Johnson, who wrote the book, and who started the whole impro movement, did not start it entirely for that. His original impro experiments went into much darker areas. They were much more to do with serious theatre. Narrative. Character. So if we shift the focus on this, and now look at impro, only as a scene, A SCENE, generating machine, a way to find a story and some characters, we must ask what is actually happening when we enter a scene? What are the fundamental elements of that? The answer is that the fundamental thing is, we cannot control or choose, most of what occurs in the scene. We have no real way of choosing the elements in a scene. They won’t conform to our tastes, ideas, expectations!!!!!!!!!
(A enters. Starts cleaning a window. B enters with a baby in her arms. Says. “It’s got a fever!” Concerned, A mops baby’s brow with window sponge. B says, “Not with that!” And a row ensues.)
As you can see here at beginning A does not know who he is. Where he is. What his relation to B is. This was all made clear be B’s offer of bringing in the baby. It then became clear they were parents at home. The point being that what ever is there, the window cleaning, the baby, the sponge, you will have to work with it. You can’t really choose it. A does know why he cleaning window. B doesn’t know how A react to the baby. If indeed she does know she is holding a baby. Agreement must be reached, because no one knows what’s there to begin with. But whatever is there we must work with it. We can’t ignore the window cleaning. The baby. The sponge. We must work with these elements.
Now this is the spiritual truth impro shows us, in that in life we often find good reasons for not working with what’s there. If a thing is below our standards, not to our taste, not what we expected, not in keeping with our ideas, somehow ‘unsavoury’, we reject it in favour of some other thing, we can go in search of!!! IN SEARCH OF!!!! i.e. something in the future. At a later date. Not now. We have this luxury in life that we can control, reject, pass over things in search of a more pleasing, or a better alternative, in the future. And this is perfectly acceptable and fine. The drawback with it of course, is that it does take us out of the moment. OUT OF THE MOMENT! By embracing something that only exists in the future, we are rejecting the here and now. We are not being in the moment. This is a thing that gurus and impro teachers alike, are always, constantly telling us to do. Stay in the moment. And impro does actively teach us that we can do this. WE CAN! That we can shift the focus on this. We can instead accept what is there, and work with it, intelligently looking for agreements, instead of denying what’s in front of us, and demanding something different.
WE CAN!
Now this is the harder option, but in long term it will achieve a more satisfying outcome. Now you might protest that this isn’t a spiritual truth, but a self-development truth, and that they are not the same thing. And this is very common. Most people do not want spirituality to be about the nuts and bolts of human relationships, but choose to see it as something more refined, more elevated. More, in a word, SPIRITUAL. In response to this I’ll say that charity, begins at home. How can something be spiritual, if it separates you from others, by making us feel superior???
Also that spiritual comes from word 'spirit'. and this is something disembodied. and before we incarnate our group awareness is effectively disembodied, and so spirituality is essentially about group awareness, or our
relationship to each other, in group terms.
It also mirrors the fact that we need to find connections between things, for we can only really make progress in our understanding of life, when we can relate one thing, to another different thing, and so intuit the pattern that lies beyond the surface of things. Having said this though, in doing impro we must not think we can use it in one particular way. i.e. as an exercise in finding the links between things, because that is what its for. No. We need to drop all our agendas, try and be in the moment, and trust in ourselves to grow from the experience, no matter how it transpires. Put another way, we must try not to be too goal orientated, which again is putting the focus on something in the future.
Now in coming to impro everyone more or less, starts in the same place. And this is a painful uncomfortable place. The place of being stuck. In Toltec terms it means your assemblage point is fixed. Stuck on one spot. What impro requires is fluidity. When you assemblage point moves, keeping it simple, you change your intensity. You would change in a scene, because the story demands it, from a young person to an old person, say. Two very different intensities. This would require an energetic fluidity. Or put simply, the ability to drop one thing and take up another quite quickly. So, to un-stick ourselves means we will have to go through an unpleasant period. A probationary period. For some time it feel wrong. Difficult. Even perhaps hopeless. However, if we can just stay with it, and trust in the process, we will reap the spiritual rewards it has to offer. These benefits are the cornerstone of spiritual development. This is why impro, even when it is seen as being very challenging, and not spiritual by most people, and the province of a few ultra talented types, is really none of these things and IS something worth pursuing from a spiritual standpoint.
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