IMPRO ARCHETYPES

Judee Sill, the genius 60’s folk singer/songwriter, called an archetype, ‘that universal mould from which we are all poured.' In other words, something pre-programmed, at a deep level, in all of us. And these archetypes often surface in impro. I’ll look at three of them.

ARCHETYPE NUMBER 1 The Futility Scene.

The first is a scene you see again and again. People are engaged in some kind of activity, but no one knows why they are doing it. The number of people may grow, doing the activity, but no matter how many people doing it, no one knows why they are doing it. People make huge efforts to make scene go somewhere, or find out what activity is for, but it just carries on.

So what is happening? To answer this we must ask ourselves the question, what does development in our lives spring from? And the answer here, is acknowledging the reality of things. Not until we say that, for example, the reality is, I am no good at say, being sensitive to what others are feeling, can I possibly develop in that area. How could we work with some issue, if we don’t first acknowledge it? We can’t.

Translated to impro this then, is about acknowledging the reality of the scene you have created! Often the space is named, a dentist’s office, but this reality not acknowledged, accepted, or agreed upon. What happens then is that scene floats off into nowhere. It is set in a Dentist’s Office, and yet people play a scene about Egyptians building a pyramid! And no one really knows where they are with that scene, for it is not grounded in a truth. So. When people invent something, and then fail to acknowledge what they have invented, that’s when the futility scene can begin. So. How can we work with this?

The answer is to acknowledge the reality of what you create! If it decided that scene happens in a Hairdressing Salon, then someone must have a hair do!!!!! If it a shop, someone must buy something!!!!!!!!!! If at a funeral, someone must get buried!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! But don’t misinterpret my ‘must’. It is really, ‘must until you have enough experience to stay with the reality of a scene, even when you don’t directly stay with it. You can develop the way you work with the truth of a scene, but that comes with time and experience!! Wanting to run before you can walk, is a common thing, but we need to have FOREBEARANCE. Take it slowly, and be patient in our learning. Suspend our judgement, and just follow the guidelines given to you. If you by-pass these early stages, because you find them too boring, you will not get the grounding that you need to build on, to become good solid improviser.

ARCHETYPE NUMBER 2 Appearance of the Monster!

Often when scenes are not really developing in a useful way, a monster of some kind will appear. It will then be necessary to fight it, and the scene will end. In relation to this, it would be a good idea not just to fight the monster and get rid of it, but to try and find out what it is. What it wants. Where it came from. But still, it’s a monster and it probably just wants to eat you, and not sit chatting. So what is this archetype?

Well. This is really just the monster of our stupidity or lack of awareness. What happens is that on some other level, people realise they are being stupid, or lacking in some fundamental awareness, that would help scene to be more effective, and the monster appears to corroborate this. It’s just saying STOP! THINK! So what is this lack of awareness? Well it is just obvious stuff like lack of intelligent co-operation. Lack of trust. Inability to shift the focus. Failure to acknowledge reality, as we said earlier. Basic stuff that requires we do have awareness about what impro is. That we don’t take it at face value, but do make a serious effort to see that it has deeper levels.

ACHETYPE NUMBER 3 failure to make someTHING HAPPEN!!!!

Why is it so hard to make things happen? To do things. Go places. Fight the dragon? Example. A man wakes up. Goes out of his house. There is a big dragon in the road. He notices he is holding a lance. He goes back in his house and makes a cup of tea. Does a bit of dusting. Reads the paper. Goes out again. Notices dragon still there, and lance still in his hand. Goes back in house. Sorts his stamp collection. Eats a sand-which. Watches T.V. Goes out again. DRAGON STILL THERE!!! Lance still in his hand. He goes back in the ….etcetera. Now this is really not going anywhere. Nothing is happening. Our story exists somewhere down the road, but to get there, we must fight the dragon. But somehow that is just not, going to happen. What it all means is, we must engage with things. We must. People act as if there is a choice, but in impro terms there isn’t. You must fight that f***ing dragon!!! Now what this does is mirror a truth that belongs rightly to the self-development world. And that is that for a client to make progress with their issue or neurosis, they must submit to change. CHANGE! They must let go of a rigid position. They must surrender to something greater than themselves. Read Irvin D Yalom, if you don’t believe me. Here change is symbolised by the dragon. Why? Because to fight it would involve pain. Think. Pain. And pain is what is being avoided. The pain of learning. Now there is no intrinsic value in pain as such, and yet still if pain avoidance is dictating all your choices, it will completely inhibit the learning of life’s deeper truths. But pain avoidance is so deeply internalised in all of us, that even in an impro scene, which is not part of actual life, it will still be the most influential thing”!!!

But put more broadly, we fall into the trap of thinking we can have things on our own terms. We want impro to be just good fun. A way to perform and express ourselves. A way to impress people. We do not want it to be anything else, or relate to anything else. Unfortunately life’s deeper levels exist whether we acknowledge them or not. So if you intent is set, on avoiding change, it will be mirrored in the scene you create, and no amount of clever technique will eradicate that. And because things work on more than one level, it would also be possible to internalise the rule, ‘I must always engage with change,’ which means you will fight the dragon and travel down that road, and create stories which do appear to go somewhere, and yet these stories will still only stay on the surface. They will have the appearance of stories, but lack that deeper magical element, which makes a story uplifting, worthwhile and truly satisfying. Which is of course what impro is at the moment. It is like a ready meal you buy in a supermarket. It looks good on the shelf. It looks good on your plate. But when you eat it, it is not quite as satisfying as you thought it would be.

So again we can see, it is a mistake to take impro at face value. Or to think impro is just about impro. This is the typical compartmentalised, polarised way of looking at things, and if you want to make progress, to develop your abilities as an improviser, you would do well to see beyond that way of seeing!!! But if you say, but change is too much! I’m not that type! You should consider the sometimes deceptive nature of words. For here we are too fixated on the word ‘change’ itself. Shift the focus and we can redefine change as a state of fluidity. The ability to flow with. Not a definite stopping being one thing and then becoming the absolute opposite of it. No. Change can be just a small and very gentle shift. We do not need to take such an extreme or extremist view, and then reject change out of hand. Instead we can put it in perspective. It’s also true that change at another level is an illusion, for although we can change our behaviour, we cannot change our essence. This, for good or ill, will always remain the same. The wise course here is to embrace change, the unknown, safe in the knowledge it may broaden your view of the world, whilst leaving you at the same time, the same, at a deeper level! Of course this is a truth that in the interests of marketing impro, to would be workshop goers, is ignored. Passed over, or perhaps simply not understood at all. Teachers will not, NOT, point out these deeper levels which imply deeper responsibilities, because they do not want to alienate would be students and improvisers. However, as Mouldy and Scullery know, the truth is out there, and we are all on a journey to meet that truth, or destiny, and we can put that off till tomorrow, or we can work to understand it today. A much more satisfying option.

ARCHETYPE NUMBER 4 the 'poo' archetype

If exercises are connecting on a deeper level, then the poo archetype will appear. Mountains of the stuff. In this connection I think of De Sade, who does a much more literary and negative version of this in his book, ‘120 Days of Sodom’. Here people do with innocent poo, every conceivable thing imaginable and some things quite unimaginable. What this indicates is the deep power and truth of this archetype. As Mouldy and Scully would say, ‘The poo is out there!’ But why? What is the symbolic significance of poo? Well, in symbolic terms it represents a combination of something prohibited from view and waste. Pooing is a private or secret thing and it is done to expel waste matter. Now we know waste matter can be recycled. Put to good use. So over all, we are looking at something which is pushed away from us, hidden from our awareness and that could be put to better use. Now in the impro context the thing we work with is emotions and feelings. So if the poo archetype does appear it is saying symbolically that we need to look at how we use emotions and feelings. How aware of the way we use them are we? Do we ever waste them? Do, for example, we see our anger as just waste, and something to be got rid of, or could it be seen more positively, and then re-cycled? Could feelings and emotions indeed be used like a compost in order to make new things grow?

Now this way of looking at things, you might complain, is too abstract. Too esoteric. In response to this all I can say is that we are very conditioned to only valuing the ‘real’. The ‘concrete’. The ‘material world’. A truth that is borne out in impro when we see players not respecting their imaginative creations. Not investing those creations with value. So it is not that this way of looking too esoteric, it is just that this imbalance exists and the appearance of this archetype is really seeking to redress that. It is jus saying, ‘Look! There is something you ignore, which you could be more conscious of, and I will keep drowning you in poo, until you realise that!!!!!!!!!!



ARCHETYPE NUMBER 5 the 'psycho' archetype


Well, we’ve all enjoyed Norman and his Motel. In impro he will often turn up particularly in games where we use stream of consciousness techniques like the one word story. And when the psycho appears he is allied to our previous archetype. It is of course simply a thing or entity which is completely devoid of feeling or emotion. It exists simply to sabotage or do harm. It is the cipher of our robotic desensitised selves and again when it appears we have to look at this area and ask ourselves just how versatile we are in regard to that? Do we empathise?  Do we simply identify with a feeling state, or are we conscious of the way we use that feeling state creatively? Remember. You put that archetype in front of yourself. It was something the group channelled for its own benefit, so it is pointless to complain and deny its existence.

It would also be useful to acknowledge that ‘The Psycho’ became perhaps the favourite character or plot mechanism in last 100 years. proof positive of the need for us lal to wake up to the significance of his existence!!!

THE NATURALISATION

I feel I have done something wrong, which sets me apart from others. I walk through the dream corridors of some vast corporation, looking for an office in which someone will validate my papers. Make me a naturalised citizen. I read the doors carefully. ‘Internal Affairs’. ‘Human Resources’. ‘Nazi Experiments’. I pause at this door and listen carefully. I can hear laughter and the chinking of glasses. I go on. ‘Conflict Avoidance’. ‘Personal Hygiene’. ‘Papers Validation.’ Ah ha! I knock. “Enter.” Inside the room an Admiral sits in an extremely high chair looking down. His Admiral’s Hat seems to reflect the light in some strange way. “The gift of life is a precious gift,” he says. “Do you wash behind the foreskin?” I feel his question is unfair and invasive. “Certainly I wash behind the foreskin! Don’t you?” he eyes me with suspicion. I go and grab the legs of his high chair and shake them violently. “In fact,” I shout, “ I am an absolute stickler for washing behind the foreskin!!!” He has clutched the sides of his chair, his hat almost vibrating with alarm. I stop and turn away in disgust. I look around. The floor is a crudely drawn map of Europe. The walls are covered in strange arcane diagrams. The ceiling is Perspex. I can see Simpson-esque blue sky and white clouds above me! The General’s high chair is painted red. “Papers,” he says. He would appear to have recovered. I take them out and hand them up. He reaches down. Our eyes meet. He takes hold of them. I hold defiantly on too. A tug of war. I suddenly let go. He sways backwards almost falling out of his chair! I smirk. He examines my papers. Iridescent rainbows glinting off his hat, which is very elaborate with 6 distinct tiers! “It says here that you are a slave of passion. Is that the case?” “That’s a damn lie!” I say. “A detestable and defaming calumny of the first water! I am not, nor never have been, a slave of passion, in any way, shape or form!!!” I have gone rather red in the face. I feel a kind of breathless tightening of my chest. “How dare they suggest I am a slave of passion?!” As I hear this coming out of my mouth, I see an image in my mind of a rose, wrapped in barbed wire, held by a monk, who’s bright red habit, appears to be in flames! “PASSION! Don’t make me laugh!” …..

But then I am suddenly overcome by a deep well of repentance. I fall to my knees. “Yes! Yes! Of course I am! When I was a child I tried to keep guinea pigs, but they always died. I can smell the cage again. See the straw that I forgot to change. Their tiny blue snouts.” And then that horrible awful shape, rises up inside me. That great un-screamed scream made of lice, cast iron, Eaton Boating Songs and the frost on the meadow, and of course, nothing at all. “We’re not interested in your record with guinea pigs!” He intones disdainfully. “Only with your ability to fit in. Be one of the boys. Fill in crosswords and generally do your bit. Do you think you can do that?” “Yes!,” I say. “Yes! I can play on your side. I can bat left field. I can bowl a googly. Hit a home run. Do the secret hand shake. Stay within my profit margin. And generally be a good team player. I can! I can!” As I am saying this a voice inside my head is saying, “No. You’ll never play on their side. Bat left field. Bowl a googly. Or any of that crap. No! NO! NO!” But the Archbishop appears mollified. “You can? You’ll agree to insider trading. The death of Hope. And wax onions?” “Yes! Yes! Wax trading. Hopeless onions, anything!” “Very well then.” He reaches inside his voluminous pocket, for his stamp of approval. He takes it out. It is an unwieldy cumbersome object, imbued with the ‘….’ Of ages, and the ‘….’ Of eons. “Ink!” I see an ink bowl in the corner of the room. I get it. Left it up. He dips. “Stamp pole!” I see a stamp pole lying against the opposite wall. It has a flat surface attached to one end. I lift it up. He puts the papers against it. With great difficulty he stamps. I put down the pole. He carefully hands the stamped papers down. I take them. It is like Joseph of Arimathea being given the Holy Graal! Somewhat stunned, I turn to leave. “Wait!! Before you go,” says the Colonel, “Remember this.” “Yes?”

He struggles to remember. Fails. “Oh nothing.” I leave. In the dream corridor, once more, of the vast corporation, I float along on clouds of gossamer clutching, my papers!!! Stamped and approved by the Admiral/General/Archbishop/Colonel, himself! Me. A fully naturalised citizen. I hear voices in a room. I put my ear against the door and listen. Inside I can her someone say. “Excuse me, is this the right room for an argument?”

the 'yes' rule in impro

The rule in impro is to always say yes. For the beginner particularly, this is an inflexible rule, for when we say no, we are not accepting what is offered us, and therefore the time is simply wasted finding a new direction to go in. So this rule greatly facilitates scene and narrative development. Now. Thinking people will often object by saying quite rightly, but life is not always positive, affirmative, accepting. So how can I be real if I say yes? And this certainly appears to be a good point. In real life, people do say no. They do reject and block. Surely we must mirror that truth? Also the objection occurs that there is no freedom in it. It is to totalitarian. You MUST say yes. No choice. And I agree. This is true. The rule is inflexible. So why is it necessary?


Well the answer is not to do with truth or freedom. The answer is to do with something that sort of precedes those issues, and is largely, quite invisible or ignored. Something already in place when those concepts materialise. And that is, the properties of words. The nature of words. The way words work. And the word yes, is a word. First and foremost, that’s what it is. And like it or not, as a culture, we have put far too much emphasis on language and talking and everything to do with words being important and influential. In reality, a word is simply a symbol for something else. Therefore a word has no actual existence itself! So when we use a word, not much has really happened, if anything at all! And yet we live in a world where once a thing is said, or written down, we act as if it has actually happened! Think! If a newspaper has the headline, MAN HAS TWO BRAINS! If we were honest, we would admit that we would believe it. And this is why the rule exists. Not because people must always be positive or follow rules, but because we need to remind people that saying words does not change very much. If in a scene I say, “Tree!” People are forced to ask, “But what about the tree?” i.e. give us more. Something real. Something that is not just words. So I would be forced to say, “The tree attacked me!” And then they would say, “Ah ha! Thank God. Something we can work with. Well then. Attacked you did it? Let’s go outside and chop it down!!!” So the yes rule simply points to the fact that a large part of reality is feelings, emotions, atmospheres, the unknown, objects, et cetera... And only a small part is words.
And let’s stop and think about actors. Coming to the theatre the first thing an actor introduced to is a play script which is, in effect, just lots and lot of words. That’s what play scripts are. You can have a silent film, but a silent play, a full length play, is almost impossible. Could you do a silent version of Macbeth? As people know the story you probably could. But Uncle Vanya? That would be ridiculous. Vanya being a good example of our word obsessed modern world. I say word obsessed. Maybe a better way to put it would be to say a culture that is infected with ‘word-faith’. Or as William Burroughs calls it, a word-virus. Another aspect of this is that of people internalising a negative attitude. An automatic negative response. I once entered a scene and the other performer said,      “ Come any nearer and I’ll shoot myself!” The

ultimate negative blocking offer!!! To flow with  things you need to embrace them. And to embrace them, you need to feel positive or

good about them. Often people simply don’t,

and the yes rule here corrects this self

sabotaging behaviour, in performance terms,

but does not change this conditioned negative

 response at a deeper level. There it still very

much exists, despite the constant positive

YES SAYING!!!

Now having said all this I’m going to contradict myself. Oh bugger! Words are magical. Words do contain power. The power of a thing said in the right way, with the right words, like in say Shakespeare or something, cannot be gainsaid. When Oscar Wilde said, ‘A Handbag!?’ the world changed. Forever. But this is poetry. And poetry relates to the individual. And impro is a group exercise. So having a purist pious attitude to the use of words in impro is rather misplaced, wonderful as words are!!!!!!!!

So. I hope all this encourages you to flow with the yes rule, and feel happy about it, and not feel you have signed away your soul to some smirking devil, who just wanted you to mindlessly say yes. YES!

ACTING- A TOLTEC PERSPECTIVE

For actors and performers one issue must be dealt with at the very outset. What should an actor do as regards getting guidance on his chosen field??? Considering the vast number of acting gurus out there, from Stanislavski to Hagen, this is indeed a fraught question. Which school/guru is best? How do they differ? Who is authentic? Who isn’t? These questions are bound to go through any dedicated actor’s mind. Now what I have learned through long experience, and having gone the usual route of following and struggling with methods and techniques, and trying to understand what the gurus were trying to tell me, is, that there is a bottom line. And that this is that acting is a magical thing, and as such, cannot really be analysed, quantified or made rational and comprehensible to the analytical mind. It is really not theoretical. You cannot think your way to a result with acting. And though it is always useful and interesting to know what other people have said on this subject, and familiarise yourself with the different schools of thought, at the end of the day, when you go on stage, you need to drop all that. Drop it completely. Forget it. Forget completely you know anything. And then you must trust in that power that rules over us, and guides us, to provide whatever it is you need, to make a particular scene or character come to life. TRUST. For when it comes to the theoretical approach, I always feel it a bit like that story ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’. The apprentice tries to appropriate the Sorcerer/Guru’s power, but his literal approach to this, simply gets him into endless complications, for the truth is, he is not the guru/sorcerer. He is, himself. In the story he ends up chopping the mop, which only means he has two mops to chop. And chopping those four. And then eight. And then so on, ad-infinitum. And the moral is you cannot just mimic the Guru’s power. You must go on the same journey as him. Find it for yourself. There are no short cuts. So.

THE RIGHT GUIDANCE!!!!!

I am not an acting guru, and that is why I can give you the right guidance on this. And my guidance is not a theory, or a method. My guidance is simply a description, in order to help you see something more clearly; for if we get clarity, we will make progress. And here it is.

Acting is about double-ness. It is about having a split-focus. It is about being yourself, and not yourself, both at once. We forget, the potential to be a character, exists when we are not a character. And when we are on stage playing a character, we are still ourselves, playing a character! In other words, on entering a scene, you must claim your space, by knowing who you are, i.e. what role you are playing, be self orientated, and self justified, and at the same time, you must be focussed outside yourself, on who the other actors are, what roles they are playing, and what their reasons are for being there, and doing what they do. You must do both these things at once. Split the focus!!!! Put in terms of the Toltec teachings, you must believe without believing! Know a thing is both true and false, at the same time. And this is of course theoretically impossible!!!! Your rational mind will never flatten this out to make it reasonable and understandable, for it simply isn’t reasonable and understandable, and yet, at the same time, it is simplicity itself, for we can be double. We can simply feel it! Now to say acting is about double-ness, may seem tad obvious. We may think, but I knew that! Of course it is about double-ness! But I am putting the focus back on this simple thing, to remind people of the essence of acting. Something that has been rather lost with the ‘progress’ that has been made in acting theory. And in order to show you a new way to work, with becoming a better actor, and how we can do this without resorting to gurus, methods, schools and the like, which, in the end, often hinder rather than help the would be actor. So, having understood that all we really need to do in acting, is split the focus, we can ask ourselves, how can I practice that? Well the answer is the place to practice this is in real life. Day to day life. Nuts and bolts life. We can practice having a split focus, within our normal world. We don’t have to be in an acting class, or be on stage, to do it. So let’s look at life.

1. You pay a bill

2. You meet friends.

3. You go to church.

4. You catch a bus.

5. You do a night class.

Here is ‘real life’ in all its majestic wonderfulness! Now. How can we split the focus in theses areas. In broad terms we can intend to be more aware of the inner and the outer in all these activities. There’s subjective, you doing it. And the objective. the place and the people you do it with/in. We find 2 ways to look at same thing.

Taken singly.

1. (The bill.) Past financial history. Present attitude. Your need to pay, and your attitude to paying.

2. (Friends.) Your perception of yourself. Their perception of you.

3. (Church.) Atmosphere inside church. Atmosphere outside church.

4. (Bus.) Focus on destination or journey.

5. (Night class.) Learning and socialising. How do they feel different.

So a lot of it boils down to inner and outer. What is the inner way to look at tieing your shoelace. And what is the outer way? It is 2 ways of seeing the same thing. Now this is the right guidance for it will yield a result, in that you will become more versed in shifting the focus. You will! However, your rational mind may well reject this saying “But I can’t do that! I can’t hold 2 contradictory positions at once.”

It may, your rational mind, even fight back against this threatening activity,
by making you go to sleep. Feel angry and confused.
Making you lose your pen. Notebook. Or trip over the cat.

Nevertheless. This is the right guidance. To act you do need a split focus, and this exercise in awareness will foster it.

Now, we live in an extremely sophisticated civilisation. Something commented on by Shakespeare in King Lear when Lear says:

“For thou are the thing itself, a bare forked animal.”

Simple attitudes to things and simple solutions are frowned upon and laughed at. And this is a shame for in doing this, man cheats himself out of the sublime joy inherent in this child-like truth of simplicity. Obviousness. Un-pretentiousness. A child knows what acting is. A child needs no theory. Acting is just pretending. And what great fun it is! (“Just pretending darling! Are you crazy? Have you seen my Lear???”)