IMPRO & THE QUANTUM LEAP

The hard thing to see is the lack of freedom contained within things. When we live in such an abundant world, where instead of starving, or being harassed by some brutal regime, we can fool around doing impro, or write and read poetry to an appreciative audience, or post our music on Myspace, isn’t that enough?? Taken at face value it would appear to be. If, if, it wasn’t also a truth of our world that no matter what supposed freedom we do have, unhappiness is still very common. Almost normal. Our freedoms do not make us free to enjoy our world, it seems. So ultimately, the ‘sensitive’ person, the ‘enquiring’ person, is forced to ask, is our concept of what freedom is, really correct? Is it helping us?

Well this is a very big question; so let’s narrow it down to the impro world for simplicity’s sake. To do this we will look at an obvious and common example, a thing we are often asked to do in impro, which is to play the stock character, the TV PRESENTER!!!!!!!

So what kind of TV PRESENTER you play, is up to you. Now. Let’s say you have done your homework and you’ve noticed how false and facile the average TV PRESENTER is, so you mimic that. All well and good. Everybody happy. What’s the problem? Well…..there is no problem except, EXCEPT, that if you could stand back from the impro world and see it more objectively, you’d realise that everyone does the TV PRESENTER in this way. It’s invariable. Because this is after all true! This is how they are, and who can disagree? So. Doing it this way is in a sense, ‘getting it right.’ And isn’t that the name of the game? GETTING IT RIGHT!!!

Or is it?


We are in the impro world, THE IMPRO WORLD, remember? Hear strict definitions of right and wrong no longer exist. For this is, how can you say, is a more fluid space. This is ‘story world’, OR ‘imagination land’, (as matt and Trey put it), where one moment murder may be wrong, but then the in next moment, murder may be right! Not that murder can ever be right in our normal world, but this is THE IMPRO WORLD!!!! It is a fantasy! Projected imagination! It made up mother!!!!!!!! So we could say, just to get it right, isn’t really enough. It’s also true, that for freedom to exist there must be choice. Variety. The freedom to choose between, is a major component of freedom. But in the example we have given, there is no variety. No choice not if everyone does the TV PRESENTER exactly alike, None whatsoever.


What this essentially shows us is that we are all stuck in the same track, and this is somehow a product of our rigid insistence on one thing being ‘true’ or ‘right’, and another being ‘false’ or ‘wrong’. And where does that ultimately spring from? Answer is that it is a product of putting a lot of faith, in thinking. Rational analytical judgemental processes. We think,

‘this is right and this is wrong’.

We don’t feel it. If we felt it we’d realise that this is right the way it feels now, and this is now wrong, the way it feels now! Crazy but true!


So let’s stop and (irony) think. Is it really necessary to play the TV PRESENTER in the way we have?????? Could we not drop that? Play the TV PRESENTER as say,

1. A Tramp!

2. An Ostrich!

3. A Forgetful Professor Type.

4. An Old Testament Prophet.

5. A Judge.

6. A famous Novelist.

7. A tyrannical Dictator.

8. An old Etonian.

9. A fool.

11. A Magician.

12. A piece of furniture.

13. A… and so on.

Would this really be so impossible????? Someone or something is forcing our TV PRESENTER interpretation choice to go down this one track. Something which was in place before we even began to improvise. Something causes this emphasis we have in terms of the faith we have in the mind’s judgements. In mind as the sole arbitrator of things.

The answer is of course, social conditioning.


SOCIAL CONDITIONING

excerpt from 'The House In Dormer Forest' by Mary Webb

Which is what? It’s really just all the false assumptions of the group mind added together since time immemorial. And that is quite a big thing, and consequently it’s no wonder we find it hard to get any objectivity on this whole issue. Nevertheless. This is the case. This is what is forcing all our TV PRESENTERS into the same damn box! And for that matter, what is forcing our entire existence into the same damn box!

For as I said before, there is no freedom in this. And why do we need freedom? Well, in impro terms we need freedom so we do not end up boring ourselves with the predictability of what we do in impro, thus eventually making us throw in the impro towel in disgust! Herummph!


Now there may appear to be a contradiction here, for the attentive reader, for I have stated in an earlier post, that impro is always the same stupid thing it was, when you first began, which may appear to conflict with the idea of avoiding predictability. What we need to see here is that we must now discriminate between two things. The first is the medium we express in. The second is the type of expression occurring in that medium. So as I’ve stated, the impro medium can never become more sophisticated. However we can change and vary what we express within that medium. So you can now see, there is indeed, no contradiction. THE TV PRESENTER!!!!!!!

Taking impro now as a microcosm of the macrocosm, we can see the same trend of lack of freedom causing predictability and therefore feelings of hopelessness in life itself! leading to the much more dire consequences of wasted lives, and lost hopes, and the like; and I say this to show that working with an impro discipline has much greater ramifications, that would at first appear.

Finally, you may perhaps feel very strongly that everyone must play the TV PRESENTER in that exact same way because this is, after all, right! And that is what people expect, so that therefore that is the intelligent option, and the way to succeed and be successful, and a great improviser. All I can say here is that we can take what we feel at face value, or we can at least try to look below it, as it were.

THINK!

Obviously social conditioning does work because it IS a very strong feeling and it has, the consensus! To go beyond it requires something new. Something unknown. Some kind of quantum impro leap! So can you do that? Can you be one of the few to make that quantum impro leap?

Well. If you have found your way to reading this post. Maybe you should consider it.