toltec spaceman

The toltec spaceman represents a new cosmogony.It's the same as Lord of the Rings and all these works that create a new universe, which in some way is the same as ours, and yet is at the same time, a significant departure from ours. The map of middle earth is the map of the human soul, as it realates cosmogonically to the destiny of the individual and of man. This may seem too mystical, poetic, abstract; and yet it is really the ony way to talk about this, issue of issues. Mankind's destiny. Mankind' s fate, which of course has significantly altered since the cry of the eagle in June 1995. For further clarification of this see the introduction to Cry of the Eagle, Vol 2 of the Toltec Teachings themselves.

SEED BED

SEED BED

I lay me down on a seed bed

To grow myself some sleep,

I put down roots

In sleep’s deep soil,

where all good things are stored.

And so I slept a sleep profound

which nurtured my deep soul,

for all Grace lives in a realm beyond

and we just ciphers here.

But here is there, and there is here,

there is no strict remove,

we inhabit the uninhabitable,

as above, so below.

Everyday we sow seeds of sleep in our garden,

and each seed blooms in a little snore,

to sing its song to a sleeping ear

and render all things clear.

For we are all God’s gardeners,

and our garden eternity is;

for what we grow will stay with us

as each cycle bears its fruit.

So pray as you lay on your seed bed

pray to be more asleep

so those snoring seeds of sleepiness

can grow you more awake.

worm fate falling apart with a misltetoe phobia!

WORM FATE.

Saw a worm on the pavement, crawling? or sliding? his way towards the grass. i knew he/she/it would die if it didn't get there. i could always pick it up and place it there.  i thought about it. then i decided not to. who am i to interfere with someone else's destiny? much better i thought, to believe the worm would make it. which i did as i walked off. i believed. I'm sure he did.

MISLETOE. 

Why did the druids and others revere it so much????? why is it used as a cure for cancer??? what is the mystery here? why do we kiss under it???? i think the answer here, if indeed there can be an answer, is in the way the plant grows.

Mistletoe plants grow on a wide range of host trees, and commonly reduce their growth but can kill them with heavy infestation. Viscum album can parasitise more than 200 tree and shrub species. All mistletoes are hemi-parasites, bearing evergreen leaves that do some photosynthesis, and using the host mainly for water and mineral nutrients. Mistletoe first sprouts from bird feces^{[citation needed]} on the trunk of the tree and in its early stages of life it takes nutrients from this source.^{[citation needed]} Species more or less completely parasitic include the leafless quintral, Tristerix aphyllus, which lives deep inside the sugar-transporting tissue of a spiny cactus, appearing only to show its tubular red flowers,^[6] and the genus Arceuthobium (dwarf mistletoe; Santalaceae) which has reduced photosynthesis; as an adult, it manufactures only a small proportion of the sugars it needs from its own photosythesis but as a seedling it actively photosynthesizes until a connection to the host is established.

we can see that MISTLETOE is unique in not wanting to be independent. it uses a host. it does not connect to the ground. apart from this being in mirror for cancer, in that cancer is something that develops independently of the needs of the host, it is also a mirror for the well known spiritual cliche, where we talk of being of the world, but not in the world. which is to say, i am it, but i don't identify with it. a well known strategy for dealing with illness itself. this is what MISTLETOE seems to symbolise or mirror. could this account for its veneration and use medicnally and in a folk sense. i wonder?? also the fact that it is propagated by bird shit. it seems to value our most undervalued thing. i.e. shit. is this wisdom? is MISLETOE just a very wise plant?????

PHOBIAS.

a fear that does not seem in proportion to its cause. or is justified by its cause. my friend, God bless her, had a phobia about going into department stores. we have to ask, what actual harm could come to her? even had she spent all her money, her husband has a good job. she cannot starve.

i think a phobia represents an area in which we have a faulty perception of what is taking place. it is a communication from our dark denied side, to our light accepted side, about where we should look for in terms of a way to heal ourselves. help ourselves. find which area is the right area to work in,in this regard. or as it is put in the TOLTEC TEACHINGS about knowing which battle to fight.

 in this way phobias are extremely useful, in that if we try and treat them positively, and not just try to get rid of them, they could lead us to very fruitful places indeed.

For a more comprehensive look at this area see Thomas Dethelsen's famous work.

 

KAPUTT!!

Pema Chodron in her marvellous book, when things go kaputt!!! talks about BODICHITTA.
now this is one of those very technical buddhist things. yawn.  this kind of terminolgy always puts me off.
however, she is actually talking about what is referred to in the TOLTEC TEACHINGS

http://www.toltec-foundation.org/
http://www.toltec-foundation.org/

as 'the quietness of life'. a thing a warrior needs to cultivate, on his definitive journey. what she says about this is indeed very wise and very true, and i reccomend her book to everyone with a serious interest in this
subject area.

THE PRESENCE OF SPIRIT

What is the spirit? The spirit is nothing. Or no-thing. This is its simplest definition. Now. How do we spot the presence of nothing, or no-thing in our lives?

Yes. A very tricky proposition (snoop dog?), and yet, the spirit pervades both life manifest and life unmanifest, and so it definitely is there around us. Not only that, but it is there to help and guide us, if possible. If we are awake enough to sense in some way its presence. In some way. But how? How can we sense the presence of nothing or no-thing? Well. We can’t. All we do is notice its secondary effects, as it were. Perhaps not even secondary. Effects many times removed from their original cause or stimulus. In other words, I suppose, we must look out the corner of our eye. Or as Jesus said, not let our right hand know what our left hand is doing. In more recognisable terms, I can point to a very obvious example and relate that to my own life.

MUSIC!

Music in many ways is the Spirit. I think we’ve all at some time heard a certain piece of music somewhere, and been ‘entranced’! inspired. Carried away, as it were.  It really doesn’t matter if it’s pop, classical, or Jamaican bongo music. The music shows us the potential for something new. A new way to feel. A new way to be. And this is the spirit talking to us. Why? Well. Music is very close to nothing. It’s really just vibrations and air moving. Nothing concrete. And why does music have the effect it does? Nobody knows. No scientific formula can explain it. We can say it mirrors nature in using patterns, but that’s about all. But being close to nothing, it can channel the spirit very well.

In my own case of meeting the Spirit, it was hearing a friend at secondary school play a Beatles song on the piano, ‘Martha my dear’, and feeling absolutely entranced and thinking, I want to do that! Play the piano! This led me to get to know this friend a lot better, learning music with him, and writing songs with him, and eventually it was this friend who first introduced me to the work of Carlos Castaneda! Now. Considering that it was when I read Castaneda in my early thirties, for the second time, and it was then that I had a ‘spiritual awakening’, you can see how my meeting with the Spirit , in the first instance, was not as straight forward as it appeared, or did not appear, at that time in my life. In fact of course, I had no idea at all that I had met the Spirit. I thought it was all about music and learning the piano! For the Spirit can’t talk directly to us. It has to be devious. And a lot of people find this deviousness so repellent, that they never entertain the possibility of the concept of meeting the Spirit, to exist at all in their lives. Sadly. But this ‘trickery’ is necessary. Absolutely.

But what did happen when I heard ‘Martha my dear’ on the school upright?????

What really happened???

Kieth Johnstone in his seminal work IMPRO, talks about interrupting routines.

I’m on about theatre, or comedy improvisation here.

He recognised that performers get stuck in one track and need to be jolted out of it. If they start on one thing, like digging holes, they just dig holes endlessly, until someone recognises, it is a routine, and says, “Hey! Lets plant a tree!!!!!!”

Now the same thing happened to me when I met the Spirit. My routine was to go around thinking constantly, magic doesn’t exist; magic doesn’t exist. Etc. but then I heard the music, and had my ‘realisation’, that jolted me out of my routine. I thought, “ Hey!! Magic does exist!!! He’s playing it!!!!!”

Let’s stop and think. We know that John the Baptist used to baptise people. Why? Why stick their head under water? What for? It’s a nonsensical act really.

Just getting someone soaking wet? Or is it? Was he actually trying to break their routine? Was John the Baptist really Keith Johnstone??? And of course, we know what happened when Jesus came along, and the Spirit descended from heaven, in the shape of a dove! The Spirit.

Let’s stop and think again. With Castaneda his first meeting with Don Juan is at the core of his work. (If you don’t know this story please look it up.) He mentions this meeting in nearly every book. Even his last one! So that what happens is, it becomes this huge myth. The momentous meeting where something transcendental and awesome took place! In ‘reality’ of course Castaneda didn’t meet Don Juan, at the bus depot, he met the Spirit. He was entranced by a look! A look which made him realise that  his routine, his academic bluster, which he used on everyone regardless, was actually nonsense! This is what that look told him! It jolted him out of his routine, just as Martha jolted me out of mine. Not that I’m comparing myself to him. 

But how can I reduce everything to impro. Which it so obviously isn’t. We’re talking about the Godfather of the new age movement. Dr Carlos Castaneda, a man whom I am very grateful too, and respect and admire. How? Well, as I said at the outset, that the spirit is nothing or no-thing. It is an absence. A void which appears and allows something new to fill it. And this points us to what normally fills this gap. And that would be THE SCRIPT,  or THE SCORE, or THE PLAN, or whatever. The ‘thing’ behind what we do, that makes sure it always stays within certain parameters. And we all know those parameters. Let’s be honest!

So in the final analysis, what have I said? I have said the Spirit is present in music. And that is saying nothing. Or no-thing. We all know that. And that is the Spirit. It is nothing.

STANDING ROOM ONLY

i THINK OF HELL,

Where the grass is glass

and would probably cut your feet

if you had no shoes.

(Are we naked in hell? Probably.)

Or if you had, (shoes) the grass,

would crunch and splinter

under your feet

like hell’s own electric frost!

And beds of iron they’d have.

On which to toss. (HA,HA.)

And nothing to drink

but dust

(shaken but not stirred).

And nowhere to sit down.

Just standing room.

And nothing to do.

And they’d give you iron gloves

that will not bend

to hold a pen

or pick up something

or do anything

so all you can do

is think, in hell.

And there is food.

But always too much.

All boiled to mush.

A great heap

on your plate

badly presented

nill grace.

And the air is close

for the wind never blows

so nothing moves

in hell.

Nothing, at all.

And you are in it.

Standing there.

Thinking,

Of all you took for granted,

When alive...

In Heaven.

ANGRY POEM

This is not a tree.

This is not a tree.

This is NOT a tree!

This is a wood process.

A song in your headboard.

A hard-boiled film noir.

A tale told by and idiot.

The consequences of dialectics on a water vole.

Ignorance.

The Brandenburg Concertos.

A fool in love.

All the years of mass superstition, hysteria, right-thinking, all boiled up in a big vat into a kind of grey sludge you can use to paste over last years snows.

THIS IS NOT A TREE!!!!!

HITLER & JESUS

One negative image always attached to anger is that of Hitler having a tantrum. we see this newsreel footage and we automatically think bad! wrong! infantile! even, EVIL! and this means we always forget that it was thru anger that Hilter united Germany, at a time when Genrmany desparately needed uniting. They were in a deep crisis and someting had to be done. Of course we all know the negative side of this 'solution' to the problem, which i no way for a second condone, obviously. I'm just saying that even here there is a postive side to anger.

making a bigger leap, it's also easy to forget that Jesus got angry. in the temple with the money changers. 
so the next time you have a tantrum remember, Jesus did this too, so it can't be all bad. Having said this it also true that  this is to my knowledge, only time Jesus got angry, and I think he must have thoought in the temple, just this once I will act out my anger, to show people that. Well that thought occured to me. That's all.

PYTHON ANGER

why can't we show are anger in this world? why do we have to keep on repressing it in the name civilisation? it's like the architect's sketch by python. the architect desings an abbatior instead of a block of flats, like topmast fucking point!, and then gets angry when they turn it down. not just angry, but brilliantly, hair-raisingly, john cleese genius angry! its as if the only way we can acknowledge our anger is to be crazy. go bonkers. design an abbatior instead of flats. speak in french to a chinese man. go to the corner shop and crap on the counter. be in the metal ward on heavy medication.  but this is dumb! worse than that it's human suffering! if anyone reads this and agrees or disagrees let me know.

IMPROVISATION & YOUR ABILITY TO RELATE TO OTHERS

Brene Brown who had a massive hit on Ted on YouTube with over 4 million hits!!! talking about her ‘breakdown’ or ‘spiritual awakening’, depending on how you look at it, said in a later Ted broadcast, that she realised that to sum it all up, she would say that it all boils down to one word. Connection.

 CONNECTION

In other words that for her, the primary truth in life we need to get our heads around is the way that we relate, RELATE, to others. & with 4 thousand hits there may be some truth in this. 

But how could this ‘relate’ to improvisation? Well, what we must do is use the Toltec technique of ‘shifting the focus’ on improvisation, to try and see improvisation differently; not just as a way to become ‘famous’ by being a better performer, actor, by being funnier and cooler etc. but as a tool to help us work with our own self-awareness, particularly in that area of relating to others. For ‘Impro’, if it is to work, is all about relating to the other performers, and not about you alone, YOU ALONE, as a brilliant actor!!! And not even about being a ‘good’ actor. In fact Impro is about ‘being’ and not acting, when it’s working.  In other words it is a micrcosm of the macrocosm.  The way we relate to the group of performers we are working with relates directly to the way we relate to the world, in society, and to those around us.

To work with our own self-awareness though, we must find ways of showing to ourselves our own failings and short-comings, which in truth, for the average person, are not really self evident. For example, are we stubborn? When we are told that in every Impro scene we must, until at least we are much much much more experienced improvisers, as a basic guideline to begin with say ‘yes’ to every offer that is made to us. Do we then stubbornly resist by finding a way to say no????? Or, are we for example ‘in denial’. If someone rushes in saying the house is burning down do we say,  “actually this is a computer generated flame effect, to put off would be burglars!”  Very clever but in fact a denial.  Or, do we lack trust? If someone says “come with me into this dark basement”, do we say, “well, perhaps not today. Maybe some other time.”  Do we have issues about certain environments or being in certain situations??? Does this bring up memories or emotions that prevent us from playing the scene and thus prevent us from relating to others??? Do we have issues about playing sexual scenes, love scenes, scenes involving movement of some kind like dancing????? Do we have an issue listening to others? Do we tend to talk over people? Do we have issues with language??? Do we place too much importance on it?? Do we think Impro is about being good with language???

All in all, Impro is a ‘safe’ laboratory to explore these things and learn about ourselves, if we can ‘shift the focus’. Now, the usual response to this will be that it is all too simple. Surely something so momentous cannot be so simple?? Surely Shirley???? Well the simple truth here is that we live in a world that specialises in complicating things. Where complexity is valued for its own sake. Where people say, “I can’t do that, I’m too complicated.”  Where the simple is devalued and frowned upon. Where to succeed you must be sophisticated and complex. Look at corporate finance. But, as it says in the Toltec Teachings, that a warrior aims for simplicity, as it cuts out all unnecessary thoughts and feelings. In other words it helps to help us ‘see’ what is really taking place in our lives. It is the  first stepping stone towards ‘clarity’. But, obviously, it is a bit of a ‘zen’ thing, knowing the importance of simplicity. You cannot explain it to people. They have to arrive there for themselves.

It is also true that there is a big ‘Taboo’ on thinking differently about culturally established things. It feels wrong. It feels dirty, to think of Impro in this way. Strange as that must sound. It is a kind of blasphemy. Our brains, ours souls, our hearts just won’t go there. We fear that unknown quantity inherent in it. Fear. A warrior’s first enemy.

If we do find this happening to ourselves we must ask ourselves, “ Am I being caught up in the ‘herd’ mentality? Am I really thinking for myself??? What is more important??? My image as a ‘cool’ improviser, or my self awareness which can help me to grow spiritually???????

In conclusion then, I will say that I can categorically state, as I know from my own experience, and not from a book I read, that we can get much better at relating. It can be done. And this was Brenee Brown’s big moment of   realisation. She suddenly ‘knew’. It can be done. It should be done. It is humanity’s way forward. If you accept this then after that all that remains is ‘how’????  What tools exist to aid us in this?? What if any???. Well. I am naming one. There are of course others. I shan’t go into those here. The alert student can probably guess a few. They do exist. Impro though is probably the easiest tool to get your hands on. The most available. And that is a marvellous thing!!! There is hope!!! And long as we can say, “YES! The house is burning down!!!”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCvmsMzlF7o

NIGHT TRAIN TO NOWHERE part one

You are on a train
travelling in the night.
Exhaustion grows in the corners
of your compartment
like a tiny desert of spider’s bones.
And you are on a train.
And the night has no end,
no beginning, no meaning.
It is just the black womb
in which you swim.

And you are on a train.

And opposite you sits an old man,

a middle-aged woman,

and a small child with a balloon in one hand and a toy train in the other.

And they are on a train too.

And the train goes forward

into the night.

A night in which children cry,

dogs howl,
and inconsolable insomniacs
twist and turn
on their bed on doubt and denial.
And you are on a train.
Deny it if you can.
And something is going to happen.
You feel that in your blood
with its red red beat.
Something is going to happen.
But nothing happens.
Nothing.
And out side the window
all is wild
all is waste.


NARR. The woman is conventionally dressed. She clutches her handbag. The child is a little girl. Pig tails. She has the balloon in one hand and the other a bright red toy train. Her face is grey. She has circles under her eyes. The old man is surrounded by a kind of fog. The woman fixes you in her gaze. It is as if she took out her eyes and handed them to you.

WOM. You know the old man smells. I think he may well have shat himself.

NARR. You don’t know how to respond. You cough and look away to the old man but he seems to shift in and out of focus. You blink. For a split second the old man changes in a big spider. All black and hairy. But that doesn’t make sense. You try to focus on his face. It seems familiar. In a thin reedy voice the old man says…

OLD MAN. I was in presses. 30 years in trouser presses. I ran the Dresden branch. 30 years. And now. Now. I can’t even remember what a press looks like.

WOM. (Contemptuous.) It looks like a press! You stupid old arsehole!! (Sniffing. To hero.) Maybe he’s shit himself. As well!

NARR. You feel sorry for the old man and perplexed by the attitude of the conventionally dressed woman who seems rather unconventional. The child begins to whimper.

WOM. Shut up!

NARR. The child carries on whimpering. A poem forms in your mind. Your mind which is a lot like a hospital waiting room.



Whimper whimper

Pimple pimp her

Playing the game

With a double dimple

Brighter dimmer

Damn her praise her

Wampum wanker

Whimple whimper

NARR. This is the poem your mother sang to you in the crib. The crib that rocked you to sleep on an ocean of bliss.

WOM. I used to enjoy masturbating. That is until my cunt dried up. Now it’s like the grand canyon. Just a dry hollow void. (Pause.) Are you a travelling salesman?

HERO. Yes I am.

WOM. In what?

HERO. In pharmaceuticals.

WOM. Pills?

HERO. Yes. (Pause.) In my case I have cures for all ailments.

WOM. (Sceptical.) Cures? Can you cure him? From being a pest?

HERO. Well…I….

WOM. Give him something to get rid of him?

HERO. I don’t think that would be ethical.

WOM. (Angry. Outraged.) Ethical? Ethical? Is ethnic cleansing ethical? (Pause.) Is the Catholic Church, ethical? (Pause.) Is the rhetoric of a cancerous bowel, ethical? And yet we all swim in the same sea. We all piss the same pee, as it were. (Disgust.) Ethical. And tomorrow, when the sun rises, this old shit will be radiating his molecular nonsense, all over the shop, and we, we, will have to put up with it!

OLD MAN. I was gassed in the trenches!

HERO. Yes. But what you are suggesting would be murder.

NARR. You wonder to yourself how the conversation ever came round to murder as the child whimpers quietly.

WOM. Not exactly murder. Let’s not over editorialise. More a common sense solution to an intolerable problem. What does it say in the Bible? “ Be that in ye that ye would for angels and devils something something in Judea, with a donkey.”

HERO. Are you sure it says that?

WOM. Quite sure.

NARR. Now there comes a quite resounding silence. The child has quietened down a bit. Only the rhythmic pounding of the train as it travels through the long dark night towards its inevitable destination. However this silence is not pure. It is infected with a murderous strain of guilt. Like a red virus. Guilt. Percolating through the silence and oppressing it with its heavy vibration.

OLD MAN. One day at the Dresden branch a man came in. A tall man. He wanted a press. (Correcting himself.) To press his trousers. We made him fill in an application. Turned out, he wasn’t affiliated! We took him in the back room. Read poetry to him. Stroked his temples. Next week, just around lunch time, he threw himself in the Danube. (Pause.) That’s a river.

WOM. See what I mean?????

NARR. You hear a noise and look up. In the corridor lots of people are milling past the door. They look excited. Some of them are drooling. The woman pulls down the window.

WOM. What is it?

NARR. A man who looks a lot like Franz Kafka stops. He pants.

MAN. There’s going to be some kind of a performance in the last carriage!

WOM. What kind of performance?

MAN. Something to do with the tabernacle and a yard of floss.

WOM. Floss?

MAN. Yes.

NARR. You wonder what kind of performance could involve floss and a Tabernacle.

WOM. (Dismissively.) It’s probably some kind of student rag.

OLD MAN. You won’t catch me in the last carriage. It’s like the Last Judgement or the last bus. I don’t like endings.

GIRL. Oh. I’d like to go! (Pause.) They might be torturing someone and I’d like to see that. Will you come with me?

NARR. Me? I…I… why me?

GIRL. Oh please.

NARR. Everyone is looking at you. A certain social pressure being exerted in your direction to do the right thing. Be a responsible member of society. Pull your weight. And yet deep inside you have misgivings. Grave misgivings. Which you really should express now saying, ‘No! I don’t wish to be involved with a heartless and self-interested little girl, who quite frankly, fills me with repulsion! Count me out!’ (Pause.) But you don’t. You remain silent. Silent as the grave. Then you stand and take the little girl’s hand. (Pause.) Above the carriage in the black night void hangs the moon which seems to leer down on the puny mortals below caught in it’s ever changing tides.

OLD MAN. Go on then. I’ll be dead soon anyway.

WOM. Yes. Run along now and have your fun.

 NARR. Out in the corridor the people are pressed together tightly edging forward. You feel in a strange way offended by having to crush amongst them. So many bodies. Human bodies. Pressed tightly together.

FAT W. Who did that!

NARR. Exclaims a fat rather plain woman.

FAT W. Someone touched me inappropriately. Who was it?

NARR. She turns round with difficulty and still edging forwards stroke backwards stares in the faces of the people behind her accusingly.

FAT W. Who?

The men avert their gaze and bite their lower lips.

FAT W. Who? I shan’t ask again?

NARR. No response. None whatsoever.

HERO. ‘Perhaps no one did. Perhaps it was an accident?’ you volunteer.

FAT W. Oh yes you’d like people to believe that wouldn’t you?

That I’m not a victim of male harassment. That my role as a woman and a mother doesn’t deserve, nay, demand respect! Yes. You’d love that wouldn’t you? I suppose, ideally, you’d throw me in the local duck pond and then burn me as a witch! Ideally? Wouldn’t you?!

NARR. You realise in a moment of profound understanding that the woman, is stupid. And it is pointless to reason with her. So you say,

HERO. ‘Yes. Yes. That is exactly what I would like as a superior male oppressor. To burn you as a witch!’

FAT W. So it was you who touched me!

HERO. I was being ironic!

FAT W. Here he is! The man who molested me! I demand justice!

NARR. Reluctantly the passengers take hold of you and pull you into an empty compartment.

HERO ‘This is ridiculous!’

NARR. They sit you down and stand over you.

P1. Why did you touch this woman inappropriately?

NARR. I didn’t.

FAT W. He admitted it!

NARR. I did not admit it!

P2. Confess your guilt now!

NARR. Said a Grunvaldesque man in a bobble hat.

P2. And we will let you off!

HERO. Let me off? But I’m not guilty! (Pause.)

NARR. Stalemate. The passengers hold a brief parley. After which one opens the carriage window and then the others pick you up, and bodily thrust your upper body out of the window! HERO. ‘Help! Stop it! Help!’

NARR. You can see the ground rushing past, illuminated by the moon and taste and smell the smoke and cinders from the great roaring beast of an engine, which labours so heroically to pull the long series of carriages.

P1. Confess!

P2. Out with it!

P1. Or we will let go.

P2. Be sure of that.

P1. We’ve done worse things.

P2. Yeah. Much worse.

NARR. You realise they do mean business. In the mechanical ant colony which they laughing call ‘consciousness’, this is the recognised procedure in such a situation. Ridiculous as it is. After a brief inner struggle you say…

HERO. Yes. I confess. It was me who touched her inappropriately.

NARR. It is as if a huge electric current has been suddenly switched off. You are pulled out and sat down. Everyone mills back into the corridor.

FAT W. Beast!

NARR. Says the fat woman and exits herself. You need a moment to recover. The little girl enters.

GIRL. What are you doing here? I thought we were going to see the performance? Come on.

NARR. She takes your hand and drags you out into the corridor. The throng has passed. You glance up at the moon as she drags you forward.

GIRL. I wonder if it will be extra sickening. The performance I mean. I like it when it’s extra sickening. I saw one on a school trip. Ms Hargreaves took us. She’s the soppy art teacher. She goes on and on about Van Gough’s soul. It’s like. You know. Duh. I mean. Duh. What’s Van Gough’s soul got to do with anything?

NARR. You glance up at the moon again. Framed in a window.

GIRL. But what would be really like cool would be if it involved scorpions and knives and rubber tubing! My friend Cheryl, her Dad, he had like miles and miles of rubber tubing, in his garage.

NARR. What was it for?

GIRL. She didn’t say.

NARR. You glance up to look at the moon again, but this time it’s obscured by clouds. The other passengers are crowded into the guard’s Van. It seems impossible to get so many people in there. They are evidently watching something judging by their expressions. You strain your neck to see what is taking place but your view is obstructed by 3 very tall people in front of you. You can hear though. Sawing noise. Gasps. The sound of snapping twigs. Animal yelps. You immediately think it must be some kind of sex show. The little girl’s beside herself.

GIRL. Lift me up! I want to see! Now! Now!

NARR. You obligingly lift the little girl with pig tails onto your shoulders and stand there patiently. You feel bored. The little girl becomes silent. Quite absorbed in the performance. You struggle to hear what the performers are saying.

PERFS. & he takes the … … ing. & places it so. (Dog bark.) Oh mighty … … itzer! (Stick snap.) Hear our … … (Loud inhuman gasp!) ladies & Gentlemen. The … … as in accordance with … (Cow’s moo.) of minute particles …. … (and as you can see, the insertion fits … … (Sawing of timber.) … …

NARR. The train plunders on through the night. A night full of dark corners where the dead literature piles up. Where grey liver wither in discontent and inertia. Where Moloch does his indefatigable two-step on your neat well-prepared grave. Standing next to you is a non descript middle-aged man puffing a Gauloises. He has spectacles and a funny shaped beard.

RUDOLF STASZ. Fascinating isn’t it?

HERO. What?

RUDOLF STASZ. These…performances.

HERO. (Bored.) Yes.

RUDOLF STASZ. You want to look?

HERO. Oh yes.

NARR. He hands you a strange periscope type contraption. Shows you how to work it. You put down the little girl who complains loudly and put it to you eye. At the back end of the van two people sit motionless at a table starring into each other’s eyes. One is wearing a fur coat. The other a dinner jacket. On the table between them is a large melon. It doesn’t make any sense to you. You thank him and hand it back.

HERO. But what’s it all about?

NARR. The little girl tugs your sleeve and you pick her back up again.

MR T. Well. What we are witnessing is a post-modern folk ritual. Something you will only ever see in the more obscure and backward parts of Europe. You should read the paper I wrote for the anthropological times last June.

NARR. You’re amazed.

HERO. You’re not Rudolf Stasz are you?

RUD. The very same.

HERO. Well I never!!!! I read your paper with great interest. But I had no idea the practice was still current?

RUD. Myself neither. Until a colleague of mine at the Polytechnic tipped me off as the possibility that it might be happening on this very night train to nowhere and so here I am.

HERO. Well. It’s only pure fortuitous chance which brings me here.

RUD. Ah. A stupid mechanical coincidence?

HERO. Yes.

NARR. You say. Not sure if you entirely agree with him. He seems to intuit your disagreement and carries on in a rather supercilious manner.

RUD. I daresay you’re one of these new age synchronicity johnnies, extolling the hidden agenda and implicate order behind the mechanistic and predictable façade of our strange and beautiful universe, but as far as I am concerned, this is the biggest form of mass insanity we, homo ‘perfectus’, have yet to come up with. I mean. The I-Ching was copied from the back of a tortoise! How scientific is that?! And the Mayan calendar went backwards!!! No. What we need are facts. Cold hard facts. And if people can’t deal with that, well, Hitler had a few good ideas in that connection. First discrimination. Then segregation. Then…annihilation! Extermination! I mean, what are they but vile loathsome vermin fit, only to be crushed mercilessly under the princely jackboot of progress. Science. Enlightenment!

NARR. (Ironic.) Fantastic. (Normal.) Can this really be the same intelligent educated man who wrote such an excellent monograph full of insight and academic excellence? You think. Can it? Impossible?

HERO. Surely you are joking?

RUD. No. I am perfectly serious. Extremely serious. It’s the only logical answer.

HERO. Well. In that case then…

NARR. You say. Full of moral hauteur and high grandiose indignation…

HERO. We shall have to part company. I cannot be party to bigotry and white supremacy! I. ‘I’. Have …errr ….

NARR. You struggle for the right word or words…

HERO. Standards!

RUD. Of course you do.

NARR. He stares silently at you, his face taking on an evil aspect in the half-light.

RUD. Standards.

HERO. (Uneasy.) Standards.

NARR. You walk back to your compartment feeling a trifle lonely and unsettled. What is this madness that passes for life? Why is no one aware that it is simply that? Madness? It’s like a crazy dream. You think.

GIRL. What is?

NARR. She has somehow read your thoughts.

HERO. Life.

GIRL. (Considering.) Yes. But it’s more like a nightmare than a dream. One full of pain and gory but signifying nothing.

HERO. And where did you learn that from?

GIRL. Oh. Like DUH. I didn’t learned it! I made it up. It’s like too boring to have to learned stuff. I always make it up. Puke.

NARR. When you get back to your compartment the old man is bowed down on the floor in front of the conventional woman who is looking away a disdainful expression on her face. The old man is muttering to himself.

OLD MAN. Where all rivers run. Where all waters flow. In the ageless age, where naught comes not, and all is ripe. Spurn me Oh Goddess mine! Reject me! Show me thy savage quim! And barren womb oh Goddess…

NARR. He stops sensing your prescence. You feel perplexed. The little girl jumps on the old man’s back and begins riding him. The old man groans.

GIRL. Giddy up! Giddy up! Fatal gee-gee!

HERO. What is the old man doing?

WOM. Does it matter?

HERO. Yes! Of course it matters! How could it not matter?

NARR. Her attitude infuriates you.

HERO. He is humiliating himself!

NARR. You drag the little girl off.

GIRL. Oh! Like I was enjoying that!

HERO. I don’t care!

NARR. The little girl sits rather sulkily.

GIRL. Like you shouldn’t have done that. My Dad is … My Dad…

HERO. I’m not interested !!!

GIRL. He is though. He’ll do for you.

NARR. She makes an evil face. You ignore her. The conventionally dressed woman stands.

WOM. I think I shall go to the buffet car. I am in need of a beverage.

HERO. You are going nowhere. I demand an explanation!

NARR. You are surprised at your own vehemence. It is as if some demon/spirit/elemental had possessed you.

WOM. Demand? Demand? I don’t think you are in any position to demand anything?

NARR. You begin to help the old man up.

OLD MAN. Thank you. Thank you. I’m old. I was in presses. Shirts. Trousers. Overalls. We did good business. (Thinks.) Before the purge.

HERO. Perhaps demand is a little strong.

NARR. You relent.

HERO. I should appreciate, that’s it, I should appreciate an explanation, we’re on forthcoming.

WOM. Well, I’m sorry…

NARR. She says.

WOM. (Mocking.) Most terribly sorry, but there will be no explanations and you can eat shit!

NARR. And with that she exits the compartment, in search, presumably, of a beverage. You help the old man to sit. Adjust his coat which has come awry. At that precise moment a violent explosion rocks the carriage. The sound has a deep manacing ‘end of the world’ feel to it. You react completely instinctively hurling yourself to the floor and crouching there like some kind of feral animal. Your mind for once a complete blank. Total silence. Then a baby crying. A crow cawing. A dog barking. A buzzing noise that you struggle to place but can’t. then you realise. It is your mobile!

HERO. Hello?

FRIEND. Hi. It’s me. How are you?

HERO. Well actually I’ve just been blown up!

F. You never have?

HERO. I have. It’s the honest to God truth.

NARR. You fill your friend in and ring off. The old man is holding his head. The little girl is leaning out the space where the window glass used to be.

GIRL. Wow. That was like really cool. I wonder if there will be another one?

OLD MAN. It was like this in the war. The big war. Only then they’d send you a letter first informing you politely that you would be blowed up.

GIRL. Blown up.

NARR. Corrects the little girl punctiliously. A cold wind blows in through the window.

HERO. Better put our coats on.

NARR. Coats are pulled down off the rack and donned. You notice that strangely there is no glass on the compartment floor. Somehow the glass must have flown outwards. Then the train comes to a grinding shuddering halt. Great clouds of steam issuing from the engine which stands like some giant prehistoric beast in the moonlight. You can see that the train is in some kind of siding.

OLD MAN. Why have we stopped?

NARR. The little girl considers puckering her brows.

GIRL. To remove the dead and the mutilated, dump them in a ditch somewhere, so we can get moving again?

NARR. The old man sighs.

OLD mAN. I was on a train during the purge. That was when I was in the trouser pressing game. Have I told you that?

NARR. He breaks off distracted.

HERO. And did that train stop?

OLD MAN. No. There was no stopping in those days. Not during the purge.

NARR. You sit down next to him. suddenly you feel terrible tired and depressed. An old music hall song creeps into your mind like a tramp creeping secretly into a huge expensive and posh wedding reception.



O moon of fate

This is our curse

We branded sinners

Here below.



O Godless moon

We curse your ebb

These giddy shores

Are all we have.

The conventionally dressed woman is suddenly standing in the compartment doorway. She looks exasperated.

WOM. I’m exsasperated!

NARR. She says.

WOM. Do you realise they have shut the buffet car because of some silly explosion. Really the standard of service on Rainbow trains is quite appalling.

NARR. You are shocked and amazed. You cannot believe you ears.

WOM. I’m considering writing a stiff letter to that fellow who runs it. The one in those tasteless adverts. What’s his name? Richard B … Richard B…????

NARR. At last you erupt. From deep down in the lost depths of your karmic self erupts the molten magma of your bitter twisted soul.

HERO. You moronic cow! You pile of genteel shit! You right-thinking robot! Don’t you know a bomb has gone off? People are hurt! People are suffering, you carboard excuse for a human being! Get real!!! Fer Kristsakes!!! Wake up and smell the ozone boyzone shit storm!!!

NARR. You grab her and violently shake her.

HERO. Hello? Come in number 37 acacia avenue! Your time is up! You’ve had your middle class nasturtium growing earl grey tea drinking nazi medical fucking experiment approving chips!!! Now you will have to find that small withered grey golem like soul and yours and give it a kick start! Up it’s metaphorical ass. Kick start it back into life! Clean off all those fucking layers of prejudice, ignorance, complacent acceptance, arrogant self aggrandismnent and be fucking human for once you turd eating wordless mother of an offal’s spawn!!!!

NARR. The you lose it completely.

HERO. What?

NARR. You lose it completely.

HERO. Do you realise that is was you who caused the black fucking plague? The inquisition. The slave trade!!! YOU!!!

Extermination is too good for you! I hope you rot in an eternity of hell!!!

NARR. There is a deathly silence. You realise the ending was a bit weak. The conventional woman sits down adjusting her clothes. She clears her throat.

WOM. Of course there really is no excuse for service of this kind. Not when my father and his father all fought and died in a greasy germ infested foreign country to make the British Empire, and I use the word advisedly, what it is today. No excuse whatsoever.

GIRL. She like, does have a point.

OLD MAN. That’s what we died for. In droves. Like chloroformed cattle.

GIRL. Like you know the trains are like…you know, really rubbish. We all know that.

OLD MAN. I don’t like trains. They remind me of the trouser press shop. All dark, and full of trousers.

Gaps & LINKS

gapsandlinksgapsandlinksgapsandlinksgapsandlinksgapsandlinksgapsandlin

“Yes! Take your car! That’s what it’s for!

Put your hat on and get out of here!”

Her frustration and discontent,
bubbling up like poison gas.

Later at her creative writing class
she made detailed notes
on the techniques involved in plot construction.
The fourth act return.
Introduction of the heroic subtext.
The magical object in folktale terms.

DAMN!

Her pencil broke.

She went out onto the cold balcony
for an illegal smoke. No matches.

DAMN!

Back in class,
in the austere Victorian schoolroom,
the teacher began praising Doug for his grasp of fifth act denouement procedures.

“Oh for Christ-sakes!!!”

Disapproving eyes probed her depths.

“Well I mean. Isn’t this taking automatic positive-ness
just a little too far? We all know Doug couldn’t plot
his way out of an episode of Watch With Mother.?!"

“What?! It’s true isn’t it!?”

Doug. Bowed his head. And actually burst into tears.

“I don’t believe it.”

Quiet condemnation welled around her.

DAMN!

The Administration office wanted to see her.A prematurely gray spinster type was waving her enrollment form. She then explained sweetly and patientlythat the forms had a printing error on page 23 and needed to be re-done.“What?! All of it?! Why not just tippex out the offending bit?”The woman looked gravely offended. If you had suggested having sex with her recently deceased Grandmother, she could not have looked more offended.“Tippex is messy and not entirely accurate. No.I think we will stick with the original plan.”

A sublime noise was issuing from a room at the end of the corridor. She went to look.She was drawn. It was a group of men, with funny beards playing old fashioned instruments.Walking away she was enveloped in sadness.

A tramp buttonholed her on her way to the trainwith a long pathetic story. “ And I suppose youthink you’re the only one in this f***ing worldwith any problems?” Without changing his expression the tramp turned and walked away.

The guard announced that the train would be terminating. Everyone got off. Another train pulledin opposite. Everyone got on. Then the guard announced that this train would be terminating.Everyone got off. The digital info board changed. Everyone got back on the first train. The doors closed.It was about to move off. Then the guard receiveda call on his handset. Moments later he announced that the train would be going back to Fulham.Everyone got off. As they were doing this a train they could have caught on the opposite platform pulled out.Everyone stood silently on the platform.



“Do you think tippex is not entirely accurate?” Her
partner considered. “Yes,” he said.

They sat after dinner reading their novels. Somewhere
in the block she could hear a child crying.

DAMN


GAPS & LINKS

GOING DEEP

scratched on the surface of a frozen pond
at winter’s zero hour
the Egyptian Book of Unsaid!

In rhyming runes that run in ribbons down a road
that leads below
the newscaster’s flat informative face.
“Good evening. This is the six-0-clock disaster!
Read to you by a speaking face.”
Below the Times Crossword puzzle,
six across, ‘intuit Morphic Aunty today’!!!!
Below even those magical words your Mother said
as she tucked you in at night
in your magic bed.
“Sail away my dear, in your little boat,
on Holy childhood’s sea, my love, my dear.”
A road that leads below, even that!!!!!
To a soft world of cabbage smells
& velvet brains thinking velvet thoughts
& soft brown sewers like your alimentary canal
& soft brown trouser falling down clowns
blowing soft saxophones
& soft politicians saying soft things like “Trust me!”
& soft policemen with floppy truncheons arresting
penguins for being too penguiny!
& all that soft love you felt for Mandy Sherwin & Janet Dibble,
& Lesley Harpic in ‘3B’
& soft trains shunted into soft sidings at the midnight hour when
no one is looking & nothing is happening for there are
no soft trains running on soft rails below the surface of
no-thing in the not-night of old/new. Or are there?
For suddenly I know!
There will come a thaw!
Of this we can be sure,
Mrs Moore!!!!!!
Even if the ice-caps grow
& the permafrost deepens
& cold hearted C.E.O.’s award themselves
even bigger bonuses!!!!!
There will come a thaw!!!
The ice will crack no matter how thick!
For we will open a soft door
& it will be no more, Mrs Moore!!!!!
NO MORE!!!!!!!!



THE KAFKA CHRONICLES (a tale of degredation, horror & love.)

You can’t be angry! They don’t want your passion! Your truth! All they want is your identification number.“4X73277XPYQ?” “Yes?” “Shut up!” And so you wander in alienation desert under a cold alienating moon. You bastards! I only wanted to be one of the crowd, happily dumbing-down to mindless piffle. Happily making war on people who do not share my ethnocentricity. (I.E. Little brown gits.) Happily screwing my Mother’s corpse in the name of…….Comedy!!! But it was not to be. And so I wander on the banks of bitterness river. And so I totter on the edge of twisted abyss. And so I limp through ‘You ***-king bastards!’ car-park. And there in the portakabin is the man himself! King Cockroach in person. KAFKA!

 Cah! It’s all your fault, I shout at him. You made alienation cool! You gave cockroaches a good image! You put the good into guilt! You flap eared twat! Kafka puts down The Sun and looks up. (Jewish accent.)“Listen already. You think I don’t know that? On my mother’s life. Why didn’t I stick to the Insurance? Oh, what a schlemiel I was. Curses on me!” And he takes out the Torah and starts beating himself over the head with it. Yes! That’s it! Go on! Make up for all those Morrisey fans! I feel exultant. Justified. Like an X-factor judge who has passed an I.Q. test! Kafka has now beaten himself down into a small pile of dust. It forms into a small whirlwind and spins across the car park. I run after trying to grab it so I can strangle it. Get rid of my rage, it but it slips through my fingers. Crap!!! Why can I never get hold of my bitterness and resentment and just kill it? Dead! But I can’t. It is too real. And so I wander through reality dream, (REALITY DREAM) convinced of the realness of stuff.





Like this six foot white rabbit standing next to me, surfing the net, wearing a pyramid shaped hat with the phrase, ‘WAKE UP’ stencilled on it! Or this group of FHM babes strutting in stilettos on a giant erect cock made of condensed diamonds! Or this Government Dream Warning Poster, which very cleverly says, WARNING! YOU ARE DREAMING! But I know I’m not because I have my pain and it’s…mine!!! I put a lot of effort into getting it. I can’t just give it up now! That’s insane! Give up my passion? My passion for collecting Victorian hat stands? Are you mad? They wouldn’t listen to me before. Well they will now. They will when they see I have the complete collection! Including the ‘RAJ’ hat stand. The ‘GENERAL CUSTER’ hat stand. And AND! The ‘WINSTON CHURCHILL’S ARSE!!!!’ hat stand. That one’s a complete rarity. To me years to track of of those down. But now I see a thick black line on the floor. On one side, printed along it are the words, REALITY DREAM. And on the other, REALITY NIGHTMARE! I step over. The atmosphere changes. It’s suddenly much more Art’s Council Lobby. I see a group of Goths starring in incomprehension at a cuddly toy. It makes no sense to them. It’s meaningless. A Night ….. No it isn’t! It’s not a nightmare!!! I think quickly. It’s cool to be a Goth. Dress in black. Listen to the Cure, and enjoy it! Inhabit a section of society revered for its complete pointlessness. That’s the meaning of cool! But then I see Hannibal Lecter, Michael Meyers and Freddy Kruger, dissecting Bambi with rusty knives. Aaaaaaarrrggghhhh! It’s not true! I am living the dream, NOT the nightmare!!! Simon Cowell is not the Anti-Christ!!! My bitterness need for self-aggrandisement and self-blindness, DO! make sense! They do!!! Ask Ben Elton! I mean, he wrote that Queen musical, ‘WE WILL FROCK YOU!’ Ask David Cameron, I mean, he was buggered at Eaton, by Boris Johnson! So it is justified. True. Right! My birthright, raison d’etre, and lumpy gravy, and I will not let go of it!!!! But then there before is…..THE HORROR PIT! (Blaring horror chord!) I peer over the edge. A vision of utter horror greets my eyes, so horrible as to be almost quite a bit horrible! I see, a group of happy people dancing freely in a circle, and around them a force field of pure love, ah. Outside of which, like in Forbidden Planet, is the twisted bitterness and denial monster, which tornadoes round and round in rage, crashing into the force field, but always bouncing off, for it is made of love. AAARRRGGHHH! This is the ultimate horror. To be like those dancing fools. Free at last from all your self-defeating and self-deluding shit! To dance and feel love. LOVE. AAARRGGHH! I wake up in cold sweat and of course instantly forget my nightmare, my dream, everything. All I remember is, YOU CAN’T BE ANGRY! THEY WON’T LET YOU! YOU BASTARDS!!!!!!!!!!!





IMPRO & THE COMPETITIVE MINDSET

AAARRRGGHH!!! impro comedy agenda! bad!

If you go to an impro show in say London, Paris or New York, you will see something that is extremely funny and slick, but is also, being now a standardised comedy product, rather predictable. The performers have internalised the comedic responses to well known things, and out they come at the push of a button. Scenes are never set in recognisable realities. You set a scene in a goldfish bowl. Or inside the mind of a Fascist Dictator. They are set in comedy hyper-reality. Nothing normal or boring is allowed to happen. Everything is spun, tweaked and generally perked, in the direction of hilarious comedy. Stories are mechanical, predictable, obvious. A lonely woman dreams alone in her room of romance and possibly sex. The floor opens and out jumps an available man! End of story! Which is of course funny, in a mad sort of way, but what relation does it have to the truth of life? In this story, it is as if we have life, with the feelings removed. Well, the negative boring feelings removed. Feelings like the frustrations inherent in actually being on the dating scene. Having to go and actually look for a partner. It not being, instantaneous.

So, funny and entertaining as it is, it is a dysfunctional model, which is presented to us. Like someone who ignores your sensitive feelings because they find them boring. An autistic sort of person like say ‘Sheldon’, in ‘The Big Bang Theory’, a very good comedy show on T.V. It is a bit like Frankenstein’s monster!

It has all the bits or mechanical parts, but lacks a soul. Frankenstein cannot function as a real human being. When in the movie he throws the child in the lake, a scene censored at first, it shows the monster’s complete lack of understanding of the human condition. What it means to be human. And yet. Yet. The monster is human, inasmuch as he is made out of the human. i.e., bits of people, and so he elicits our sympathy and compassion. He is like us, and yet he is not like us. Just to kill the monster seems somehow wrong. Unsatisfactory. And yet the monster is a monster. An aberration of nature. And this is not acceptable either.

Paradox.

Irony.

Dilemma.

The irreconcilable zen koan of existence. And we must start to solve it by accepting that the comedy impro Frankenstein we see on stage is our own creation. We made him. We can un-make him.

"Who cares if it rots your brain, saps your will and atrophies you soul?We all need a good laugh!"

(In the sense that we do need comedy, it is very important to laugh, but we must see there is no shortage of comedy, and it would be better if there was some balance in the impro world. A balance that meant there were shows that didn’t just go for the mindless comedy option. A product there is no shortage of! But allowed impro to examine some deeper more resonant themes.) And the place to start doing that is to look at our automatic competitiveness.



AUTOMATIC COMPETITIVENESS

(Impro Station Master.) "Look at this big comedy impro carrot of ego gratification & impro kudos! Yum!"

For some reason, everybody on stage wants to be the funniest person on stage, and it is unconscious. Automatic. It is as if all the performer’s were hypnotised by Derren Brown, before the show started, and now they simply have to compete. And it’s this which forces the performance down its predictable lines. Like a bunch of Darwinian cave men, all chasing the same Darwinian Carrot, and destroying it, and themselves, in the process!

And what is behind this. This hypnotism.? This automatic competitiveness? This Derren-like insanity? The answer is of course, FEAR. Fear of not being funny. Of not being good. Of not being useful to the group. Our peers. Whatever. Fear. FEAR!!!!!!!!

It’s a cut throat environment. Its dog eat dog. If you don’t get the knife in first, someone else will! Which is absurd really. This is after-all, the theatre world. A place exempt from the normal rules. Here we can be different. Experiment. Have fun. Relax. Let go of the conditioning and explore the unknown, for a change. We don’t of course. Our fear of not being funny or ‘good’ compels us to turn everything into a competitive exercise in funniness. The idea that performers are inherently good, is absent. Put another way, the idea that we have value, simply in ourselves, before we have done anything, simply because we exist, is absent. We can’t, as performers, have an inner value. Our only value is what we force an outer world to accept by virtue of being ‘good’ at something. It’s like our exam system. Businesses only perceive applicants as good, or worthy, if they have passed the right exam. They would never value an applicant, simply on his or her own merits, if it was a certain type of job. (But do not think I think failing exams is a good thing. Wrong.) Meaning in life doesn’t just exist, for itself, it must be created artificially; like…

Frankenstein’s monster!!!! Unless we find life, or performing, a painful struggle, we are not getting it right! (On the apprentice one guy got fired by Sir Alan because he was being nice to people! You can’t be successful at business and be nice to people as well! But why not?)

Now competitiveness is not bad it is good. It’s healthy. The thing is though there are two kinds. Unconscious and conscious.

Or automatic and considered. When we compete simply for the sake of competing, we act robotically, without feeling. When we are consciously competitive, we are empathetic. We act with feeling. The unconscious model is like the cave-man model, and it’s the one we are born with. The conscious model, the alternative model, of the ‘ideal realising person’, is our latent potential. We not born with that one up and running. We need to cultivate it. Nurture it. Work to make it a reality. All true learning is forced.

Now you may well say but why should I think about this? If I am happy with the impro I see, or with the impro I perform???

Well Horatio, you must understand that the thing that drew you towards impro in the first place. That very first impulse that made impro attractive to you, that thing still exists, and yet it has been over-ridden. Overlaid by another agenda. Yet it is still there. Under the surface. And this is fact that impro is essentially to do with freedom.


FREEDOM FREEDOM FREEDOM FREEDOM FREEDOM


This is what first attracts us to impro. Not the idea of being funny, but the idea of being free. Free from a script for example. Free to do and say anything we like without some director telling us it is wrong or inappropriate!!!! Free to be stupid. The freedom even to do something meaningful and uplifiting! Something self-developing. Something not necessarily 100% obvious and understandable to an audience!!!!!!!!!!!!

So this is what the comedy demon feeds off. Your freedom! And do you want that? Is freedom really so unimportant to you????

Is it?????????

The answer here is that you have simply never thought about it.

Or never really allowed yourself to think about it. You were hoping that these things were just inbuilt into the whole scene and you would just get them automatically like presents under your bed at Xmas! Doh!

Following on from this, you could say that impro such a minority thing that it can’t have such far reaching implications!

(Freedom? But it’s impro! It’s just fun!)

And in view of that we should look at something more conventional and common. In response I’d like to draw attention to 2 things one of which I already mentioned.

1. SPONTANIETY

Obviously the main thing impro hopes to recover is spontaneity.

How successful it is at doing that is another issue. Question is though, what is spontaneity? Why is it so important? To answer that we must look at no less than creation itself. According to the Big Bang theory, (A very funny T.V. comedy!)  the Cosmos suddenly jumped into being from nothing. When I say nothing I mean from a place or condition that didn’t even contain nothing. Something we really struggle to conceive of. Yet out of it sprang creation.

BINGO!

Now I am not a Cosmologist and my description is a bit weak, but nevertheless, we can all see that in this model, nothing actually made it happen. There was no preceding cause that instigated the coming into being of creation itself. It just happened! BINGO! Which means of course, life the universe and everything, WAS SPONTANEOUS!!!!!!! And so spontaneity, is built into the fabric of existence itself. It is our heritage. It is what the Cosmos built on! So no matter how stuck, atrophied, inert, fixed we become, the ability for us to regenerate still exists, as this spontaneous coming into being is the first condition of everything! A fact of course, that being in life quickly dissuades us of, and yet it is nevertheless extremely true. Which means of course, if we can work at our impro in a disciplined way, for a period of time, with the right guidance, we can and will get back in touch with really what is the centre and essence of it.

With the spontaneous freedom of being!

2. THE SCRIPT.

Obviously the other main thing is to work without a script. Again FREEDOM! Now what is a script? What does it stand for? Well ultimately it stands for something set in advance. A self protection device. It protects us from the uncontrolled. The spontaneous unpredictable stuff that life is made of. The fact that scripts, like Shakespeare, can be extremely good, is a separate issue. If you have a script, no matter what it is, you are constrained to follow it. So fact is that scripts preclude any kind of spontaneous development simply because you cannot write a script for reality, for say going to the shop. You could get close but you could never get it right, for even though it always contains say 99% the same elements, it will still never happen in exact same way twice. That annoying 1% is bound to crop up. Reality is spontaneous. Self-generating. It is un-scripted! Now as I said, it’s not that scripts are bad. No. It’s just that we are very imbalanced. Before we started impro we were in a position of everything being scripted! Everything! It was all planned in advance. Then we did impro and it all became unscripted! All of it! Now this is an imbalance. What it should be is 50% scripted and 50% impro. That would be balanced. In this way we would reincorporate the spontaneous element in our work and not lose the obvious benefits of working with scripts. What happened was we through the baby out with the bathwater! It’s simply the seductive power of anything new. Any script ever written was improvised as it was written. Again polarised thinking demands that these things are entirely different. Script and impro.


As a footnote one example occurs to me. Experts studying fire disasters came to the conclusion that people were killed because they followed an internal script. In one case people suffocated in a restaurant because their script said you cannot leave until you have paid the bill and yet unfortunately the manager and staff had fled so they couldn’t. In another example of a tube fire people insisted on taking a certain escalator because their script said so. This again led to the loss of life. Here it is having such complete confidence that following script the only way to do things that proved disastrous, for the time came to drop the script but it didn’t happen.

But then of course, we do need scripts! We need a script for example in a restaurant. Without it, it would be just chaos! The problem occurs when we become too strongly identified with that script. For it is only a script!!!!!!

Bad script thing: You are constrained to follow it.

Good script thing: It forces you to channel ‘deeper’ less acceptable feelings.

Good impro thing: It can go in any direction.

Bad impro thing: It encourages playing everything just for ‘fun’.

So we can see, in end, it all swings and rounabouts.We can see that the ‘bogus entertainment agenda’, in impro, is that if we take things at face value, and do not make any effort, for personal reasons, to look below the surface of a particular thing, we are endangering our freedom!

FREEDOM

And freedom is precious!!!