Impro

Highlights

• It was as if I’d learned to redesign everything, to reshape it so that I saw what ought to be there, which of course is much inferior to what is there. The dullness was not an inevitable consequence of age, but of education.

• The implication of Stirling’s attitude was that the student should never experience failure. The teacher’s skill lay in presenting experiences in such a way that the student was bound to succeed.

• I play low status physically but my actual status is going up, since only a very confident and experienced person would put the blame for failure on himself.

• Instead of seeing people as untalented, we can see them as phobic, and this completely changes the teacher’s relationship with them.

• Status is a confusing term unless it’s understood as something one does. You may be low in social status, but play high, and vice versa.

• We soon discovered the ‘see-saw’ principle: ‘I go up and you go down’. Walk into a dressing-room and say ‘I got the part’ and everyone will congratulate you, but will feel lowered. Say ‘They said I was too old’ and people commiserate, but cheer up perceptibly.

• We want people to be very low-status, but we don’t want to feel sympathy for them—slaves are always supposed to sing at their work.

• Status is played to anything, objects as well as people. If you enter an empty waiting-room you can play high or low status to the furniture. A king may play low status to a subject, but not to his palace.

• Non-defence is exploited by the wolf who exposes his neck and underbelly to a dominant wolf as a way of ending a losing battle. The top Wolf wants to bite, but can’t.

• The actor or improviser must accept his disabilities, and allow himself to be insulted, or he’ll never really feel safe.

• ‘Close’ is a concept related to the amount of space available. Once the beach fills up with people you can sit very close to the original family. The space people demand around them contracts as more people are added.

• A servant’s primary function is to elevate the status of the master. Footmen can’t lean against the wall, because it’s the master’s wall. Servants must make no unnecessary noise or movement, because it’s the master’s air they’re intruding on.

• You have to be a very stubborn person to remain an artist in this culture. It’s easy to play the role of ‘artist’, but actually to create something means going against one’s education.

• Many teachers think of children as immature adults. It might lead to better and more ‘respectful’ teaching, if we thought of adults as atrophied children.

• Imagination is as effortless as perception, unless we think it might be ‘wrong’, which is what our education encourages us to believe. Then we experience ourselves as ‘imagining’, as ‘thinking up an idea’, but what we’re really doing is faking up the sort of imagination we think we ought to have.

• Most people I meet are secretly convinced that they’re a little crazier than the average person. People understand the energy necessary to maintain their own shields, but not the energy expended by other people. They understand that their own sanity is a performance, but when confronted by other people they confuse the person with the role.

• It’s no good telling the student that he isn’t to be held responsible for the content of his imagination, he needs a teacher who is living proof that the monsters are not real, and that the imagination will not destroy you. Otherwise the student will have to go on pretending to be dull.

• We all know instinctively what ‘mad’ thought is: mad thoughts are those which other people find unacceptable, and train us not to talk about, but which we go to the theatre to see expressed.

• An artist who is inspired is being obvious. He’s not making any decisions, he’s not weighing one idea against another. He’s accepting his first thoughts.

• There are people who prefer to say ‘Yes’, and there are people who prefer to say ‘No’. Those who say ‘Yes’ are rewarded by the adventures they have, and those who say ‘No’ are rewarded by the safety they attain. There are far more ‘No’ sayers around then ‘Yes’ sayers, but you can train one type to behave like the other.

• High-status players block any action unless they feel they can control it. The high-status player is obviously afraid of being humiliated in front of an audience, but to block your partner’s idea is to be like the drowning man who drags down his rescuer. There’s no reason why you can’t play high status, and yet yield to other people’s invention.

• The improviser has to be like a man walking backwards. He sees where he has been, but he pays no attention to the future.

• What we assume to be ‘normal consciousness’ is comparatively rare, it’s like the light in the refrigerator: when you look in, there you are on but what’s happening when you don’t look in?

• How do we enter trance states? I would prefer to ask ‘How do we stay out of them?’ In the middle of a dark night I wake up, how do I know I’m awake? I test for consciousness by moving a muscle. If I block this impulse to move I feel a tremendous anxiety. The control I exercise over the musculature reassures me that ‘I’m me’.

• Once you understand that you’re no longer held responsible for your actions, then there’s no need to maintain a ‘personality’. Student improvisers asked to pretend to be hypnotised, show a sudden improvement.

• Crowds are trance-inducing because the anonymity imposed by the crowd absolves you of the need to maintain your identity.

• Actors who ‘can’t do’ Mask work are never able to let the Mask be truly stupid and ignorant. They try to transfer their own skills directly. Instead of allowing a Mask to explore a closed umbrella they’ll ‘take over’ and open it. Instead of letting the Mask suffer because it hasn’t learned to sit in a chair they’ll ‘make’ it sit. By their impatience, and desire to exert control, they bypass a necessary process. The Mask feeling leaks away and we are left with the actor pretending to be another person, instead of being another person.

• But as soon as you try to shift the centre to some other place within or outside your body, you will feel that your whole psychological and physical attitude will change, just as it changes when you step into an imaginary body. You will notice that the centre is able to draw and concentrate your whole being into one spot from which your activity emanates and radiates.