I’ve continued asking myself the question of “why improv?” lately. Why am I so drawn to it, and at such a spiritual level? The best way I can describe it is this (and I promise, if you read past the first part, I’ll bring this back to improv)…
We humans put things in mental boxes. Its how we cope with a complex world. When I learn something about, say, pigs, I take down the pig box, add my new understanding to it, put it back in the box, and put it on a shelf somewhere. If you tell me you’re thinking about buying a pot-bellied pig, I don’t think, “Hmmm, okay, pigs are mammals, they can be pink or brown, and it’s likely this many pounds, and let me try to remember some more facts about pigs.” Instead, I just grab the pig box and go with whatever’s inside. In this case, my half-second impression is “filthy and gross”. If you’re my roommate, I immediately begin trying to argue you out of it.
Boxes are great for simplifying the world enough so that we don’t go crazy, but at the same time, they’re limiting, and we need our categorizations constantly challenged or we begin to have a very narrow view of the world we live in.
If I could make a very general statement about the value of Art, it’s this: Good art takes those boxes down from the shelf, un-boxes whatever it is you’ve boxed up, and forces you to take another look at it. The best art doesn’t have an agenda behind it, it simply holds up the contents of your boxes and makes you take another look at it. An deceptively simple example is this William Carlos Williams poem:
The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
If you read it carefully, the poem hopefully unboxes your image of a wheel barrow and makes you look at it, in this case, glazed with rain, beside some chickens, and depended upon by… by what? You decide. The poem simply takes it out of the box, it doesn’t try to rebox it for you.
Of course, there’s a lot of art that takes something out of a box, and immediately tries to jam it in a specific box. Political art sometimes does this, when the artist has a specific agenda, and doesn’t trust that if they’re simply true to themselves, the truth behind their political beliefs will be unveiled. Imagine a Hallmark card that says, “Babies are the cutest of precious things.” Argh! Why not just show me a baby and let me experience my own feeling about it being cute and precious?
Anyway, the thing about most art is that the artist opens up the box in the privacy of their own solitude and explores it, trying to communicate that exploration to an unseen audience.
But improv is more direct. In improv, the performers pull down boxes willy-nilly from their minds and from the minds around them, rip them open like Christmas morning, and hold them up for everyone, artist and audience, to see. Lets get some suggestions from the audience! Roommates, Cuba, Ninjas. Great, say the improvisers, lets rip those open, along with the Fidel Castro box, the martial arts box, the people-who-don’t-do-their-chores box, and the country bumpkin box. Every single person in the audience has some version of these boxes. (Even the drunk guy who doesn’t know who Fidel Castro is and keeps shouting “lesbians” for every suggestion has some vague box that the Fidel Castro character will fit in, even if its “Political Figures” or “People Who Smoke Cigars”)
Improv, to me, is about opening all these boxes up and playing around with what’s in them. Sometimes its big picture stuff. Maybe it’s a scene about an Iraqi boy, once, afraid of being killed by machines from another country. Played true, its just an exploration of what it’d be like to be that boy and the world that put him in that position.
But this is where its hard to explain, because sometimes its really really unimportant box that you open up and share with the audience, and it just feels good in the moment, in a way that can’t be described in
another setting.
I was once in a scene in which our prize pig had escaped by climbing up into the loft, and I became angry and opened my mouth: “Pigs shouldn’t do that, they’s down-low animals!” That’s not a particularly funny line now, but in the moment, it was like this weird connection opened up with those listening, and I could tell that somebody out there thought the exact same thing. And if that doesn’t feel good, well, I don’t what does.
I still don’t think you should buy a pig, though. Maybe a rabbit instead?
