The Art of Is. Stephen Nachmanovitch

with being uncomfortable.

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      One of the finest teachers of improvisational performance I have known is Al Wunder, an old friend from Berkeley who now runs the Theatre of the Ordinary in Melbourne, Australia. Wunder wrote an influential paper called “Positive Feedback Only,” reprinted in The Wonder of Improvisation. He points us to an experience that many of us have had, being in the room with a one-year-old baby who is walking for the first time:

      When the adults realized what was happening, they all sat in a circle. The young performer teetered and wobbled from the outstretched arms of one adult to another — ooo’s, ahs, smiles, cheers and hand claps all around the circle. There was a huge, beaming smile on the child’s face. Not a single adult thought of saying, “That was lovely (insert your own name), now if you could just hold your back a little straighter and lift your knees higher, you will walk even better the next time.” Why not? The child certainly was not walking well. Yet we, the adults, knew that the child would continue to develop, on their own, the skills of walking, of running, skipping, hopping and other forms of exciting locomotion.

      Fine musicians and artists teaching master classes, with the best of intentions, often fall into the trap of making helpful suggestions. It is much more challenging to allow the mistakes to hang silently in the air and instead have the students speak about what they enjoyed in each other’s performances. Reinforce what was interesting, and it will be stronger next time. Once a nurturing environment has been established, it is possible to give and receive criticism without wounding. Even then, it is better to use our discernment to find the good, the interesting elements in the work, the edge of exploration that leads to the next work.

      What if the dignity and encouragement we show to babies were a model for all our educational systems?

      “Positive feedback only,” as Wunder describes it, does not mean pretending that everything is uniformly good or that our critical faculty is to be disabled. It means that by searching out the aspects of a performance that we enjoy, we are strengthening them. We can only identify these aspects and figure out how to reinforce them if our brains and perceptions are fully engaged.

      In the face of institutional mania for evaluation and the accompanying threats of failure, more positive approaches have also arisen, from the practice of appreciative inquiry in the world of business and organizational consulting, which has spread widely from its origins in the Cleveland School of Business, to some of the methods of legendary basketball coach Phil Jackson (who introduced his players to Zen meditation and mindfulness techniques as part of his training regime) and his Positive Coaching Alliance, an antidote to the popular conception of sports coaches as militaristic, punishing martinets.

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      At this moment you might be sitting, standing, lying down, or walking. Wherever you are, try gently shifting from side to side. If you’re sitting, notice that as your torso keels a bit to the right, the muscles on your left side know to pull you back to the left to return upright. Every time you veer over to the left, your muscles adjust you back to the right. We do this every moment of the day; otherwise, we wouldn’t be sitting up in chairs, we’d be flopped onto the floor like corpses. Our proprioceptive senses and core muscles are in a constant dance of dynamic equilibrium. We perceive where our bodies are, we perceive our relationships with the people and objects around us, and we adjust accordingly.

      In the same way, we are able to walk, bicycle, drive a car, dance. This is the wisdom of the self-adjusting body. Steering a car, we continually guide it right and left in order to go straight. We do not castigate ourselves for making a mistake each time we wiggle the wheel. We simply notice the error and adjust for it. Inevitably we will lose our balance, fall over, make mistakes, and get into accidents. How do we respond? With guilt and self-punishment? Or with self-acceptance, which encourages another attempt and more practice, allowing us to respond to emergencies smoothly and realistically? Self-correction is a lot easier without the added burden of guilt.

      Wunder reminds us that when toddlers fall, they don’t need to be told that they fell. We trust that they know what is happening as it happens, that they receive feedback as the experience unfolds. Our bodies and minds, our partnerships with others, are self-organizing systems. The mechanisms of feedback, communication, self-correction, self-organization, by which toddling evolves into graceful interaction, are fundamental to life, as revealed in the sciences of systems theory.

      Every person reading this is an ex-toddler. We retain (consciously or unconsciously) an immense amount of experience from this life stage of falldown-getup, falldown-getup, falldown-getup. Nelson Mandela once said that he wanted to be judged not by what he accomplished but by how many times he fell down and got up again.

      Improvising is trial and error smoothly flowing. For that to work, error has to be free from clenching or regret, so that our learning process can swing easily from each step to the next. The more we accept mistakes as part of the natural flow of our activity, the more we will be able to incorporate them, use them to build stronger and more interesting structures. In the flow of music, the “bad” note can be deliberately repeated, now as a bridge to something new, building a new modulation around it. Our partners can pick it up and toss it around in a freshly expanded game.

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