to be telling the truth. As they read their manicured scripts we sense the stilted and contrived tone, because we are used to spontaneous, interactive, face-to-face communication.
Every day we have conversations that are reasonably lucid and interesting, without needing to rehearse them. I wrote about this decades ago and have repeated the idea many times since. Each time I repeat it, I am blurring my own line between the spontaneous and the rehearsed, so I was ripe for a surprise. One day I was speaking at the University of Virginia and said, “We don’t write down our conversations before we have them.” Most of the students nodded in agreement, and I expected to go on with my talk. But a young woman raised her hand to interrupt. She said, “Sometimes I write things down before I say them.” That stopped me. I asked, “Really? When?” She answered, “When I’m going to talk to a boy.” For her, talking to a boy she liked was fraught with trepidation. The stakes were high. I found it fascinating because while she was admitting to her fear, at the same time she was brave enough to stand up and say this in front of two hundred people.
Perhaps the person to whom we’re speaking might think we’re a fool, or perhaps we’re being graded or assessed. We want to nail things down so that we appear to be in control. Improvising, we might make fools of ourselves; but when we speak from a script, we also have the possibility, at least as great, of making fools of ourselves.
Blurting out the truth can be a high-risk action. Often big stakes and legitimate fears are involved. Diplomats learn to speak with circumspection because misunderstood words, especially across diverse cultures, can spark an international dispute. Who among us doesn’t sometimes avoid speaking out, from politeness, from fear of failure, or simply because we forget to pay attention to our own minds? Who among us has not lied to avoid making a cruel remark?
But blurting out the truth can also result in unexpected professions of love or friendship. Blurting out the truth may lead to unexpected commitments to a life project. Blurting out the truth may lead someone to quit a job in which he or she is required to do something dishonorable — causing short-term havoc in the person’s life but perhaps improving just a little bit the lives of others. Often playing a musical instrument or dancing allows us to make such statements more directly, getting to even deeper truths and patterns than we can reach with speech. The language of body and action may teach us a simpler way to do things and reveal knowledge we had within us but had not suspected. Dreams, the royal road to the unconscious, are sometimes a way of blurting out the truth, in images, metaphors, and connections that give rise to creative breakthroughs in our life and work.
Art is the act of balancing: knowing what to prepare, what to leave to the moment, and the wisdom to know the difference.
• • •
Composer Phillip Bimstein moved from Chicago to a small town, Springdale, Utah, to live in the beauty of nature and concentrate on his work. But somehow he found himself drawn into local affairs and was elected to two terms as mayor of Springdale. This town was so rife with conflict that the previous mayor found dead chickens thrown on his front lawn by irate citizens. Bimstein discovered that he could use his experience as an improviser and composer to facilitate communication in town, and he dramatically changed local politics for the better. Certain principles of listening and mutual respect pervade music making, whether in small groups or symphony orchestras. If you can’t hear what your fellow musicians are playing, you are playing too loud. People become attuned through practice to listening to each other, listening to the environment. In music, contrasting themes and emotions blend — not necessarily harmonizing or agreeing, but weaving together in exposition and development. “When musicians improvise together the interaction between them is as collaborative and communicative as it gets. Improvisation brings out not only individual expressions, but collective efforts to build something together.” Bimstein found himself facilitating, and bearing witness to, a small community “composing and performing a new democracy.” He describes the development of a new collaborative tone in town meetings, used in resolving disputes over real estate and city services. He learned how to be a conductor, allowing consonant and dissonant combinations of voices to move together without squelching individual voices. In a 1997 article, Parade magazine called Bimstein “The Man Who Brought Civility Back to Town.” Living is art, and living together with people who are not just like us is really art, perhaps the most important art.
• • •
In the Theatres Act of 1843, the British Parliament criminalized improvisation. All performances had to pass through the filter of state censorship, and theater managers were required to submit an advance copy of the script to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. Unscripted theater could not be predicted and controlled. This law was eventually overturned — but not until 1968!
• • •
I value what I have learned as an improviser, but improvising in itself has no value. Plenty of amoral demagogues are fluent improvisers. History, right up to this day, presents us with examples of tyrants deft at spinning stories, modulating frames of reference, using imagery and emotional rhetoric to incite fear and hatred in a crowd. Such manipulators, ranging from showmen, salesmen, and petty politicians to brutal, violent dictators, are often skilled at spontaneous speech that, like art, touches the interface between our conscious and unconscious perceptions. Like actors, such people often have more control over their facial expressions, tone, timing, and other communicational qualities than is good for them, or for the rest of the world. We can be fascinated and entranced by the sound of poison pouring into our ears.
Creation has an essential ethical dimension. We often conflate creativity with cleverness, or with superficial innovation. Defining the ethical matrix that separates creativity from destructiveness is notoriously difficult, but it has something to do with recognizing our kinship with each other and with the natural world we inhabit. We can begin by cultivating the activity of the drama students we encountered at the beginning of this chapter — mutual respect.
• • •
Del Close, one of the gurus of instant theater, said that your job as an improviser is not to come up with clever lines but to make your partner’s shitty line sound good. Keith Johnstone describes this principle using the wonderfully old-fashioned word chivalry. This is something we seldom see in the public sphere: mutual respect, mutual support, building something together that we might never have dreamt of on our own. Improvising is all about human relationship. It is about listening, responding, connecting, and being generous. When a group of free players gets together and unfolds a coherent and interesting piece without a prior plan or template, it is like watching separate beings become integrated into a single nervous system. It is a partnership, with each other and with the audience, in the deepest sense of the word. I even get this feeling when I am playing or hearing a solo improvisation. Each tone and gesture can be seen as an invitation to deepen the information and feelings that are unfolding. The discipline of improvisation involves sensing invitations, accepting them, and supporting each other. There is not much room to be egotistical or greedy for attention. Leadership might be clearly visible at one moment and subtler at others, but it is fluid and shared; it slides around from person to person, like a fugue. We are able to engage in the give-and-take of communication. Exchange, flow, listening, responding: our improvising can become a mini-economy, a mini-ecology, a template, in fact, for a self-organizing, organic form of democracy.
Artistic creativity won’t heal the horrors of the world; it won’t save anyone or anything. But it is practice — and through practice we change the self, and the relationship of the self with all things.
• • •
Union organizers have a technique for bringing a factory to a standstill without actually going on strike. It is called an obedience strike, or work-to-rule. Quite simply, the workers follow every rule and regulation to the letter. We’re going to do our job exactly as it is stipulated. The problem is that no one can design a formula, job description, or software algorithm for every contingency. Soon everything grinds to a halt. If management wants to frustrate the work-to-rule action, they have to command the workers as follows: you must interpret your jobs freely, using personal judgment about each case based on context. What a marvelous double bind! “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth