• • •
The pioneering theater and film director Peter Brook pointed out that in the days of Ibsen and Chekhov, people went to the theater to see well-written plays acted out with the magic of lights, sets, costumes, and so forth. Today, with movies and TV, many of those elements can be realized far better than on the stage. So what now is the function of live theater, whether improvised, composed, or a hybrid between? Brook’s answer is that we go to the theater to be personally involved in an event that can only happen in this place, at this time, at this temperature, in these acoustics, with these people. We come for an experience of presence. It is that sense of concrete immediacy and impermanence that theater must provide.
The unmediated presence of players with each other, with spectators, is the true purpose of live art. A young man at one of my university workshops remarked that during the two-hour session of a hundred people playing together, he was not once tempted to take out his phone. He said that every time he was at an event that interested him, he compulsively shared photos or videos. But this time he realized that the essence of the experience was being there. The more our society dissolves into a mirror labyrinth of screens and telecommunication, the more vital is the experience of simply being with each other.
There is such a ferment of artistic exploration today, occurring almost entirely below the radar of both mass media and high-culture media. These encounters bring forward the element of music that is more important than sound, of theater that is more important than story, of art that is more important than imagery. That element is people, interacting and present for each other. At each moment we are there to witness an event that has never taken place before and will never take place again. This is true not only of theater but of every instance in life. The key to creativity is other human beings. As we realize this in our day-to-day practice, our art becomes, in the words of the musician and scholar George Lewis, a power stronger than itself.
• • •
There is a word from the South African Bantu language, ubuntu: mutual humanity. In the related Zulu/Xhosa language, they say, “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.” “I am a person through your being a person.” Ubuntu is intimately related to Buddhist ideas of interdependence, and as Archbishop Desmond Tutu explains, it is the opposite of Descartes’ I think, therefore I am. It is the opposite of our idea of the solitary genius-creator-intellect who produces masterpieces in a room.
Clarence Jones was the speechwriter and close friend who happily watched as Dr. King pushed aside the text he had helped prepare. Jones reports that King had used the phrase I have a dream in a previous speech with little effect on the audience. That day in August of 1963 was different. “The power is not in the words themselves. Nor is it in the speaker. The power was woven into the feedback loop that jumped between the words, the speaker, and his audience.”
Ubuntu is that feedback, looping around to weave a network of reciprocity. Doris Lessing called it “substance-of-we-feeling” — awareness and sensation flowing throughout the body and between self and others and environment. We think the body is in the body and the mind is in the head, but actually, down the pathways of communication, through our limbs, and the instruments with which we extend ourselves, through the resonance of a room as sounds return to us, it is all an indissoluble continuum of conversation.
Art activates empathy, and creates the opportunity for it, inviting us to see for a while through someone else’s personality and experience. Gregory Bateson said, “It takes two to know one.” We know ourselves through each other. That is why, if you stand up and play a solo, as a storyteller, dancer, actor, or musician, you are still operating in this infinite nexus of relationship, listening and responding. We come to see individual and collective experience on a continuum, just as improvisation and composition occur on a continuum. We become stewards of these newly discovered relationships with our partners and our environment. With practice we can make those relationships richer, more interesting, more generous.
Improvising makes visible some truths of daily life that we experience but seldom think about: that we can navigate our way through complex systems in the simple act and art of listening and responding; that creativity is the property of everyone and not just of a chosen few; that the ordinary, everyday mind is expressive and creative. From this magical interaction the work is born.
•
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me,he complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
— Walt Whitman
I was in London for a few days before traveling to a conference on improvisation in Wales. I walked along the South Bank of the Thames, taking in the sun and puffy clouds reflected on the water, gulls wheeling and yawping overhead, and crowds of mostly happy-looking people strolling up and down the walkways, each involved in his or her personal mixture of business and pleasure. I was supposed to give the keynote talk at the conference, which gathered international improvisers from across the arts, including musicians, theater people, dancers, visual artists, filmmakers, educators, psychologists, and others, for a series of talks and performances. While I was looking forward to this conference, as usual I didn’t have the foggiest idea what I was going to say. As a practicing improviser I have grown used to this cloud of unknowing, and to discovering that when the day arrives, the talk will organize itself. But at a certain phase in between, I dissolve into a panic: this time I will have nothing to say, or it will be a confused jumble. I will get up and make a fool of myself.
Last time I was in London, years before, the South Bank was a grungy area of decayed industrial buildings. Now it had been transformed for the new millennium into a miles-long environment of footpaths along the river, with galleries, theaters, and cafés sprouting off to the right. I noticed how architecture is a score for improvisation: the shaped container and guide for a buzzing ecology of individuals, families, small groups, intent business people, tourists, working men and women carrying tools, talking with their friends. The design of the outdoor space that surrounded us lent a particular flavor, a relaxed but energetic style to our collective activity. The walkways, never entirely straight, constantly varying in width and geometry, channeled the stochastic process of people’s activity into a kind of dance.
I wandered into a bookstore. I randomly browsed among the shelves, not looking for anything in particular, passing the psychology section on my right. Suddenly out of the corner of my eye, I saw a book. The spine was fire-engine red, with bold white lettering that said IMPROVISING. Needless to say, I did a double take and turned back to the shelf to find the book that had caught my eye. I was eager to learn who wrote it and what he or she had to say. I scanned the shelves from top to bottom. Nothing. I searched again, thinking that perhaps I had scrambled the letters of another title. But there was no red book. I had hallucinated it. Clearly, in the workings of the unconscious, I was anticipating the improv conference; but something else was at work in that hallucination. Improvisation had been transformed to improvising. Not a noun, but a verb, in the active present.
• • •
This little hallucination encapsulated patterns and ideas that had preoccupied me for decades. Like many such experiences, it was the fast, synaptic summation of information that had always been available, hiding in plain sight. That swift connecting of patterns, flowing through time, is itself what we often mean by improvising. The gift was that I now had a focal point for the talk I was about to give.
It took me a few years more to realize that the book I had imagined in the store was this book.
As the vision of the book and the word improvising came to me, I recognized that I was stepping onto a well-trodden path. My mentor, the anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson, was fond of repeating the slogan STAMP OUT NOUNS, coined by his friend and student Anatol Holt. “Language,” Gregory told me, “can