The Elite

When I was in junior high band, our band teacher came to us one day near the end of the year and posed a question: when auditioning new members for the band, what should their minimum proficiency be? The drummers all insisted on being able to do umpteen paradiddles, flamacues, pataflaflas, and other delightfully, entertainingly named rhythms and rudiments. Brass and woodwinds wanted three octave chromatic scales, five or more scales, double tonguing and other vaguely sexually termed techniques. We were all naming things that we felt we could do well, and we all wanted to feel that when bringing new band members in that we wanted them to meet a minimum skill level – at the very least to preserve the overall proficiency of the group. Insisting on high skill would seem to insure that only very talented and very serious players would get in. Our band director dutifully wrote down all our suggestions (which at the end turned into a fairly long and in depth list of things) and then posed another question: how many of you could do all of this when you joined this band? In the course of our high-minded ideals, we failed to realize how hard this list was – a set of demands that would effectively keep most people out of the organization.

We must never forget just how low improv sits on the hierarchy of needs; improv has never fed the hungry, satiated the thirsty, provided security to the insecure, or loved the lonely. If the world were to come to a crashing halt tomorrow, things that could do those things to the huddled masses would be appreciated much more than a rousing “Freeze Tag”. (Though on the plus side, we could do improv much longer than we could watch TV, movies, play video games, or listen to music; in that respect it's probably one of the most efficient entertainment options. This is one of the symptoms of the modern age and is best exemplified by a thought question I saw in an article recently: the world has ended, and you can escape and take one of three people with you: Brad Pitt, Jessica Alba, or a Scientist. Most people would grab one of the first two people, even though the scientist might actually be useful.) Yet, despite how essentially worthless improv is (not meaning to say that improv cannot give meaning – that is the nature of art – but just to reiterate that it does not fulfill any of the lower tiers needed to survive), what I notice that troubles me is a cult of elitism. I see improvisers time and time again, both as individuals and as teams who act as if what they do is exceedingly important, look down at others that don't conform to them, ostracize those who operate on their own, and treat hangers on with derision.

I like playing with the unaffiliated. I've been getting together once a week with a few improvisers in a very low key, relaxed environment – some are members of a few different groups, some have played in an official setting since they finished their last class, but they all get together because they love doing this improv thing, and they either don't get enough in whatever outlets they already use, or they've been cast aside by an improv group. At the same time, I've met some improvisers who play in a strongly defined improv group who practice a kind of jingoistic, isolationist group think that looks down their nose at the “other”, if they even deign themselves enough to recognize that they exist. Why this is plainly apparent in one aspect: insulation prevents innovation, but not so much in another: we were all that guy once, who wasn't very good, and who didn't have a group to call “home” (hell, I was that guy until pretty recently).

The way I see it is that you can either stay locked in your ivory towers, pretending that what you do is important, wanting people to watch you, but hoping that only the “good” ones get in, or you can come down to everyone else, and try and help others along. The ivory tower self-perpetuates: if you do it, the next group will too. But if you try and share the fire, it will spread too far and bright to be contained. Of course in that very Prometheus-like allegory, it should be pointed out that the Gods did chain him to a rock so that birds could tear him apart for eternity, so take my lessons with a grain of salt, because those who live in the ivory towers will not appreciate your generosity.

InDoc

“Does making a man a knight make him a better fighter?”

“Yes”

Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

Modern storytelling has definitely romanticized the knight and the samurai almost into caricature, yet we remained spurned on by theirs and other similar bands for what we see as noble behavior. We could trace a line from their teachings all the way to the fictional Jedi knight if we wanted, but the origins are in fact much simpler. The knight for example is a champion of the code of chivalry, whose origin is the French word chevalerie, which means roughly “skill with a horse”. The first knights and samurai alike were little more than soldiers or mercenaries, raised by vassals and shogun, respectively. The concern came that when you hire people to specialize in the art of killing, that you needed some sort of internal restraint to keep your skilled warriors in line. Hence the samurai received bushido or “the way of the warrior”, which espouses things like courage, benevolence, honor, and loyalty, and the chivalric code covers three areas, duties to countrymen and fellow Christians, duties to God, and duties to women. It wasn't enough that we needed our warriors to be skilled at killing, but we wanted them from the very beginning to also have a heart and soul. For example, in a study of initiation rituals, historian Mircea Eliade found their function was “to reveal the deep meaning of existence to the new generations and to help them assume the responsibility of being truly men and hence of participating in culture.” Even the early chivalric prototype in the Middle East included poetry and piety in the same breath as skill with a horse or bow.

A more modern indoctrination is “innocent until proven guilty”, which serves as the backbone for almost our entire present day legal system. An indoctrination's primary difference from just being a lesson is that it is a learned knowledge that is gained outside of the arena for questioning thought. Or basically, when you are taught, you are encouraged to look at the whole of knowledge as an external observer and analyze and internalize it yourself; when you are indoctrinated, you are just supposed to accept the teaching as “the way”. Certainly as improvisers, you might think that Our Craft has managed to stay inoculated against such Newspeak encroachments, but in fact you were indoctrinated (likely) during one of your first practices, the “yes, and”. This is a concept that you are not invited to question, you just take at face value that you are supposed to agree and build to information provided to you by your partner. What I find lacking in improv education is how little more attempts are made at providing students some kind of direction in the form of these indocs. We give them yes, and, and then just throw them to the world and say “figure the rest out for yourselves”. It's no wonder that so few improvisers appear able to truly support each other's work. Here's another indoc: “theater of the heart”. This is the concept that you are to cherish each other on stage and treat others as if they are “geniuses, artsits, and poets”. And yet I see a lot improvisers, both experienced and green, that treat each other as if they were gladiators out for blood. They have never been made civilized, so it's more like “Mad Max” than “King Arthur”.

What worries me about how most improvisers are trained is that they are given the way of the sword (i.e. how to swing it (in improv terms, how to do a scene/game/mime)) which is the technical stuff, without giving them the way of the warrior (i.e. who to swing your sword at and why (in improv terms, the “theatre of the heart”, organic group based thinking) which is the stuff that makes improvisers more than just technicians and makes them artists. But even beyond just making them better improvisers, it makes them real people who can function and contribute, discover and help, rather than razing the world to the ground. That kind of stuff you can't get from a class or a book (or even, heaven forbid, a blog), you get that kind of stuff by being involved in communities, and more importantly, communities that live by that way of thinking. At the same time, be aware of what you're teaching other improvisers just by how you work. You'd be surprised how many habits are picked up just by others watching you and taking that as “the way of the improvisers”.