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”.