Risks and rewards

Last Saturday I took a day-long improv workshop. Yes, improv, as in acting/comedy with no script. The description of the class made it sound like it would be mostly theory and history as we were told to bring notebooks. I expected a mostly academic-type class. The fact that the confirmation email also suggested wearing “comfortable closed-toe shoes” was ignored by the part of my brain that usually screens out potentially humiliating situations. I went, prepared to learn the history of improv and to get more odd knowledge for my already overpacked brain.

What I got was maybe 30 minutes of note-worthy material and the rest of the time I was using my comfortable, closed-toe shoes to their full capabilities. I was on my feet, doing stuff–stuff that made the “don’t do something potentially humiliating” part of my brain recoil in horror. I sang (a tiny bit), I invented characters, I mimed driving a car and later throwing up (not sure if that was so much acting as just being real [grin]), and I played rapid-fire “bippidy-bippity-BOP” which is a game with rules so complex as to make your head explode but actually simple to play and “bunny-bunny-bunny” which is so simple that it makes no sense that it’s so hard.

I figured out ways to convey character, relationship, objective, and where the action was taking place in a scene, in two sentences. On the fly. With another person who got to use up one of the sentences and with whom I did not collaborate ahead of time. One of us would just say a line, the other would say a second line. And somehow, sense was made.

This was, in a very non-professional way, a day of making art. It was all about creating and taking the risks necessary to create. Did I screw up? Oh boy howdy did I! I was completely out of control–that is, I could not control the situation at all, instead being forced to react and invent. It was about flow and giving. The result was greater than its parts. It wasn’t about me yet it was all about me. It was, in a word, amazing.

You creatives get to do this every day. Each of you, in your own way, gets this gift of creating. For me, that one day was magic. I wish I could do that every day–have that feeling of come home afterwards totally exhausted and utterly enthralled with life. You get that.

If you haven’t felt that in a while, you’ve been cheating your gift. Maybe you’re playing it safer than you should. You know that feeling, when the creativity is flowing and you don’t really care about the result–it’s the process that is making your teeth sweat. Find it again. Sure, you might not get to that place on every project, but you need to get there for yourself ever so often, just to remind your creative self what can be. So the next time your boss or AD pushes you to be blah, you can push back, even just a little, to touch that gift.