Sunday 15 March 2009

Permission giving

Improvised comedy is about great performance. When it’s well done nothing is funnier, but it’s all too easy for performers to start playing against, rather than with, each other. I started teaching improvisation because I couldn’t find a class where collective performance was valued over individual brilliance from the very start. The instance is preached by many and applied by few. There’s a good reason for that since tapping into our collaborative instincts is much harder than tapping into our competitive one.

Ego stands in the way of collaboration. You need enough of it to get up and go. But too much will make you sabotage the work (allowing you to fail in the re insuring knowledge that you didn’t try your best) or turn you into a control freak (look mate I think I know what to do next better than you do), or both. Ego is a distraction that can stop us from listening. Our power of cognition is finite, and listening is 95% of the job.

At an early stage of the training, most improvisers look for their teacher’s approval. It is a natural phase during which learners don’t feel fluent enough to trust their own judgement (although they have been improvising since birth, which should qualify them as expert, but that’s another story…). This need for reassurance disappears with time, as participants learn to own their experience and stop having to include their teacher in the permission-giving process.

I suspect that the decision to personally take part and, more importantly, to really commit to the games is the product of a non-conscious risk to reward ratio analyse. The risk is to loose face, something potentially lethal in our ancestors’ world. The reward is social success, in one form or another. If and only if the non-consciously perceived ration is positive (reasonably low risk for reasonably high reward) do we "take a chance".

Our decision to commit to a task in public might depend on a non-conscious risk to reward computation:

- A positive ratio would produce a good "gut feeling" conductive to disinhibition.

- A negative ratio would produce a bad "gut feeling" conductive to inhibition.

shaman picture source: wikimedia