Being Unprepared

For many years my cause was resisting nuclear weapons. I support the people who still do, and though I was a competent organizer, I was never a good one. I never did the work with a good heart, and so these days my cause is improvisation. If I am not a holy resistor, I can still hope to be a clown of god.

Good improvisation is based on the reality of not being in control. It helps overcome fear and anxiety, two of my lifelong issues; and it does so with kindness. Improvisation is the best practice I’ve found to build the skills necessary to approach life in this way. To be vulnerable in a scene with another improviser is to be deliciously in the moment, highly focused on listening to your partner, and lost in the flow of discovery. It is a state closer to joy than most of life. To interact this way you must engage unprotected and unprepared. Since you have not pre-planned what to say or do, you get whatever you need from your partner’s presence, words, and being. It feels both risky and scary, but when you open yourself to paying focused attention to your partner; saying yes; pleasing your partner, and making them the most important person in the room, you are employing the same skills you use naturally when you are falling in love with someone. This discovery was first articulated by the wonderful Canadian Improviser, Actress, and Clown, Rebecca Northan in her wonderful Ted Talk.

Keith Johnstone, the great English/Canadian Impro theorist, director, and teacher once explained to me: “The minute you think ahead is the minute you’ve stopped listening and miss most of what is happening on the stage, just as in life.”

It is one of the most difficult things to teach in improvisation: “Come unprepared”. It sounds easy but is not. Perhaps a better way to explain learning improvisation is: “We practice and prepare to become unprepared.” It sounds both contradictory and zen-like and probably kind of ‘woo-woo’, but there you have it. Come and give it a try. Come to the place where listening to your partner is all that is important.

It can be rather destabilizing at first. We spend our entire lives learning to accomplish, to be safe, and to be presentable. So teaching unpreparedness is difficult, especially for those of us who tend toward perfectionism. This does not include me, by the way. I am a daydreamer rather than a perfectionist. Being prepared, in my case, involves the urge not to look like an idiot rather than having things just so. I am as diligent a preparer as the perfectionistic among you. Perhaps even more so, because my tendency to prepare is born out of insecurity and unworthiness

I tell my students that I teach improvisation because it is what I need to learn. It is not that I am good at it, but I do love attempting it, and the more I attempt it, the more I learn about being present, about being in a relationship, and about the truth of our ultimate lack of control. And being unprepared, being without guile is so rare and unusual, that it often turns out to be funny. It is actually funny to see someone honestly say yes rather than no. As an audience member, it is easy to see if the performer is truly open and truly unprepared for what might happen. As an audience member, I automatically am interested in that person. I am both honored by and concerned about the risk they are taking by being that open.

Wherever you are, I encourage you to find an honest improv teacher and give it a try. It’s a difficult and frustrating process of unlearning that is punctuated by a tremendous amount of laughter. In my experience, the payoff is huge and filled with growth. And the practice itself?
If you can stand it, and if your partner can as well, It kind of feels like falling in love.

— DanielSouthGate