Exercises
Imagination is such an evocative word. Poets are said to have a ‘strong imagination’. People, especially young people, are often criticised for having ‘no imagination’. I find myself using the word a lot in classes, as in: ‘Imagine you are walking in the countryside.’ And how often have we heard people say, ‘Use your imagination’?
But what is imagination? Is it something we can decide to use when we need to use it and not, when we don’t? Like a tool in a toolbox? A carpenter keeps his saw safely in a cupboard and only brings it out when he needs to cut a piece of wood. Is that what the imagination is like? Or is it something that is operating in the background of our brains all the time?
What is imagination?
As I ask myself these questions my mind is roaming and wandering through the vast accumulation of ideas, images, experiences and thoughts that clutter my brain. I’m using my imagination to find an answer to the questions I’m asking myself! So in asking these questions my imagination is searching for a definition of itself. Is that how it works?
Experience and information fill up our brains, and we can tap into them at any time to come up with answers to problems. We imagine. Some people don’t think they’ve got a very good imagination, but what does that really mean? While you are waiting for a bus, you imagine it arriving and you imagine getting on it, you imagine it taking you to work and you imagine getting to work on time; otherwise you wouldn’t be waiting. Imagination sifts through our vast range of experience and information, and paints metaphorical pictures in our mind’s eye. It trawls the archives of experience and plays fantasy films in the back of our brains. It’s doing it all the time. That’s why we run from an angry bull. We imagine it tossing us up in the air and goring us with its horns, and we don’t want that, so we move away pretty fast. If you didn’t use your imagination, you would have no reason to run from the bull. You’d have no reason to wait for a bus. You would not even know why you were standing with other people by a post with a strange sign on top.
Children all have great imaginations. They imagine that their teddy bears and dolls can think and talk. They imagine that they are lions and astronauts and bus drivers. They imagine Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy. They imagine anything they want, and have no problems with it.
The trouble starts when other people – grown-ups, older brothers and sisters – make children question their imaginative creations. ‘Teddy doesn’t really talk, that’s silly.’ ‘You can’t be a lion. Lions are animals.’ ‘Believing in the Tooth Fairy is babyish.’ And when people say things like that, children start to doubt their own creativity.
These pragmatic statements inhibit the free-ranging, phantasmagorical mental inventiveness that we are all born with, like great big steel shutters clamping down on the windows of our imagination. Consequently, as children get older, they start to doubt the results of their imagination in order to forestall criticism. ‘I can’t think like this; people will think I’m a baby.’ And down comes the shutter. Clomp! ‘I can’t say that; people will think I’m stupid.’ Down it comes again. Clomp! ‘I mustn’t behave the way I want to behave; people will think I don’t like them.’ Clomp!
Schiller wrote of a ‘watcher at the gates of the mind’, who examines ideas too closely. He said that in the case of the creative mind, ‘the intellect has withdrawn its watcher from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell . . . ’ He said that uncreative people ‘are ashamed of the momentary passing madness which is found in all real creators . . . ’
The imagination is continually being inhibited by the outside forces of mediocrity. Improvisers have to learn to battle these forces and let their imaginations fly. It’s not that some people have ‘no imagination’ or ‘a weak imagination’, it’s that they allow their imaginations to be repressed and restricted by a form of self-censorship.
Imaginations have been incarcerated: we need to break their chains, open the shutters, release them and allow them the freedom to take uninhibited flight!
AGREAT WAY FOR IMPROVISERS TO RELEASE THEIR IMAGINAtions and explore possibilities is to allow themselves to be inspired by each other. This session is really a continuation of the ideas explored in Chapter 12: Building Together, and they encourage the improvisers to, first of all, listen to each other, and then secondly, to push their imaginative creativity further than they would normally allow it to go.
Improvisers need to take the critical spotlight off themselves in order to discover how they, or their character, would really behave in any situation.
How Far Can They Go?
In my sessions, I am not concerned about improvisers using inappropriate language, or even allowing their characters to make ‘politically incorrect’ statements. If they are imposing limits on themselves during an improvisation, then they are creating their own ‘watcher at the gates of the mind’, and thereby inhibiting their imaginations. This is a very tricky area, because, obviously, I don’t want people to get abusive, or to use improvisation as an excuse to be racist, or to attack minorities, but in my experience, taking away these restrictions doesn’t usually lead them down inappropriate paths, all it does is empower them, and give them confidence. However, if any subject, opinion or use of language becomes a problem during an improvisation, then there is always the opportunity to discuss these issues with the group after the improvisation has finished.
Mirrors
This is a familiar game, but it’s a good warm-up.
Two people face each other and place their palms a few inches apart. One person has to be the leader and move their hands around while the other has to copy the leader’s movements exactly, as if they are a reflection in the mirror. Once they start, the leader can move their whole body, not just their hands, and the ‘mirror image’ has to follow. It’s best to do this slowly so that the person ‘reflecting’ the movement can keep up.
When one person has been the leader for a bit, let the other person take the lead.
Finally, explain that from now on, neither of them is the leader. Without speaking they must do the same exercise and continually swap the lead. Where one person starts a movement, the other can finish it by taking it in a new direction. Anyone watching them should be unable to tell who is leading at any particular time.
RATIONALE This is clearly about concentration and unspoken negotiation. Both people are learning to pick up on the subtle shifts of focus and interpretation. They are tuning in to each other’s creativity.
Experts
With the whole group divided into pairs, each pair improvises in turn while the rest of the group watches. The improvisation takes the form of a television interview, or an interview in a lecture theatre, and the only information that the two improvisers are given is their roles. One is the ‘interviewer’ and the other is the ‘expert’. When it starts, the expert has no idea what subject he or she is supposed to be an expert on, in fact, without any discussion, the interviewer starts the improvisation by creating the subject of expertise during the first question. The interviewer should say something like:
‘Welcome Mr Brown, it’s great to be speaking to you . . . I hear you have invented a method for extracting gold from the scales of goldfish. Can you tell us a bit about how you do it?’
or
‘. . . I hear you’ve discovered a new species of six-legged animals, living in the mountains of Peru . . .’
or
‘. . . I hear you’ve trained an army of ants to bake sponge cakes . . .’
The interviewer can choose any mad combination of ideas they like, and the expert has to start talking about the subject that the interviewer’s question has made them an expert on. As the interview progresses, the interviewer must constantly interrupt and add new information to the creation, by picking up on what the expert has said and asking another question that expands on it. The question must never be as simple as ‘How do you do that?’ Each question should always add more information. So, for instance, if the expert is talking about ‘a new species of six-legged animals’, and says something like, ‘ . . . and they have feathers rather than fur . . . ’, the interviewer can add to that by asking something like:
‘Oh yes, I hear that as a child you used to collect feathers and make models of world-famous buildings out of them. Can you tell us a bit about that?’
At this point, the expert has to go off in a new direction and build on the second question.
It is important that both the interviewer and the expert are continually adding to the story. The interviewer must never sit back and let the expert do all the talking and creating. The interviewer has to ask complicated questions that go into new areas, and the expert has to expand and develop these new areas.
Although the style or the performance of the interview should be extremely realistic and believable, the subject matter can be as absurd and surreal as they like. The weirder the better as far as releasing the imagination is concerned. If it is entertaining to anyone watching, it should be because the imaginative verbal creations are funny, not because the performances are clown-like or comedic.
RATIONALE During the improvisation, both people have to listen carefully to each other and add to, and change, the story. They both have equal input, and they both learn from each other. In this way they are both opening their imaginations to new ideas and, at the same time, ‘feeding’ new ideas to each other. They are building together, and taking equal responsibility to create a complex and interesting (albeit ridiculous) conversation.
DEBRIEFING They should understand that the more they listen to each other, the easier it is to share their creativity. Also, they must realise that it doesn’t matter if they appear ‘silly’. When they say ridiculous things they are opening the shutters and liberating their imagination.
Preparation for ‘Three Bullshitters in a Pub’
It’s now time to start combining some of the exercises from this and previous chapters in order to release the improvisers’ inhibitions even more, and to really let their imaginations fly.
First of all, ask them to get into pairs, and with all the pairs working at the same time, have them practise ‘Tangents – It’s Funny You Should Say That . . . ’, until they are comfortable with the idea of taking the story off at a tangent. (See Chapter 11: Listening.)
Then ask them to get into new pairs and practise ‘Confirming the Details – Do You Mean . . . ?’, until they remember how to expand the story from the inside. (See Chapter 12: Building Together.)
Then ask them to practise the following exercise which combines these two techniques and also incorporates ‘Experts’ (see above).
Banish Politeness
With the improvisers divided into groups of three, and all groups working at the same time in different parts of the room, one person in each group starts the exercise off with a simple sentence, then either of the other two can pounce on a word and do one of the following things:
Then while the second person is talking, either of the other two can pounce on a word and interrupt by using any of the three techniques above. Then while that person is talking, either of the other two can interrupt and so on.
As the exercise progresses, each person should try to dominate the conversation with their imaginative ideas until it becomes a sort of battle to be the next person to speak. Some people will find it hard to interrupt when someone else is speaking, so they should be encouraged to ‘banish’ any form of social politeness and nicety and really try to shout each other down. Each person should try to be the one that talks the most, but at the same time, each person should never stop listening to what the others are saying. In fact, they have to listen to what the others are saying because that will be the stimulation for their imaginative reactions. They should be asked to continually vary the three forms of reaction.
RATIONALE This exercise often becomes a bit of a shouting match as each person tries to interrupt. But at this stage, that is not at all a bad thing, because the competitive nature of the exercise and all the noise in the room tends to free up the more inhibited members of the group. Also, while each person is listening to someone else speak, and trying to find a way in to the ‘conversation’, their imagination is working overtime.
DEBRIEFING People must not let their notions of politeness inhibit their ability to interrupt someone else. Everyone has to add their own creative contribution. Some people are heavily conditioned not to interrupt when someone else is speaking: but this is just an exercise, not an indication of how to behave in real life!
Three Bullshittters in a Pub
With the rest of the group watching, ask three people to improvise a scene where they are sitting in a busy pub having a conversation. The sort of conversation where everyone is very lively and everyone is trying to speak at the same time. They should keep the improvisation realistic; they shouldn’t be polite; and they should fight for their turn to speak, using the three techniques they have been practising: ‘Tangents’, ‘Confirming the Details’ and ‘Experts’. Also, as they interrupt, they should each try to ‘top’ what the others are saying. Three other people from the group can help to create the atmosphere of a pub by joining the improvisation. For instance, they could be a barman and two other customers. However, they should set up the bar to one side and be less noisy than the three main ‘bullshitters’. While these other three are creating the background atmosphere, they can practise the exercise themselves, so when it is their turn to be the three bullshitters, they will have had a bit of a warm-up.
RATIONALE This improvisation is to give everyone ample opportunity to let their imaginations run wild. It is very close to the way conversations sometimes go when people actually are in a pub, although a lot of these imaginative inventions will probably be more bizarre than realistic. But as long as the performance or style of the improvisation is naturalistic, it doesn’t matter that they may be talking exaggerated nonsense. In fact, it should be encouraged, because the whole point is to push this exercise to the maximum. Having taken things to an extreme, they can always pull back to more realistic inventions at a later date.
By now, people should be able to concentrate on listening to each other for anything that can inspire or stimulate their imagination. At the same time they should be able to let their imaginations fly without self-censorship. Two things are happening here. The more they concentrate within the scene, the less they are likely to want to try to ‘entertain’ an audience and the more truthful they will become. At the same time they will realise that there is a lot of food for their imagination if they keep focused within the scene. Add to that the notion of ‘being there’ and not having to do anything except concentrate on the truth of a situation and just respond naturally to whatever is said or whatever happens, and they will be starting to improvise in a way that is useful for exploration and discovery. Creative improvisation. Improvisation for actors!
