Ruthie: Improv, Week 1

After meeting all 40 of the Fear Experiment participants on the first day, it was nice to get into our smaller groups on Thursday. Nerves were high, but we eased into things this week–a lot of talkie, not very much do-ie. Our instructor, Pete Aiello, who (among many other things) leads improv activities for corporate team building, asked us what we were excited about and what we were afraid of going into this three-month adventure.

He also provided us with some wisdom gems from his years of doing improv. Lessons learned:

Trust your fellow improvisers.

As I mentioned before, we spent a lot of time talking this first night, learning about why we were excited (excited to be silly) and why we were afraid (looking stupid in front of the audience or not knowing what to say). It was a bit touchy-feely, but it was all part of Pete’s master plan: to get us comfortable with each other. Because improv is all about building worlds from nothing with the people around you, we need to know and trust the people on stage with us.

Silence the meta-critic in your head.

Improv is a rare activity where you don’t need to worry about what Pete called “impression-making.” With your coworkers and even with friends, you craft a persona and try very hard to not say or do anything that veers from that persona. With improv, however, you’ve got to turn off the voices in your head that tell you, “Don’t say that; you’ll look stupid.”

Play as if you were a child.

Recently, I wrote a story for the University of Chicago Magazine about Vivian Paley, a retired kindergarten and nursery school teacher who researches children’s play. With young kids, she said, their imaginary play is how children learn to make sense of the world and interact with other children.

Children’s play has “a kind of Second City spontaneity going on constantly. The great thing about the preschool and kindergarten improvisation and the audience is that it is impossible to get it wrong,” Paley told me. “Somehow or other, anything another child pretends or says is considered quite remarkable by all the other children.” This is what improv should be.

Most importantly, and most quotably, if you feel stupid while doing something, do it harder.

This is the one that I imagine will be the hardest for me. When I acted onstage in college, I’d feel like I was being totally expressive and acting my face off, but I’d watch myself on video and realize I was completely holding back. Do it harder.