My relationship with improvisational theatre continues.
It has been twenty years since I agreed to direct an improv troupe at Cooper High School. I knew nothing about improv. But I imagined I was clever, funny, and a first-year Drama teacher. So I said yes. Over the next twenty years I’d learn that improv has nothing to do with being clever, funny, or a first-year Drama teacher. I’d also learn improv has nothing to do with me and everything to do with us.
I spent years teaching high school students about long-form improv. Designing communities, coaching improvisors, and directing groups. I learned through an endless process of joyful failure. Lots of laughter and lots of people hurting people taught me about most of what I figure I need to know about improv.
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I stopped being a high school teacher and started becoming a college professor. I spent years in State College, Pennsylvania building Happy Valley Improv with Andrea, James, Nate, and others. I knew, going into that experience, that improv wasn’t about me. But, of course, we never really know anything until we know it. That’s one of the reasons standardized tests are stupid.
I’ve been learning to let go of my need to control and be controlled over and over again, and improv has been instructive with that lesson. Learning is iterative. Improv is iterative. Improv has shown me time and time again that it is hard for people not to be controlled by our egos. It is important not to be controlled by our egos. It is important not to impose our realities on others at the expense of the group. There’s so much to say about these sentences I just wrote. I say some of it here. Well, write some of it.
I helped design a community with Happy Valley Improv. Helped to open up Blue Brick Theatre. I performed regularly with members of our improv company. I taught classes. I led workshops. I directed groups. I coached improvisers. That work was and will always remain very important to me, even as I grow more distant from that time and space of my life. Happy Valley Improv was instructive to me, in the same ways that building the improv community at Cooper and Roseville Area High School were instructive to me. Always learning.
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I’m frustrated by much of what passes for improv. I worry that so many improvisers, especially those trained at successful improv theaters such as UCB, IO, Second-City, or the Groundlings get caught up in a game of egos. Caught up in a game of being clever, funny, and marketable. Saturday Night Live and Whose Line is it Anyway? have market improv in the United States as a comedic art-form. Meanwhile, Viola Spolin – considered one of the founders of Chicago improv – used improv as cultivate anti-authoritarianism with young people in the 30’s. I served on a doctoral committee of a PhD student at Vanderbilt who wrote beautifully about the history of improv. As I wrote about over the last few weeks, my former high school student Ben wrote a brilliant dissertation about climate change, energy, and improv. There’s so much to be learned from the incredibly difficult work of working in affirmation of difference, of giving up the need to control and be controlled, and of sustaining the emergence of something surprising and new.
The picture above is a flyer for a show I’m doing with another improviser here in Iowa City. Sarah and I have built a group called, well, Sam and Sarah. And we have connected with a few other improvisers in Iowa City. Something of a community might be emerging. I’m trying to be careful about boundaries and energy. I don’t have the desire or the ability to pour myself into creating something here. But I do want to perform. And I do want to keep studying and practicing improv. And so I’m grateful to have met Sarah and the others I’m working with. Whatever comes from this will come from it. That’s another lesson improv is always teaching me.
There is always more improv for me, I guess. And there’s another pedagogical lesson. There’s always more in front of us. And, depending on your metaphysical perspective, there might be forever in front of us. Riffing. Learning to work in affirmation of difference. Improvising and making more life and in doing so, hopefully learning to love and to be loved.
Samuel Jaye Tanner 