by Nils Peterson
I was on my way to a fun Improv class taught at my senior living quarters. I had been thinking about Leonard Bernstein’s remark “It’s all jazz” before I set out. He was saying something like – from Beethoven to Bebop, music is, in whatever form, the human response in sound to the joys and woes of living in this world, that the attempt to separate “serious music” from “HiDee, HiDee HiDee Ho” was a foolishness, in a way, a refusal of joy.
Then the thought came, “it’s all Improv,” meaning life. The more I thought about it, the truer it seemed.
In Improv, you’re given a situation and you must find language, bodily as well as verbal, to make sense of it, to make it work
We start at the joining of sperm and egg, but they’ve got a moment-by-moment careful script and follow it dividing and multiplying and turning into arms, legs, fingers, toes, head, ears, nose, face, and all that stuff in the skull. Then a miracle. There is a moment when what has been gathered together becomes aware of itself. A term that some Christians call ensoulment. (When that happens or what a soul is is a debate for another time. Let’s just think about it as a center of awareness in a bunch of cells who have been following the blueprint print offered by the DNA erupting out of that first meeting of sperm and egg.)
Life is pretty comfortable until one day you find yourself being squeezed and pushed and shoved and out you come into a world of bright lights, strange shapes, strange freedom and you kick your feet wave your arms open your mouth and an unpleasant sound comes out and it doesn’t stop until you find yourself on a warm place, and the opening that let the sound out enjoys sucking and that sucking brings something good.
Well time goes by and you’re more and more in the world. You become aware of the sounds made by the big others and try to imitate. That they have meaning comes along. Now you’re diapered and dressed and can make those lower parts move and carry you from one place to another and you’re given the prompt “Be a good boy.” So you have to figure out what that means. They sit you on the toilet. You have to figure out how that will make you good. “Don’t touch” that is said a lot.” Realizing that everything is not yours comes as a shock. You struggle to deal with that. There is another role that is offered, the role of “bad boy.” What does that mean?
Now you’re dropped off at someplace called school. You’re in kindergarten. There are others your size, some them girls and a big other person who isn’t a parent but seems to be like one and she has her version of what makes a good boy and a bad boy are and you have to find what that means for her and how to play your part. Somewhere along the way you come to realize that there is a you that’s you and a you that the world sees and that they aren’t quite the same. That gives you much to ponder about if the you that is you was given a pondering nature by that distant meeting of DNA’s.
You learn in the second grade that if you come back from the bathroom with your fly unzipped you no longer fulfill the definition of good boy and you can no longer sit in the A row with the real “good” boys and girls. And somewhere you begin to suspect that you are being offered scripts to act out that aren’t in accord with that you that is watching what is going on really wants. You learn that sometimes you may have to act out what is a lie to get along even though you’ve been told lying is not good.
The adolescence comes and we find ourselves drawn to another. What kind of language is needed? What face must you put on? Confident? Shy? You have to figure does your body need to strut, does it need to be “cash” what is – probably you haven’t got the word yet – the role must you play?
By now you’ve got the idea. You’ve been given the situation, but not the script and you must improvise. Though you see too that there are scripts being thrust at you by parents, church, later on by jobs, by partners, maybe by children. Each has its own face-choice and word-choice, each with its advantages and each with its limitations.
Your secret job through all of this is to find out what you really want to be so you don’t end up being what someone or something else wants you to be. It’s a lifetime’s job this improv game. Tomas Transtromer, the Swedish Nobel laureate, puts it this way: “Task: To be where I am.” In other words, you must learn to be who you are, where you are. It seems so simple, but, of course, it’s not.
There are other ways of describing what I’m talking about. This way is offered by Ginette Paris in her book Pagan Graces, meditations on Dionysus, Hermes, and Mnemosyne. On Dionysus:
“The expression ‘to wear a mask’ also means ‘to play a role.’ It is from this perspective of a masked God, a God who loves to play many roles, that we discover an ordinary, every day Dionysus, in addition to the Dionysus of great occasions, celebrations and stage sets. This day-to day Dionysus is as important as the other…for he is the inspiration for the personal and social rules that life and society invites us to play.”
In other words, the situational scripts within which we improvise.
Again from Ginette Paris: “Jacob Levy Moreno, a psychiatrist who had been an actor and director, defined the neurotic as someone whose repertoire of roles is meager and dried up, which prevents him from adopting to the multiple requirements of life in society. Certain roles are not available to the neurotic because they’ve been repressed.”
Well, much to brood on (my DNA had a brooding gene) as I head off to class.
For this moment I conclude – “It’s all improve.”