“I am your
long lost sister.”
“No, you are
not.”
Scene=dead.
“I am your
long lost sister.”
“YES, you
are!!!! You have my same weird birthmark shaped like garlic.”
Okay,
granted, my example was not funny, but do you see how the scene takes off? Now
we are going places! The possibilities are endless.
Needless to
say, I have witnessed and, at times, been a part of great improv. I talked months ago in the blog about The National Theatre of the World who are some of the greats at improv. And of course I
am married to one of the masters of improv, as you know. But these people are
not great because they are funny, although that is a big part of it. No, they
are great because they know how to play the game the way it should be played and
that is summed up by one simple phrase: Yes
And.
Yes And
is key to great improvising. If I make a statement in a scene, you should
accept it. YES and then add to it ...
AND.
Last week
when Colin and I were at Chicago Second City I got to thinking about the Yes And and thought, wouldn’t it be
great if we all Yes Anded in LIFE?
What if we confirmed and added to every statement someone offered us in
conversation?
Even if we
didn’t agree with the statement, it would work. You could totally disagree and
yet still forward the thought.
“I think
that Picasso was the greatest artist of the 20th century.”
“I hate
Picasso. I could paint his crap with my feet.”
Yes Anding
would maybe make it...
“I think
Picasso was the greatest artist of the 20th century”
“Yes, he had an amazing way of looking at
the world and I think it’s great that
you appreciate his work, but I tend to love his earlier more realistic stuff
more.”
We open the
conversation while still holding our opinion. We don’t block the person. We don’t
downgrade their opinion. We show respect for other ideas and thoughts and we add our opinion.
I do confess
that this becomes a stumbling block around, “Don’t you just love Nazis?”
However, you still might even be able to Yes
And that with:
“Yes, I thought their uniforms were very
slimming, but I really despised their guts.”
See? A nod
to the slim tailored uniforms keeps the ball in the air. The conversation is
still afloat.
Seriously
though, all I am saying is that especially with venues like Facebook, I am
finding that people just ram negative comments at us all the time. And in
conversation I rarely hear anyone start a sentence anymore with “In my opinion, dot dot dot...” On the contrary, it often seems that we state things as fact. No
wiggle room. I did not like the movie you liked, therefore said movie stank. Do
not challenge me.
I find this
blocking stance especially irksome regarding the arts. Art is subjective, isn’t
it? Isn’t that the beauty of it?
I was never
a modern art gal until the boy at the age of four enticed us into its world and
now, although I certainly don’t like everything I see, I have grown to not only
appreciate it, but to understand its beauty and strength.
“Mommy, I
want to go into that room where there is a giant number five balancing on a
bloody bird feather”.
“No,
sweetie, that’s modern art. It’s scary. We don’t like it.”
Yes And
brings us...
Yes,
sweetie, that looks amazing. Let’s go in there and see the giant baby head
balancing on a feather and it will
become your lifelong passion and we
will bond over it and as a result we
will see modern art all over the world and
sometimes it will make us laugh and
sometimes it will make us puke and we
will have wonderful conversations about it over dinners and we will have wonderful conversations about it over the years and we will meet at modern art galleries
when you move away from home and it
will be good and it will stimulate us
and we will always remember the first
time we went there.
Yes And.
After all, isn’t that what we do every day of our lives ... improvise?
Barbara: Aw,
Deb, you made me both laugh and teary with this one. How can I not laugh at
“slimming Nazi uniforms”? But there is a core truth here that hits very close
to home for me. Did you know that one of my most challenging times was when I
worked with someone who (unwittingly) said no to almost every one of my ideas?
It took me a long time to realize how frustrated, confused, and ultimately belittled it made me feel. When I
finally realized what was happening, I pointed it out to him—and, to his
credit, he was totally shocked. Ironically, this habit was so ingrained that,
as we continued to work, his solution was mostly a tentative Yes But. Which sounds better, but is
essentially the same as “no”. Worst of all was how I ended up reacting—by turning
in desperation to my own crude, heels-dug-in-stubborn and strident no, No, NOs! *embarrassed shudder* (lesson learned)
What an amazing
and wondrous experience it is when someone takes your idea or thought or notion
and expands upon it, allowing it to billow up, bigger and wider, until it is
airborne and gloriously huge. Yes And
is flying and dreaming and collaborating and connecting and relating and
hearing. Yes And is the best kind of fuuuuuuuuun.
