Because I make my living as a musician, a lot of my knowledge about improvisation is drawn from my experience playing the piano. When you are playing a particularly fast or complex passage of music, it becomes very obvious that you need confidence. Your hands are flying all over the keyboard, trying to accurately hit keys at a rate much faster than your conscious mind can comprehend. If you are confident about your ability to hit the right keys, this feeling of confidence itself, manifested physically, will increase your accuracy. If you feel unsure and hesitant, the physical manifestation of your insecurity will likewise ensure that you will miss many more notes.

A common error is to think of confidence as a kind of “blind faith,” which is actually a manifestation of an enormous lack of confidence. In other words, you think to yourself “I have no belief that I can consciously make myself hit the right notes, so I’m going to fling my hand somewhere in the vicinity of the notes, and just believe on faith that it will hit the right ones.” What you’re actually doing in this case is deliberately shutting down the channel of information which your hand is receiving from your eye and your brain. As might be expected, it makes your accuracy worse rather than better.

Real confidence is simply the intellectual understanding that if you keep the channels wide open between your eye, your brain, and your hand, you will play the notes with perfect accuracy, even at tremendous speeds. Your hand will be accurate because it will be as well-informed as possible. This makes your job as a musician much easier: all you have to do is keep your attention “inside” of every note of the music, and keep the channels (all of your senses) wide open. Accomplish these two things, and you will play the piece perfectly.

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The same thing applies to improvised theater. You must bring yourself to understand intellectually that if you simply “live” inside each moment of the scene, and keep all of the channels (that is, all of your physical awareness and your senses) open, you will “nail” each line and each beat of the scene perfectly.

By keeping the channels open, you will feel confident, because you will have the security of knowing that you can physically feel your connection to the sources of the scene, which are supplying you with everything you need to build your performance. Physically, the muscular experience of “confidence” is the sensation you feel when you know you won’t fall down because you can feel the support of the floor. When you keep the channels open, you will experience a similar muscular sensation of confidence, which will carry you through the scene, feeling secure because you can physically feel that the energy of the scene is feeding you everything you need.

Note that this knowledge is not particularly something to use directly in the scene, or in creating a mental “preparation” to use before starting the scene. If you prepare by saying to yourself “I will be confident in the scene” or even “I will keep the channels open” it won’t be of much help to you.

Rather, say to yourself “I will fully experience every moment of the scene.” Then, in order to do so, you will have to keep the channels open as much as possible at all times, and thus you will be making yourself feel confident.

In other words, confidence is a result of good technique more than the cause of it.

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There is one potential (avoidable) difficulty that can happen when you do an improvisation, just because the previous time we worked together the work happened to go particularly well. The danger of course is that you can load your expectations for the improv, either by hoping that it will be as great as it was the last time, or by having anxiety that it will not be as great as it was the last time.

Here’s how I would avoid this difficulty:

First of all, simply recognize the truth that every time you improvise, it is a unique experience which has nothing to do with any other improvisation you have ever done (except for sharing the same underlying technique). It will have its own perfect form and its own particular qualities and feelings, which cannot be compared in any meaningful way to any previous experience.

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Secondly, recognize that all you need to do is to do the correct preparation in a fully conscious way, and then trust the piece, and the improvisation will turn out very well every time. This is why I refer to my technique as a “technique:” because, if one uses the technique, it enables one to do improvs which are always good. When looking at the tapes later, one will naturally still prefer some pieces to others, but, if you have used the technique, you can always feel confident that the result will be a well structured, well performed and well “written” piece.

Specifically, then, it is worth your while to look at the preparations we used in Sunday’s improvs, since these preparations obviously worked very well. You may perhaps remember some details of your own preparation which you feel were significant and helpful.

What I found significant about our preparations was this: I reiterated the point that you have to think of yourself as deliberately “opening yourself up” or “opening up your pores” in order to achieve saturation. It is not enough, in your preparation, to simply say “I will get more and more saturated.” You need to say “with every phrase I will open myself up more in order to get more saturated.” In my previous email I pointed out that it is important to understand which aspects of the scene are allowed to happen “by themselves” and which aspects are things that you willfully and deliberately make happen. In this form of improvisation, the one action that you deliberately and willfully perform throughout the scene is “I will open myself up in order to get more saturation.”

(Note the rationale behind this thought. “The piece” already exists in its perfect form, therefore you cannot and need not do anything to “improve” the piece; the piece is already perfect. What is under your control is your own “instrument.” You can keep opening yourself up, so that you become a better and better medium for the piece to flow through. By continually opening yourself up, you are improving that which you have the power to improve, and thus allowing the perfect piece to become more and more available to the viewer.)

I think this idea was very helpful to us.

Looking forward to next time.

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Real beginners at improvisation tend to navigate their way through a scene by trying to think up and implement a set of “ideas.” While they are in the middle of performing a scene, they use up half of their brain power by trying to “think up stuff to talk about” or to make decisions about what the scene is like. If it is a narrative or dramatic scene, they also use up a lot of brain power trying to think of all the ways that their ideas fit in with the ideas of their scene partners. What all of this amounts to is that, because half of their brains are busy inventing ideas and manipulating data, they are only partially inside of their character and inside of the feelings of the scene, producing a scene which is shallow, not credible, cluttered, incoherent, inorganic, and overly intellectual.

As an actor begins to acquire technique, she begins to learn that the proper way to navigate through a scene is by feeling the scene, that is, by opening herself up more and more, each moment, to feeling the flow of energy-and-emotions which make up the scene, and thus discovering along the way what the “content” of the scene is. If she doesn’t understand this process clearly, she can become confused about if it is OK or not to “know things before they happen.”

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One actor in my group used to occasionally ask me about this problem. “When the scene began,” he would say, “even before I said a word, I could feel that the mood of the scene was quiet and sad, like an elegy. I even knew that I would begin to speak mournfully about the death of a childhood pet. If I’m supposed to be discovering everything about the scene by feeling it in each moment instead of by thinking up ideas, isn’t it wrong if I know ahead of time what the scene will be like?”

Well, no, actually, it isn’t. This actor was suffering from the following misunderstanding:

If you don’t proceed through a scene by “thinking up ideas,” that means you’re supposed to remain throughout the scene in a state of completely suspended “unknowing.” Each element of the scene enters into you as a total surprise.

That’s not what is meant by “discovering the scene by feeling it.”

The point of “discovering the scene by feeling it” is not to put you into a state of blank “unknowingness.” The point is for you to place yourself, as you work through the scene, as directly and fully as possible into the richly pleasurable flow of feelings-and-energy which is the actual source of the scene, rather than placing yourself inside of your intellectual manipulation of ideas about the scene, which you then have to try to artificially transform into actual feelings, slowing down your responses and taking away the authentic, organic quality of your work. Once you are fully inside the flow of feelings-and-energy, you will generally find yourself in a state of rather full “knowingness,” rather than in a state of “unknowingness.” That is to say: You will “know” what the scene feels like, and you may very well “know” what’s coming up next in the scene as well.

Does this mean that, besides knowing what each moment in the scene feels like, you also “know” what’s going on in the scene in the intellectual sense? (This question is basically equivalent to asking if you would be capable of describing the feeling in words.) It depends. Some of the time, you might also “know” what you are doing in a conscious, intellectual sense. If, for example, the feeling-state you are in at a certain moment happens to be a very familiar feeling-state, for which there are very well-known terms, such as a state of “overwhelming jealousy,” and if the director happened to stop the scene at that exact moment and ask you to verbally describe what your feeling-state was, you’d be able to describe it easily. If, on the other hand, your feeling-state was an odd, hard-to-describe state, and the director stopped you and asked you to describe it, you might not be able to. If you happen to have a sense of poetry and you worked hard at it, you might still be able to come up with a description of it after a while: “I was feeling a kind of light, suspended, round floating quality, almost as if I were a glowing pink soapdish which was floating through a blue sky.” In either case, if the scene wasn’t interrupted by the director, and you just continued to move through it, you wouldn’t need to describe it to yourself, to your scene partner, or to the audience. You would just need to be inside of the feeling as fully as you could be, and allow that feeling to affect your language and your behavior.

The same thing is true about those times in which you “know” ahead of time what you’re about to say. If you are building your scene by staying inside of the flow of feelings, you may, at certain times, have a very clear notion of how those feelings are about to translate into language. You just “know” that you’re about to talk about being in a parking garage, or whatever. At other times you may have no idea how the feeling-state you’re in will translate into language, you only know what it feels like, and you will be genuinely surprised at the words which pop out of your mouth.

The point is that you construct your scene by remaining fully inside the flow of feelings, rather than by partially pulling out of the feelings in order to “think up ideas for the scene.” This means that your goal is not to place yourself in an ignorant state of “unknowing.” You do want to “know” what is going on at every moment, in the sense of “knowing what it feels like.” This kind of “knowledge,” knowledge in the sense of being completely filled up with feeling, is the knowledge which becomes the very basis of the scene. So, while you do want to keep yourself in an “open, receptive” state, a state where you can constantly pick up more and more information (feelings) from everything which is going on around you, that doesn’t mean you’re trying to remain in a state of “blankness” or “emptiness.” On the contrary, you’re trying to feel as fully saturated, as filled with feeling, as you can possibly be at each moment.

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The improvs I do at Lake Ivan don’t have a narrative structure, so I use a “musical” structure. But the same principles of technique could be applied to a narrative scene and to comedy improv.

In the current version of our technique, we prepare by imagining that the piece we are about to perform already exists in its perfect form. We imagine that it is like a piece of music, by which we mean a flow of energy, rhythms, and emotions. Our job, as performers, is to physically feel, in our bodies and with our voices and our words and our silences, every moment of this piece of music. Note that our job is not to perform, recreate, show, or explain the music, but just to experience it physically. We proceed as if the actual words or actions we perform could be anything at all, as long as they help us connect to the feeling of the underlying piece of music.

Note that you can use the same concept in a narrative or comedy improv: the difference between our nonnarrative form and a narrative form is that in a narrative structure each person is supposed to remain inside the point of view of an individual ‘character.’ The narrative version of our technique would be to imagine that the scene you are about to perform already exists in it’s perfect form, and that your job is to remain inside the point of view of your character, and feel every moment of the scene (by using your voice and words, your silences, and your physical movements.) Note that the actual words you say and actions you perform are incidental, the “real” scene is the underlying flow of energy and feelings with lie underneath the surface.

This underlying layer of energy-feelings-and-musicality is the lifeblood of the scene. It is the source from which everything in the scene springs. To the extent that you are able to fully immerse yourself in that energy flow, and feel it with every cell in your body, your work and the scene itself will flourish and thrive. To the extent that part of you moves outside of that energy flow (to worry about something, self-criticize, etc.) your work and the scene itself will be weakened.

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When we are preparing for the scene, we imagine that the flow of energy-and-feelings which is the scene is like oxygen. If we remain fully inside of it, we will experience great pleasure, and our performance will flourish. If we move outside of that flow, even a little bit, our work will start to flounder, wither, and die, and so will the scene itself. This makes us work in a very instinctual, low-on-the-brainstem sort of way: INSIDE THE FLOW: GOOD FEELING!! OUTSIDE THE FLOW: BAD FEELING!! Just as if we were trying to stay inside of a place that had delicious, nourishing air, and not go into the surrounding area which had poisonous air.

The preparation could be phrased this way: The scene I am about to perform already exists in it’s perfect form, as a flow of energy-feelings-and-musicality. To the extent that I keep myself completely immersed in that flow, my performance will flourish, so I will do whatever it takes to keep 100% inside of the flow.

The formulation “whatever it takes” is very useful, since it allows your intuitive self to solve the problem of getting back inside of the flow in the fastest, most efficient way, without needing to remember a complicated set of instructions.

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Here’s the Safety Device I use:

I’ve been working on improvisation long enough that I’m very familiar with the sensation that I am “inside” the flow of the scene.

In the abstract, nonnarrative work I do with Lake Ivan, “inside” the flow of the scene simply means I’m inside the flow of feelings-and-musicality which makes up the scene.

In a narrative form such as comedy, “inside” the scene also means inside the reality of the situation and my identity (character).

The safety device:

Whenever I sense that something about the scene is not right, I remind myself “just be inside of the scene, and anything you say or do (or don’t do) will be good.” This is true. As long as you place yourself inside the flow of the scene, you can’t make a bad choice. Everything will be at least at the Basic Professional Level.

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Once you are securely back “inside” the scene, you can work on opening yourself up and being ever more fully “inside” the scene, which may lift up the scene above the Basic Professional Level to an even higher level.

The usefulness of the Safety Device is that it is simple, it’s fast, and it always works.

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Several things from this book struck me as being striking metaphors for the basic principles of improvisation which I use in my work.

Wilczek writes about a view of the world in which all of space (what we think of as “empty space”) is filled with several kinds of energy fields, and refers to these overlapping fields as The Grid. He writes:

In the Grid view of the world…Particle A affects the field fluctuations around it, which also affect another particle, B. This is our most fundamental picture of how a force arises between A and B.

I find that this image has very close parallels with how I like to view the interaction between actors in an improvised scene. Rather than thinking that the two actors “react” to each other, I prefer to think of the whole space of the performance as an energy field. Everything that the two actors do changes the fluctuations in this field, and this changing of the field in turn affects both of the actors. It’s a great image for the concept of working in Counterpoint Form.

Speaking of fields, Wilczek writes that Einstein and other physicists originally resisted thinking in terms of energy fields, and preferred to analyze interactions using a particle model. The problem with the particle model is that in order to understand the current state of a set of given particles, if you rely on a model based solely on particle interactions, you need to know the previous state of each of the particles at every previous point in time and in space, which makes the calculation almost impossible. According to Wilczek, though, the field model is much more fruitful. He writes:

That move from a particle description to a field description will be especially fruitful if the fields obey simple equations, so that we can calculate the future values of fields from the values they have now, without having to take past values into account.

In other words, by adopting a paradigm based on fields, you no longer have to track all the events of the past, because you find that all of the information from the past is found (mathematically) within the present moment. To me, this is a great image for the idea that an actor in an improvised scene does not have to interrupt the flow of a scene and try to go back and consciously remember all the things that have already happened in the scene, in order to make the scene into a coherent, connected whole. When I first started trying to perform improvisations, I had a tendency to panic in the middle of scene because I was worried that I had “lost the thread of the scene” and that the scene was wandering around aimlessly. I would try to fix this by making myself remember all of the things that had already happened in the scene. You could say that I was approaching the scene using a “particle model.” Over time, I realized how counter-productive this behavior was, and that the better way to ensure that the scene is a coherent, connected whole is to remain fully embedded in each moment of the scene, and feel how each moment becomes the next. Each moment contains the full sum of all the energies leading up to it, so by remaining fully inside the flow of the moments, I can carry the whole history of the scene forward with me, without having to “step outside of the action” and keep track of everything. I have adopted a “field model” approach to the scene. I write about this idea extensively in my entry on “following the curve.”

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Another interesting metaphor I drew from the book comes from Wilczek’s description of every particle as being surrounded by a cloud of “virtual particles” which have the opposite charge. Every positively charged particle is surrounded by a halo of negative particles, and vice versa. Metaphorically, this reminds me of the tendency of improvisations to structure themselves around “polarities,” that is, pairs of opposite qualities. When one character talks about wanting to be alone, the subject of the scene usually shifts soon to being about the need for company. If one actor mentions his need for everything to be orderly, then the need for chaos and unpredictability usually comes up in the same scene. Director Antero Alli has actually created a whole series of wonderful paratheater exercises based on these polarities, which he writes about extensively on his website.

There is one more metaphor from the world of physics which has been important to me for a long time, and I’ve often told this image to actors I work with. Physicists aren’t able to observe quarks and most of the other subatomic particles directly, because their interactions are too tiny and too short-lived. When they conduct experiments using particle accelerators, they use devices which record traces and marks of different kinds which result from the particle interactions, and the physicists interpret these traces rather than observing the interactions directly. You could think of these devices as making a kind of “shadow graph” of the interaction.

I like to think, when I’m performing a scene, that the real scene itself, the reality of it, is not the words, sounds, or actions of the performers. The scene is a sequence of emotional states, rhythms, and energy states. In other words, the real scene is the inner experience of the scene, not its outward manifestation. The actual words, sounds, and actions that we make are a kind of by-product of the scene, a “shadow graph” left by our experience of the inner states.

To me, this is a very fruitful idea, because it enables me to stop thinking that I have to “play” all of the inner states I’m feeling. I no longer think that I have to come up with words or actions which “express” my inner state. Instead, my real goal is simply to be inside of these states, to feel them as fully as I can, and I use whatever words or actions are handy in order to better connect to the feelings. The words themselves could be anything at all, and they don’t have to do the job of “performing” or “expressing” the feelings. The more I connect directly to the feelings themselves, the more legible the “shadow graph” of my words and actions will be, and the easier time the audience will have in using my outward behavior in order to connect with the inner reality of the scene.

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Some performances are also too underplayed. Certain moments can come off as vague, underarticulated, and simply hard to read.

The trick, naturally, is to play each moment at exactly the right size, the right energy level. But how do you do this?

The basic model for improvisation which I use in my technique, as outlined in this blog, is that you approach each scene as if it already existed in its ideal form. That is, you view the scene as a continuous flow of feelings, energy, rhythm which already exists, and your job is to experience as fully as possible each moment of that flow, by using your words, your silences, and your actions. One aspect of that flow of energy is its size.

Each moment of the scene will have its own energy level, on a continuum from very low and quiet to vast and overwhelming. (Of course, most moments are somewhere in the middle.)

As you go through the scene, feeling the flow of the scene, one aspect of what you are feeling is the size of the energy at each moment. Your goal should be, at each moment, to feel the exact size of the energy flow, not a hair bigger, and not a hair smaller. (Remember, at different moments, you may be “using” words, silence, actions, or stillness as a tool to feel the size of the flow, but this shouldn’t make any difference. You will be able to feel any size of energy, regardless of whether you are silent or talking, still or in motion.) Try to get the size of the flow with pinpoint accuracy.

You can practice feeling this aspect of the flow by doing an improv making nonverbal sounds, and making yourself especially aware of the size of the energy flow at each moment. (See the section on working “holistically” for a discussion of why you should work on feeling size as an aspect of the whole flow, rather than trying to concentrate on “just feeling the size by itself.”)

There are different challenges for you to practice when doing such an exercise. If you come to a moment where you genuinely feel a tremendously huge flow of energy, it may be difficult to find enough “largeness” in your physical instrument to accommodate all of this energy. In a moment of very tiny, nuanced energy, the flow may feel almost imperceptible. In all the moments of middle-sized energy, it takes practice to feel the exact shade of “middle” which you are doing.

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Make sure you have no biased beliefs that “bigger” moments are “better” in any way: funnier, more exciting, more dramatic. They’re not. You could have a scene that consists exclusively of quiet, subtle actions and words, and, if the performance is perfectly “true” to the underlying energy, it will be a great scene. In general, it’s a good idea to have an attitude that you are almost resisting having any huge, dramatic climaxes. That way, if a huge climax does occur, it will occur because the internal needs of the scene are so strong that the scene overcomes your resistance. The result is that the huge outburst will seem completely justified. (Just like in real life, where most people do not enjoy having huge dramatic displays in public, and only do so when an inner necessity compels them.)

In other words: what makes any moment in the theater moving and believable is when it is played organically, that is, it is exactly true to the flow of energy which underlies the scene. The enormously big moments, if there are any, will seem believable because the huge amount of energy has built up organically. The quiet moments will also seem justified, if they fit with the underlying dynamic. In fact, the jarring experience (for the audience) of feeling like a moment is “overplayed” or “underplayed” refers precisely to the feeling that the size of the performance is not organically related to the feelings underneath.

Therefore, go into the scene with absolutely no preconceptions about climaxes, high points, low points. Every scene will have its own organic shape. Some scenes will have no extreme high energy moments. Some will be almost all high energy. Your goal is to discover, by feeling it, exactly what the shape and contour of this particular scene turns out to be. The truer you are to the size of what you are feeling, the more believable and organic the scene will be.

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Most actors who have basic training in acting technique understand what to do when they are not speaking during an improvised scene. Just as in a scripted scene, the goal is to stay “inside of” the circumstances of the scene, and “inside of” the flow of your character’s reactions to everything that happens. This goal remains constant, whether you are speaking or not. You naturally allow yourself to be aware of the literal meaning of what the other characters are saying, as well as the underlying emotional tone, just as you would in real life, because the style of narrative theater demands that everything you do, even if comically absurd or exaggerated, lies “within” the storyline.

But what are you to do if your goal is to create a more abstract, poetic form of theater in which the actors are creating an evocative collage of poetic texts rather than telling a story? If the scene has no story, what exactly are you doing when you aren’t speaking? If you’re not responding to the other actors by reacting to the literal meaning of what they just said, how are you responding? One senses that an abstract scene must have a “structure” which the actor remains “inside of” throughout the scene, analogous to the “storyline” structure of traditional theater, but what exactly is this structure?

The answer I came up with for my own work, after many years of experimentation, is that the structure I preferred to work with is a musical structure. The scene, a collage of improvised texts, is really an organically whole composition which, like music, has the logic of a connected series of feeling states. Each feeling state naturally evolves into the next one, which creates the “meaning” of the scene, exactly as it does in a piece of music. (At least certain styles of music, for example Romantic music.)

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This means that, by analogy to the actor in a narrative scene, the job of the actor in the abstract scene is to simply be “inside” of the flow-of-feeling-states which IS the scene’s structure. Her goal is to be “inside” of the scene at all times, whether she is silent or speaking. Her silences are just as full of feeling, and have just as much of a rhythmic, musical form to them as her speeches do. She simply speaks when speech helps her feel more connected to the flow of the scene, and is silent when silence helps her feel more connected. Her task (“be as connected to the flow of the scene as possible”) remains constant. (Much of this is covered in my previous entry “words as a tool to help you feel.”)

However, she will soon discover that if she tries to “listen” to what the other actors are saying, that is, to really focus on and understand the literal meaning of what they are saying, as we’re used to doing when performing a traditional scene, it will throw everything in the scene off. After all, it is precisely this characteristic, of “responding to the literal meaning of words” which distinguishes the narrative-based from the nonnarrative styles of theater. Since the goal in narrative theater is to stay “inside of the storyline,” as an actor, you naturally want to take in the literal meaning of what others are saying. (You, the actor, want to take in the meaning, even if it happens to be a moment in the scene when your “character”, self-centerdly, is not listening to what the others are saying.)

By contrast, my goal is to create a form of theater in which the texts are all related to each other primarily through the underlying feelings and musical qualities, and only secondarily or accidentally through the literal meaning of the words. (I think of this style as being a way to encourage audiences to be comfortable inside of their feelings and intuition, without having to rely on following a story.) In theater of this style, if you listen too closely to the literal meaning of what the other actors are saying, it destroys the scene. It draws you completely out of the flow-of-feeling-states, what I like to call the “understructure,” which the scene is based on. It tempts you to entertain yourself and the audience by creating a kind of “surface unity” to the scene, where, by making clever connections between your own subject matter and the subject matter of the other actors, you trap the scene at the level of intellectual cleverness, and prevent yourself from discovering any deeper, really interesting connections.

The solution I developed is, when I am not speaking during a scene, to focus on connecting to the voices of the other actors primarily on the level of emotional and musical tone rather than on the level of the literal meaning of the words. I listen in the same way you listen to someone speaking in a language which you don’t understand. I don’t go so far as to try to “block out” the literal meaning; it would be a wasted effort to try and prevent myself from taking in the meaning of the words. It is perfectly fine that on some level I “know” that my partner is talking about a supermarket, or about flying to the moon. But I don’t focus on taking in the literal meaning; I put actual effort into connecting to the emotional and musical qualities of her voice.

To be more precise: my effort at all moments in the scene is to feel the emotional-and-musical flow of the scene as a whole. If I’m the only one speaking, that means that I’ll feel most of this flow within my own voice. If my partner and I are both speaking simultaneously, I’ll feel this flow in the combination of our two voices. If I am silent and my partner is speaking, I’ll primarily feel this flow as being “inside of” my partner’s voice. And, of course, if everyone is being silent, I’ll feel this flow as being “inside of” the silence.

The fascinating result is, when the actors make no conscious attempt to connect the literal meaning of what they are saying to what the other actors are saying (but also make no attempt to block out the literal meaning) and instead focus all of their efforts on connecting to the other actors’ voices on the emotional and musical level, the texts which the actors come out with are automatically deeply connected, on the literal level, on the metaphoric and poetic level, as well as on the emotional level. In fact, typically, the scene which emerges is so coherent that it feels as if every single line in it is addressing a single topic. And this happens without any conscious effort on the part of the actors. What I am calling “not listening” to your partner, apparently leads to what improvising composer Pauline Oliveros referred to as “deep listening.”

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I was getting into a rut, as always, by not observing the Improv Technique which I know so well is the One Way Which Always Works Best!! In this particular case, I was falling into the following habit: I would observe the musical outline of the dance exercise I was about to play for, noting the movement’s particular accents, dynamics, and phrasing, and then I would play a piece of music which had the exact same accents, dynamics, and phrasing as the movement had. I fell into this habit because this is a way of working which comes up with a result which “works,” if what you mean by “it works” is: you have solved the problem of “coming up with something to play” which doesn’t do any harm to the dance exercise. However, both I and the dancers would quickly grow bored by this mechanistic and uninspiring approach.

First of all: I reminded myself that I was falling under the following common misapprehension: I was thinking of the problem of improvising music for dance class as the problem of “coming up with something to play which goes with the movement.” This is the same mistake as an actor who thinks of the problem of performing an improvised scene as “coming up with an idea/a character/a plot/a new twist to the plot/some dramatic material.” Wrong! And the wrongest thing about it is: it is pretty easy to “come up with material,” so, when operating under this misapprehension, as soon as you have “come up with something,” some part of you breathes a sigh of relief and says “oh good, I’ve accomplished my task,” and you then just “play the idea” for the rest of the scene, without going any deeper or further into the material. You are in a state of Complacent Rest. This is what makes it so boring to use this approach.

The actual task of an actor in an improvised scene is, of course: “be inside every moment of the scene, and continually open yourself up, so that you feel the flow of the scene more and more fully.” It has nothing to do with “coming up with material.” The material is already there, and doesn’t need you to “come up with it.” Note also that this task is never finished, which means that you must constantly work on it throughout the scene, which means that the scene is alive all the way through.

Similarly, my task when playing for the ballet class is “feel the flow of the movement (in the exercise the dancers are doing), and to keep opening myself up so that I feel it more and more fully.” Again, it has nothing to do with “coming up with something to play.”

PART TWO:

Here’s an even more interesting issue which underlies my problem: the question of how much of the “Surface Detail” of the dancers’ movement should be clearly reflected in what I am playing. That is, since I know that I should be trying to connect to the underlying emotion-and-musicality of the movement (its “Deep Structure,”) how many of those little details of accent and phrasing should be reproduced by sounds in the music? This is analogous to a question that comes up in theater improvs. In an acting scene, the Surface Detail is the actual words being said (and the gestures being made). The Surface Detail is also the subject matter being discussed in the scene. The Deep Structure of the scene is the flow of feelings-and-musicality which lie underneath the scene. If, as an actor who is trying to use good technique, you know that you should be directing your effort to feeling the Deep Structure of the scene and becoming one with it, you may wonder how much it is proper for you to be aware of verbal details. Is it OK if you seem to know ahead of time the exact words you’re about to speak? Is it OK if you know ahead of time what the subject matter will be? Will this interfere with your ability to stay connected to the Deep Structure?

Here’s the answer:

The Deep Structure, the flow of feelings-and-musicality which is the underlying engine which drives the scene, sometimes is identical with the Surface Detail. And sometimes it is not: sometimes the Deep Structure has one kind of feeling to it, while all the Surface Details may have a completely different rhythm and tone to them. You can almost think of it like this: the flow of a scene is like an ocean, which has powerful currents beneath the surface. At times, the details of the little waves on the surface may be very different from the powerful currents beneath. And, at other times, the powerful underneath currents might “surge” upwards, so that the surface detail is the underneath currents. So, the answer to the question of “how much should I be aware of the Surface Detail” is answered thusly: this is one of the aspects of improvised performance which you must allow to simply take care of itself. You shouldn’t worry about it.

Allow me to clarify this, using both the dance class and the verbal improvisation as examples.

In the dance class, it is true that I should never deliberately set out to try and reproduce the surface rhythmic details of the movement in my music. I should approach every exercise by telling myself that my task is to connect to the Deep Structure of the movement, that is, to its underlying feeling. However, when I do that, I find that at times parts of the music that I end up playing very very closely mimic the surface rhythmic details of the movement. at times almost all of what I’m playing mimics the surface details of the movement. At times, almost none of it does. (However, the music that I play always has the same meter and tempo as the movement, since this, in traditional dance forms, is invariably a part of their Deep Structure.)

In which situations does it happen that my music has the same Surface Details as the dancers’ movement? If you remember that a classroom is a pedagogical situation, rather than a strictly artistic one, you will realize that one of my goals as a dance accompanist is to help teach the students how to feel a connection between the music and the movement, and also how to understand difficult or unusual rhythms. Intuitively, I can accomplish this goal by making sure that my music feels like it is “connecting me to the students.” Therefore, if a part of the dance exercise I am playing for has an unusual or tricky rhythm, I will often instinctively end up playing that same rhythm very clearly in my music, because I know that the students won’t get it if I don’t give them the extra help, and I will feel that I’ve lost my connection to them. If a particular rhythmic part of a dance step happens to be very striking, and forms an inherent part of its stylistic character (as in a tango), I may end up playing that rhythmic motif very clearly. If I’m playing for complete beginners, who have trouble understanding all rhythms, I may end up playing most of the movement’s Surface Detail in my music. If I’m playing for a “company class” for professional dancers, I may end up playing hardly any of the Surface Detail in my music.

The important things to remember are: that it doesn’t matter whether the music contains none of the Surface Detail, some of it, or all of it. As long as my conscious intention is to connect to the movement’s Deep Structure, there may or not be some of the movement’s Surface Detail reproduced in my music, and my intuition will generally make the correct choice about it. I shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that “connecting to the Deep Structure means not connecting to the Surface Detail.” This is not true. The two things are completely independent of each other.

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In the example of a verbal acting scene: I must remind myself in my preparation for the scene that my one task is to connect myself more and more fully with the scene’s Deep Structure, with its underlying flow of feelings-and-musicality. I should not deliberately set out to try to connect to the scene on the level of Subject Matter (that is, I shouldn’t try to connect to the scene primarily by being aware of whether we are talking about shopping at a supermarket or about the weather on Mars). However, at times during the scene, I will be completely conscious of what the subject matter is, and what it most probably will be in the immediate future. At times, I will be completely aware of the exact words I will be saying next. At times, I will be completely aware of the exact words my partner is saying. At times, I will be less aware of these things. As long as I make sure that, with each new line I speak, that I keep reconnecting and reconnecting and reconnecting to the scene by “placing” myself fully into the Deep Structure, then it makes no difference whether or not I am consciously aware of the subject matter and the exact words being said.

For example, suppose I am doing a monologue, and the monologue turns out to consist of a description of the amazingly beautiful flowers in a garden. If, every time I begin a new sentence, I consciously reconnect myself to the Deep Structure underneath the words, to the flow of energy beneath the specifics of what I’m saying, then it is Perfectly All Right if the next one hundred statements are all descriptions of the same garden, and are all logically connected to each other. When I come to the hundred-and-first statement, and once again I reconnect to the Deep Structure, and this time the statement comes out as a diatribe against mathematics, I will know that the subject matter changed organically, it changed because the flow of the Deep Structure had changed at that moment. On the other hand, if, with each new statement, I did not reconnect to the Deep Structure, but simply kept on talking about the flowers in the garden because I knew that “that’s what the monologue is about,” then I would be making a serious mistake. I would have lost my connection to the Deep Structure which is the lifeblood of the scene. The scene would no longer be organic. And I would be stuck in the subject matter.

(See the blog entry “Words As A Tool to Help You Feel” to read about the exercise of going back and forth from words to nonverbal sounds, as a test to make sure that you are connecting to the scene through the Deep Structure, rather than through the Surface Detail.)

Again, the important point to remember is that it is perfectly ok to be aware of the subject matter in advance at times, because it is not true that “connecting to the Deep Structure” means you have to avoid being aware of the Surface Detail. The two things are completely independent. Making sure that, with every sentence, you reconnect to the Deep Structure, is a task that you must consciously make happen through great deliberate effort throughout the scene. The question of how consciously aware you are, at each moment, of the subject matter and the verbal Surface Details of the scene is one of those aspects of the improvisation that you must allow to happen by itself, and it will take care of itself in the best way at each moment.

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I certainly do not mean “feelings” in the sense of “being very emotional all of the time on stage.” I’m not a super-emo guy.

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I use the terms “feelings” or “feeling-state” in a broader sense, to refer to everything which you feel during the scene. Anything you feel is a “feeling-state.” Blank neutralness is a feeling. Machinelikeness is a feeling. Deadness is a feeling. These are all feeling-states which one can explore and go deeper and deeper inside of. It is not necessary for a scene to contain rage or joy in order to use a technique of building the scene based on the “feelings.”

Note that these feelings include all physical feelings, and in fact even the “emotional” feelings are experienced primarily as physical sensations. I tell the actors in my group that they should try to experience everything as physically as they possibly can. (This doesn’t mean they have to jump around vigorously all of the time. It just means that they experience the energy, emotion, and other feelings as something inside of their bones, muscles, nerves, and cells.) If you experience the scene physically, it will become visible to the audience.

Are there other terms I’ve used, and you’re not sure what I mean by them? Leave a question in the comments, and I’ll post an explanation of the term.

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But in some situations, the directive “go inside of the feeling-state” doesn’t seem specific enough. There can be many things going on in any given moment of a scene: conflicting emotions, rhythmic or musical qualities, visual imagery, characters and dramatic situations, body sensations, and the complex combinations of these things which are coming from several performers at the same time. What aspect of the moment are you supposed to “go inside of?” Should you pick one, and if so, which one? Or is it a question of somehow going inside of everything, all at once?

In some situations, it seems intuitively clear how you can “go inside of the feeling state.” If the moment you are in is already dominated by an obvious “feeling” such as anger, you would simply go inside of the anger, allow it to open up, and this would lead you to the next moment. If the current moment is dominated by a physical sensation such as itchiness, you would enter into the itchiness to find the next moment. But what if the current moment isn’t dominated by an obvious emotion or physical sensation? What if it has several qualities going on at the same time? What if your imagination, in a given moment, is dominated by visual imagery which seems abstract, such as a blue space filled with purple spheres? Such a moment may not even have any human figures in it, let alone an obvious “feeling state” to go inside of.

To find the way to navigate through moments of this type, it helps to think of the directive “go inside of the feeling-state” as meaning “look for that part of the current moment which is most obviously a source of feeling” and move inside of that place. You could say that you are moving into the part of the scene which is giving off the most heat, the most energy, or which is simply something likely to open up into a source of feeling. You navigate through the scene as a sort of heat-seeking missile.

To cite some examples:

In the moment which is dominated by an obvious feeling-state such as anger or itchiness, the anger or the itchiness is the hot spot, so you would move inside of that.

In a moment where you are looking at a wooden chair, and have just made a statement about sitting in the chair, you might enter inside of the action of sitting. Enter into the feeling of really needing to sit down, into both the physical sensation and the emotional need, and allow that to open up and take you to the scene’s next moment.

In the moment dominated by the visual image of a blue space with floating purple spheres, you could enter inside of the color purple, and try to open up the feeling-state associated with the color. Alternately, you could enter inside of the roundness of the shape of the spheres, which might very well connect up, in your mind, with some previous imagery from the scene. Or you could equally well enter into the calm spaciousness of the blue.

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The important point to keep in mind is that, as you take a breath between phrases or beats of the scene, and you prepare to reconnect with the underlying feeling-state and navigate to the next moment, you train yourself to go towards that aspect of the current moment which most attracts your attention and seems most capable of being a source of more energy and more feeling. You don’t have to pause or step outside of the moment in order to “make a choice” and you don’t have to worry about “whether or not you chose the right thing” because any choice you make will be the “right choice.” Any aspect of the scene which attracts your attention, and which yields feelings, energy, and imagery, will work equally well to lead you to the next moment. The more you remain fully immersed inside of the energy of the scene as you make your choice, the more inevitable it becomes that your choice will lead you into imagery and feelings which are central to the unfolding story of this particular performance and its concerns.

One real world example that I think illustrates the potential of this idea well can be seen in the improvisation which forms the basis of my 2010 film Marvelous Discourse. The improv is an extended dialog between myself and Ian W. Hill, in which we had made multiple references to prophecy, oracles, and visions. At one point, I talked about watching a puppet show performed with shadow puppets. Ian responded with an almost facetious comment about those “shadow tricks” people sometimes do at parties, using their hands, and he said he had learned to do “Abe Lincoln, both with and without his hat.” His comment, with its jokey tone, had no obvious relationship for me with either the content or the emotional tone of the scene we had been performing, as I searched for a way to “go inside of” what he had just said.

Intuitively, I saw that the most attractive part of what he had evoked was the image of Lincoln’s hat. In my mind, it was as if the hat was emitting a faint light for me, compared to the rest of the moment, which was comparatively barren and blank. I imagined myself entering into the hat, or becoming the hat, and I began a speech which concentrated on the word “stovepipe” (the name of the style of hat which president Lincoln wore), and this image of the long, iron stovepipe eventually led the two of us to the idea of a lightning rod, a conducting bar of iron, which inevitably led us back to the images of the oracles, and prophecies which were the main center of interest in the film. Because I had remained firmly embedded in the world of the scene as I made my choice, Ian’s seemingly irrelevant remark about Lincoln’s hat became a portal which led the two of us inescapably deeper and deeper into the heart of the story.

Using your scene preparation, make yourself into a heat-seeking missile, and train yourself to move instinctively and directly into that aspect of the moment which gives you something to feel. The feeling will lead you to the imagery and the language of the next moment, which will lead you deeper into the heart of the particular world and particular story of your scene.

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Somewhat mistakenly, in the past I had emphasized that Classic Form was more like a piece of music, where the emphasis is on the continuity, and following how each moment becomes the next moment. Landscape Form, I had said, paid no attention to continuity, and each moment was its own experience.

Now we have clarified that although Classic Form does indeed emphasize continuity, it is certainly not the continuity of following the scene along like a piece of music. Rather, it is the continuity of deliberately unfolding each moment, in order to discover the next moment. In practice, this actually does not feel very much like following a piece of music or reading a musical score.

Landscape Form, on the other hand, really does consist of simply following the scene along. I don’t compare it to a piece of music, because the way the energy changes in the space is more often like changing weather or changing light than it is like a piece of music, but it is still true that the difference between the two forms is precisely that Classic is the form where you navigate through it by unfolding, and Landscape is the form where you navigate through it by simply following along, without needing to deliberately unfold anything.

In our previous preparation for Landscape, I emphasized that each moment of energy in the space always has two qualities: rhythm (how it flows), and feeling tone (the emotional or textural quality of how the energy feels at each moment). The moments of the scene may have many, many other layers and qualities as well, but they always have a way of flowing, and they always have a feeling tone of some kind. Taken together, I could refer to these two qualities as being the weather in the room. (But I wouldn’t use this shorthand term in an actual preparation, because I still need the reminder that I need to feel both rhythm and feeling tone.)

So Landscape Form, as previously defined, means to use my vocal line (words and silences) to feel the weather in the room at each moment. The Landscape warm-up exercise reminds us that the vocal line is an active, tactile tool, like your hands, and that (unlike your eyes) you need to reach your voice into the room over and over again to check what the weather is like at each moment. It is as if you navigate through the scene by asking over and over “What’s the weather like now? What’s it like now? What’s it like now?” Since we are navigating through the scene by continually using our vocal line to see what the weather is like at each moment, we are indeed navigating by using one particular level and simply following it along for as long as we care to. This is why I have always said that working in Landscape feels like you’re doing something far simpler, in essence, than working in Classic. It feels simpler because you are simply following the weather. There is no need to push for constant unfolding, for constant exploration and discovery.

However, it is important to note that plenty of unfolding occurs throughout a Landscape scene, all by itself, and that this unfolding is in fact the very thing that makes the scene interesting to watch. Looking at the Landscape Form film Suggestive Gestures, you can see that the actors do not, by any means, stick solely to the weather qualities of rhythm and feeling tone. Many other levels make their appearance throughout the scene: characters, dramatic situations, visual images, spatial sensations, tactile sensations, ideas, etc. The actors are still navigating through the scene by simply following the energy weather, but these other levels of meaning appear spontaneously throughout, giving the scene its flavor and interest. So, in an almost exact mirror image of the formula for Classic Form, we can say that Landscape Form is the form where you navigate through the scene by following the weather (the rhythm and feeling tone) at each moment, but you allow whatever unfolding takes place by itself to occur whenever it needs to. (As opposed to Classic, where you navigate by unfolding, but allow the following along to occur whenever it needs to.)

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It is also important to note that Landscape Form still has its own Prime Directive, but a simpler one than the one used for Classic. If you allow yourself to simply and lazily follow the weather along through the scene and leave it at that, the scene will be too flaccid and wandering, and indeed it is precisely this kind of improv which is called noodling.

The Prime Directive for Landscape states that, throughout the scene, I will keep opening myself up to feel the rhythm and feeling tone of the energy in the space more and more physically, and more and more fully. It is as if I am simplifying the Prime Directive of Classic, by asking myself to keep feeling the weather level more and more fully, but leaving out the requirement to feel it more and more completely, meaning I don’t have to unfold it. The actors in Landscape Form are like energy barometers, in the sense that they are like instruments that continually register every nuance of the weather in the space. So the Prime Directive states that we have to continually be self-improving barometers, and make ourselves register the nuances in the energy weather more and more fully and more and more sensitively. Meanwhile, other levels of meaning are allowed to appear in the scene wherever they need to.

It turns out that this very simple form of Prime Directive is perfectly sufficient to give a Landscape scene a sense of urgency and drama, to raise the stakes in the scene and prevent it from feeling like it is wandering aimlessly. In the film “Suggestive Gestures” I used the visual form of a labyrinth, where a pathway leading to the center is a very literal representation of the idea of a journey, to indicate that although the scene had absolutely no connected themes, no unfolding, and no narrative through-line, it still generated the feeling of taking the viewer on a journey. The Landscape Prime Directive is enough to create this narrative feeling all on its own.

To use a metaphor: imagine a film of a landscape where the light and weather changes throughout. Now imagine that it has been filmed so that the camera starts out completely out of focus in the beginning, and slowly and continuously comes into greater and greater focus throughout the film, so that the last moment of the film is in completely crisp focus. Our ability to follow the details of the changes in light, weather, and mood improves throughout the film. This is what the Prime Directive in Landscape accomplishes.

Note that this is just a metaphor. I’m not suggesting, by any means, that you should start off a Landscape scene by deliberately doing a bad job of registering the energy, and only slowly getting better at it. Of course, you should still begin the scene by doing the best you possibly can at registering the energy of the opening moment, and then continually improving from there. I’m simply saying that, by using the Landscape Prime Directive, you’re injecting drama and interest into the scene by creating a sense that the landscape is constantly becoming clearer, more real, more specific, more intense, and more filled with detail. Its like a weather report taken from self-improving barometers.

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Here is a recap of the refinements we’ve been making to the concept of saturation or The Prime Directive, along with further thoughts:

The essence of the idea is that, in the Lake Ivan Classic improv form, we navigate through the scene by following its Unfolding Structure, to borrow an idea from Christopher Alexander. This means that, at each moment in the scene, you take the complex experience of the energy of that moment and open yourself up to feel it more fully and more completely, and this brings you to the next moment in the scene.

More fully is shorthand for allowing yourself to feel the quality of the energy in as full a way as you can. Note that this doesn’t mean the energy you’re feeling gets more and more intense. Depending on what the energy is doing at that moment in the scene, it may be growing, remaining the same, diminishing, or changing into something different. It simply means that you are maximizing your own capacity to be filled with the feeling of the energy, at what ever size it happens to be just then.

More completely is shorthand for feeling the moment in more ways, on more levels, and bringing out hidden, latent aspects of the moment. (We discussed this at length earlier.) Both these terms are purposefully kept vague, so you can use them in the actual preparation for your scene, without specifying exactly what more fully and more completely will mean at any given moment in the scene.

(If you find that this formulation of more fully and more completely doesn’t work for you there is an alternative formulation which works better for some people, including myself.)

Note what this clarifies for us about the Prime Directive, and exactly what makes it “prime” in the technique. Previously the Prime Directive was simply defined as “feeling the flow of the scene more and more fully.” It was almost like an extra instruction, something we were supposed to do while improvising, which made the scene better in some unspecified way. We are now clarifying that this action of unfolding is actually the method by which we navigate through the scene. It says that in the scene, we continually explore, discover and uncover. It’s how we get from each moment to the next moment, from the first moment all the way to the last. As such, we can say that the action of unfolding the scene is actually our main action in the scene (in the method acting sense): it is what we focus on actively doing throughout the scene, and it enables us to find our way through all the twists and turns of the scene. It is not “extra,” it is our central action.

At the same time, we can say that we don’t want to navigate through the scene by taking just one level of feeling, for example the musicality and rhythm of the scene, and simply following it along from moment to moment. If we do this, we find ourselves getting stuck in the level of musicality. If we try to navigate through the scene by following a fascinating train of associations, from idea to idea, and from image to image, then we are making the mistake of riffing, of getting stuck at the level of images and ideas. If we try to navigate through the scene by following one tactile sensation to the next, we are making the mistake of getting stuck in the level of tactile sensations.

It is important to note that the experience of following something along still happens all the time within a Classic scene, and it is perfectly OK, so long as we don’t navigate through the scene by following. For example, it would be very common for a long stretch of a scene to follow along a changing rhythmic quality. This is natural and helps to give the scene a clear rhythmic shape, so long as we continue to discover each new moment in the scene by unfolding it and feeling it more fully and more completely. It also often happens in a scene, for a lengthy stretch, that the ideas and images mentioned are all directly connected to each other, and this is also natural and helpful to the shape of the scene, so long as we are not navigating to the next moment by following a chain of associations, but rather by unfolding each moment to find the next moment.

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We are already familiar with one very clear way of experiencing this distinction between navigating by following and navigating by unfolding. I’m speaking of our use of dialog moments, where the two characters appear to be answering each other back and forth in a dialog format for a part of a scene. These dialogs sometimes last for one exchange, but they can also last for several minutes. I think we’re both already familiar with how we handle these moments. We don’t navigate through the scene by simply following the dialog, as actors do in standard improvs, where you follow the line of what I say to him, and how he answers me back. Rather, we navigate by continually unfolding the scene, and feeling each moment more fully and more completely, bringing us to the next moment. While we’re doing this, the appearance of having a dialog can last for quite a long while, but we’re still not navigating by following the line of the dialog. Inevitably, a moment comes where the unfolding leads us into saying a line which is not part of the dialog any longer.

So we will now treat all forms of following the scene in a similar way. A musical, rhythmic line may continue for a while in the scene. A chain of associated ideas and images may continue for a stretch of the scene. A sequence of tactile sensations may continue for a while. But, at all times, we actually navigate to each new moment by unfolding. The parts of the scene where we seem to be following along are allowed to occur wherever they are needed, but we don’t use them for navigation.

This helps explain why the warm-up exercise in which we use a piece of recorded music may have been helpful in some respects, but it was a counter-productive warm-up exercise in other respects, as I have dimly suspected for a long time. Using recorded music did indeed give us a general model of the idea that the scene already exists in its perfect form. But the exercise, after all, consists of following the music along from moment to moment. We did concentrate on constantly feeling the music “more fully,” but we nevertheless navigated our way through the scene by following the music along, almost the way one would read a musical score. This is not helping us at all to practice navigation through unfolding the scene.

The newer warm-up is more useful. In the new exercise, we practice the idea that the scene already exists in its perfect form by using the real space we are in, and the real objects around us as the “existing text” from which to build the scene. We simultaneously use our hands and our voice (or words) to feel and experience the energy we find at a particular spot in the room. As we navigate through the scene, we try continuously to feel the energy more fully and more completely. We can either stay in the same spot and use the same object, or we can enlarge the area we’re using, or we can move to an adjacent spot, or even follow a “ray of energy” taking us through the room to a new area. The rule is either stay where you are, or move away, whichever one allows you to feel the energy more fully and more completely.

This exercise allows us to practice the Unfolding Structure. Using our hands and voice (or words) together helps us to feel that we use our vocal line as an active tool to explore the space, the way we normally use our hands. Using the real room and the real objects allows us to experience that the scene is something which already exists in its perfect form. We are practicing throughout how to navigate through a scene by constantly opening ourselves to feel the energy more fully and more completely. We are also get to experience that through unfolding each moment to find the next one, we sometimes find a more fully realized version of the same place where we’ve been, and sometimes it takes us to a new place, and reveals a new facet of the scene. Both are fine, and we use whichever one gives us a fuller, more complete feeling.

This new information also helps me personally address the problem of following the curve. This concept was originally developed because I would sometimes panic, in the middle of a scene, and worry that the scene was wandering around aimlessly, and that I no longer knew if the material we were doing had any relation to the earliest parts of the scene.

In the new unfolding paradigm, this image of following the curve obviously no longer applies, because our action of navigating through the scene is decidedly not one of following a curve. It’s the wrong image. If we navigate to each new moment by unfolding the present moment, then clearly the next moment will always be related to it, because the new moment is always an enhancement of the previous moment, bringing to light its latent and hidden aspects. It becomes clear that the best method for ensuring that all of the material in a scene belongs together in the same scene is by using the navigational tool of unfolding at every moment. The scene is all one connected whole, just as a quilt is, once you have fully unfolded it. It is worth noting that when we used this image, in our last rehearsal, I experienced no panic whatsoever about the scene wandering around or becoming disconnected. Looking at the videotape afterwards confirmed that that material was indeed highly coherent when we used this technique.

The implications of this technique for Landscape Form are explored in the next entry.

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This Week with David Rovics

The Joy of Tsuno

I’d like to talk with you about Artificial Intelligence. I know from talking with many of my friends, fans and acquaintances that there is both vast skepticism and vast ignorance out there about what AI is, what it can do, and where the future is going…

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5 months ago · 8 likes · 6 comments · David Rovics

For context, I recommend that you read this article and also listen to Rovics’ AI generated music. To my ear, he is absolutely correct that he’s able to create excellent music in this manner, and also the fact that his (human written) lyrics are often scathing attacks on the very technology he’s using to create the track is witty and ironic, and makes his critique much more effective, if only by demonstrating the reality that this technology is formidable. In fact, many of his lyrics are not just witty, they’re brilliant. By the time you get his point, you’ll be wishing you didn’t. (The truth always hurts when it hits this close to home.) I get the sense that it is precisely this irony which is Rovics’ motivation for this project. As an artist, he seems quite interested in our complex and changing relationship to technology, and the effect (especially the economic effect) this is having on artists and the arts. This project seems to be his way of exploring these questions by entering the belly of the beast, by fighting fire with fire.

The article “prompted” me to think about why I, personally, have zero attraction to working in this way, either to create music or imagery for my films.

The first question I had is technical: in Rovics’ description of his process of laboriously crafting and re-crafting verbal prompts for the music, it sounded like, for me, it would simply be faster and easier to play a musical idea myself than to use a generator like Suno. Generally speaking, if I have a musical idea in mind, I can immediately play what I’m thinking of, or I can get pretty close to it pretty quickly, so it just seems as if I can get better results faster by playing it myself than I could be writing and re-writing AI prompts. Even if I wanted to work with a singer to sing my music for me, rather than singing a song myself, it seems like it would be faster (as well as more interesting) to tell a singer how I would like her to change the emphasis and phrasing of a melody, rather than trying to goad Suno into doing the same thing through tricky prompts. It would interesting to hear Rovics perspective, and, as a very experienced musician, how he compares the speed and convenience of realizing his musical ideas by simply playing them himself, as opposed to using Suno. (This is leaving aside the question of how to get the polished, professional sound of a studio-produced track. It is obviously cheaper and faster to do this with AI than with human musicians.)

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Looking more deeply into this question, however, I began to think about the more fundamental reasons I’m not interested in working with AI tools to create music or imagery. Writing and performing good music is notoriously difficult. It is difficult to craft a composition so that it works in just the way you want it to, and it is equally difficult to develop the physical, technical and mental skill to sing or play an instrument that fully realizes your idea. And it turns out that it is precisely this difficulty that I find most valuable about making music (or film). It is actually the central reason why I make music to begin with.

For me, being an artist is an opportunity for self-exploration. As readers of this SubStack know, I am attracted to using improvisation because it is a way of diving into the vast and fascinating pool of the unknown which resides inside of me, and inside of my collaborators, and gaining the skill and finesse to express the process of self-discovery in ways that make engaging, exciting music and film. Certainly, as Rovics describes his process of using AI generated music, there is a certain amount of self-exploration possible in that process, but for me the most direct and powerful way of getting right into the depth of my self-exploration will still be putting my hands directly on the piano keys. There is no more direct form of self-engagement than this. It turns out that the challenge, the difficulty, of making the effort to find “the good stuff” within me to generate my music, is the entire reason I’m making music to begin with. Without the opportunity to make that effort and learn about myself, I wouldn’t get anything out of composing. As John Barth wrote, “The key to the treasure is the treasure.”

I also do not discount the difficulty posed by physical performance: the difficulty of the body, of pianistic technique. I have always considered myself, in fact, to have pretty bad technique, as a pianist, probably stemming from the fact that I began playing at age 11, which is pretty late for piano. Throughout the 40 plus years that I have supported myself solely as a pianist, I’ve been continually amazed that people actually pay money to listen to me play, considering my limitations. Certainly, my technical limitations as a pianist are part of what has drawn me to improvised music. Of the two sides of my musical personality, the composer and the performer, my skills as composer are so much stronger than as a finger-crunching pianist that I have been able to make a living playing improvised music precisely because this is the form of music in which my musical ideas, my (spontaneous) compositions, count for much more that my ability to run up and down scales with perfect control.

For this very reason, I deeply value the difficulty of learning to play my own music well. I have known for a long time that finger technique is my weakest area as a musician, the area I need to work on the most assiduously. For this reason alone, the fact that it is quite hard for me to play my own ideas myself is what makes me more interested in doing it that way, and completely uninterested in generating beautiful renditions with AI. If I used AI tools, I wouldn’t have any opportunity to practice and improve my playing, and so it has very little value to me.

This is not simply a matter of looking for opportunities to practice and improve my piano playing. Because of my perspective as a person who doesn’t have the most fluent, easy piano technique in the world, I have a deep respect for the resistance posed by the body, for the challenge of trying to get my fingers to respond instantaneously and flawlessly to my musical ideas and impulses. To practice playing the piano is, for me, to forge deeper and stronger communion between my mind and my body. It is to come closer to being a fully integrated human being. As an embodied creature, a person who will spend my entire life living in my body, it is of (literally) vital importance that I strengthen and deepen my mind/body connection every day of my life. Among other things, I believe health depends on this. There are very few illnesses and injuries that can’t be effectively addressed by increasing physical awareness, increasing consciousness-in-the-body. Once again, the key to the treasure is the treasure. Every opportunity to experience one’s body in more nuanced, more subtle ways, is an opportunity to discover health and to become a fully integrated person. Learning to play an instrument well is a powerful tool to accomplish this.

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Here’s an alternative formulation of the navigating technique, one that works better for me:

For each moment of the scene, I will go inside of it and open it up in order to discover the next moment. I begin the scene by experiencing the feeling-state quality of the first moment, and then I go inside of that feeling and open it up to find the next moment, which brings me someplace else. I then go inside of that feeling-state and open it up to find the third moment, and continue to navigate from moment to moment through the scene by using this method.

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Go inside is mainly a reminder to myself that my movement in the scene is always inwards, towards the feeling and not merely following something along, and certainly not moving away from the feeling. If I experience, during one moment in a scene, that I am hanging off of a cliff, I then explore what’s going on inside of the feeling of hanging off the cliff. If I feel calm and quiet during one moment, I then explore what’s going on inside of this calm. If I become a character who is an obsessively orderly person, compulsively arranging things into categories and files, I then explore what is inside of this compulsive behavior.

What I don’t do is to simply follow the scene along, simply see what happens next.

Using this navigation technique, the scene becomes like a set of magical Matryoshka dolls, in which you go inside of each moment in order to discover the next moment. However, due to the peculiar properties of exploring inner spaces, when you go inside of a feeling-state, the place you discover on the inside is likely to be larger than the outside, not smaller, in the sense that it is more richly detailed and feels more expansive. Since the inside is generally larger than the outside, the process of exploring by moving inside can continue indefinitely.

The second part of the formulation, to go inside the moment and open it up, is a reminder to allow hidden, latent images and feelings to become manifest in the scene. (This is discussed in detail in this post.)

A good way to practice this formulation is a form of the alternating exercise, a scene in which you go back and forth between saying a few lines of text using real words, and saying a few lines using nonverbal vocal sounds. Every time you return to using nonverbal sounds, you can use it to go directly inside of the current feeling. Then, every time you allow words into the scene, you can open it up by allowing the words to reveal hidden content in the scene. You don’t have to be too fussy or keep track of when you are going inside and when you are opening up. Just keep going back and forth between verbal and nonverbal vocalizing, and remember to constantly move in, towards the center of the current feeling-state.

Once you have trained yourself to navigate through a scene by constantly moving inside of the current feeling, rather than merely following the energy along, you can do the same thing without needing to use nonverbal vocal sounds.

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What does this sensation really mean? Does it mean that, because I was so completely inside the music, I didn’t hear it? Certainly not. There is nothing wrong with my hearing. Does it mean that I didn’t “know” what the melody had been? This is also not the case. In a dance class, the musician generally has to play each piece of music twice, as the students do each exercise once on the right side and once on the left side. The first time I play each piece, it is completely improvised and therefore is a surprise to me. But when I play it the second time, by entering once again into the same “emotional space” as I had been in before, I generally play an improved version of the same piece of music, with most of the melodies very similar to what they were the first time. Clearly, some part of me “knows” what the melody was note by note, since I am able to repeat it almost exactly.

The sensation that I have “missed” my performance is caused by the fact that, being 100% inside of the music, I can’t appreciate and enjoy the music in the same way that an audience usually does. An audience member is not generally 100% inside of the music. (Except at key high points of epiphany.) They are generally partly inside of the music, and they are partly outside, able to observe their own responses to what they are hearing. They are able to think, in passing, “What a beautiful melody! That was so beautifully shaped! It’s so haunting and lonely sounding.” Etc. Of course, they are also able to be consciously aware of all the things that strike them negatively, and things which simply leave them unmoved.

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It was this sort of experience which I was unable to have. While playing, because I was completely inside the flow of the music, there was no part of me in reserve, able to comment to myself about how good the melodies were, so I was unable to “appreciate” their quality.

I have had the exact same experience after performing an improvised theater piece in which I was completely inside of the flow of the scene; I finish, somehow just “knowing” that I have said things that were extraordinarily witty, well-phrased, or poignant, yet it is as if I had just missed my own performance.

Of course, in the trade-off of being a performer rather than a viewer, I receive something I find much more valuable. By being fully inside of the piece, I am able to viscerally feel the music in every pore of my being, which far outweighs the value of being able to sit outside and “appreciate” it. But there is a feeling of genuinely having to give something up by going so far inside of your performance that you can no longer enjoy it as an audience does. This is why people have always spoken of great performances as being “generous” and as being “a gift to the audience.” You allow them to have all of the conscious appreciation.

This is also the reason why, when you see a performer who has a deep appreciation of their own wittiness or their own greatness, and is clearly standing up on the stage and thoroughly approving of themselves after every line or after every phrase of music, it is so irritating to watch that one generally feels like throwing something at the stage.

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Here’s a new version of the preparation language which I recommend using for an improv in the form which I refer to as Classic Form:

I will keep opening myself up to feel each moment more fully and more completely. This will bring me to the next moment in the scene.

This language helps us to keep ourselves receptive to experiencing each moment on more levels and dimensions, with more physical commitment, and with more depth and detail, but without specifying ahead of time what the more levels and dimensions will be.

There are always many, many levels on which each moment can be experienced. Not all of the levels are prominent or important for each moment. Here are just some of the common levels of feeling we use all the time in our improvs:

the rhythm of the moment, and the way speech flows

the size of the energy, whether small, medium, or large

the emotional tone or feeling

the degree of tension or relaxation

the images associated with the moment

the ideas associated with the moment

a sense of a dramatic situation

a sense of being a certain age, gender, or a certain kind of a person

the body sensations of the moment

the tactile, physical, material feeling of the moment

the landscape or setting associated with the moment

and many other possible levels one might experience

To navigate through the scene in Classic Form, one should always want to experience each moment of the scene on as many of these levels as possible. If we are experiencing it on two levels, we should want to add a third. If we are experiencing it on ten levels, we should want eleven.

Note that all of this is done by direct, physical intuition, and not by intellectual analysis. There is no effort to keep track of what the levels are, or how many of them are being used. Of course, during the scene, one would never think consciously “I have the musical level and the texture level, I should add the dramatic situation level.” One would never think “oh great, I just added the level of spatial setting and body sensation.” One would certainly never think “I’m only using two levels, I need to add a third one.” Rather, as our preparation suggests, we are simply trying to experience each moment as fully as we can, and then open ourselves up to feeling it on more and more levels, without ever needing to label, identity, or analyze what the levels are or even what the content is. We just feel it, rather than thinking about it. The goal is to gain new information, so that we can find the next moment in the scene.

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The essence of the idea is contained in the phrase feel the moment more fully and more completely We should always want more, and specifically more levels and dimensions of feeling and meaning, as well as the full experience of the levels which we already have. We should want to add and open up additional “feeling centers” in ourself, to add more dimensions to how we experience each moment. We should never simply coast on the very great, ample pleasure of a particular level which we’re enjoying very much, but constantly look for hidden and latent centers of meaning and feeling which are implicit in each moment of the scene, and use our new discoveries in order to find the next moment.

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As outlined in the “Relationship to the Audience” entry, if your job as performer is not to show the scene to the audience, and not to enact or perform the scene for the audience, but only to feel the energy-and-emotions which are the underlying structure of the scene, then what is your relationship to the audience? How do they make a connection to the scene?

As I wrote in that previous entry, your job as performer is to feel the energy of the scene as a physical sensation. You feel it in your body. You use words to feel it physically with your voice. The more you feel it as a physical sensation, the more visible it will be to the audience. The more you feel it physically with your voice, the more audible it will be to the audience.

Therefore, a goal of good technique would be to feel the energy of the scene in as physical a way as possible, using your whole body. A good sentence to say to yourself as part of your preparation for the scene would be “My goal is to experience the flow of feelings-and-energy which constitute the scene as physically as possible, with every cell in my body.”

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But what does it mean to “feel the energy of the scene as physically as possible?” Suppose the mood, the energy you feel underlying a certain moment of the scene, is a mood of anxiety, of expectant dread, as if something awful were about to happen. If you tell yourself to “feel the energy more and more physically,” does that mean that you will hunch your shoulders, squint your eyes, dart your glance rapidly at all the corners of the room, and in general act like an extreme caricature of paranoia, straight out of the Yiddish Theater?

Only if you misunderstand the instruction. “Feel it more and more physically” does not mean “do all sorts of physical movements and gestures which represent the concept which you associate with your idea of that energy.” Note that, like all of the improv instructions which I use in my technique, this instruction is not an instruction to do anything at all: not make gestures, not make movements, not anything. It is a “feel this” instruction, not a “do this” instruction. All you need to do is be present inside of your body, and feel the dread and anxiety which are the underlying mood of that particular moment, and concentrate on feeling that this anxiety and dread is a physical sensation, flowing through your arms, legs, torso, your entire body. The slight, involuntary movements that you perform in order to maximize how much you “feel” are more than enough to convey your character’s state of mind, and in a suitably underplayed style.

And speaking of style: suppose you were in a similar situation in a scene, but you could feel that the entire energy of the scene was grossly farcical, exaggeratedly ridiculous and comic? In telling yourself to “feel the energy” of the underlying dread “as physically as possible,” you would, in this case, be led naturally into allowing your body to take on all of the ridiculous, farcical and comic exaggerations of posture and gesture which you wouldn’t have done in a more naturalistic, dramatic scene. The reason for this is that the difference between two scenes, which have essentially the same characters and plot, where one is a naturalistic drama and one is an exaggerated and farcical comedy, is precisely this difference in the physical energy. In the farcical version, the emotions are allowed to overflow into the most grotesquely exaggerated physical form possible. (The words and the character’s reactions to the situation are likewise permitted to overflow into a larger-than-life style.) Intuitively, if you feel that you and your scene partner are both feeling the scene in this comic, farcical style, you will naturally allow your body to take on a more and more exaggerated version of the mood of the scene. Style, too, therefore, is something you and your partner feel as a physical sensation.

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This will typically happen in moments of the scene where the emotional energy is itself about a feeling of being stuck, such as when your character is panicking about a dangerous situation, and doesn’t know what to do, or your character is trapped in feelings of rage or hopelessness. It can also happens when your character (or the flow of the scene) reaches a state of extreme low energy and listlessness, and it feels like the scene will never move again. How can you get unstuck, when the energy you are inside of feels like a completely stuck energy?

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It is important to remember that when I say that you proceed through the scene by feeling the scene’s energy, that this energy is always in motion. It is always flowing in some way, whether it moves smoothly and easily, or with a jerky and irregular flow, whether it moves with lightning speed, in a moderate tempo, or with glacial slowness. The energy never comes to a complete standstill. And, in fact, when you “feel the scene’s energy,” one of the main things you are feeling about that energy is how it is moving.

The next time you feel like your energy is stuck, remind yourself that you must feel how the energy flows. If your character seems trapped in a mood of rage or frustration, keep focusing on feeling the way that that rage or that frustration gradually (or maybe suddenly) transforms, breaks through, and becomes the next, deeper development of the scene. Simply saying to yourself “feel it flow” should be enough of a hint. When the scene seems to be stuck in a moment of terminal slowness of stillness, remember that although the energy may be moving with a thrilling, tantalizingly glacial slowness, it never completely stops. If you keep your focus right inside of the incredibly slow motion, you will catch the exact moment in which is starts to pick up again, and the audience will be thrilled to feel everything almost come to a halt, and then pick up speed again. (You can hear Beethoven use this dynamic trick over and over again, in his piano sonatas.)

You can incorporate this idea into your preparation for the scene. Instead of saying the words “I will feel the energy of the scene” as part of the preparation, make sure you always use a phrase such as “I will feel the flow of the energy of the scene.”

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The larger question is about the actor’s use of her intellect, her emotions, and her physical sensations as resources to find the material of the scene. Almost everyone is very, very used to using their intellect, their ideas, to “think up” material for an improvisation. It isn’t necessary or helpful to remind actors to incorporate ideas into their work; people generally have such a strong habit of listening to their own ideas that no force on earth can stop them from doing so. The actor’s ideas will end up a part of her work without any conscious effort on her part. The two resources that actors are not used to using, and must constantly remind themselves of, are emotions and physical sensations. (This is especially true for language-based improvisations.) Telling yourself that, with every phrase in the scene, you will go into your center and open yourself up more, in order to feel the scene more fully, is a way of reminding yourself to use your emotions as a resource. Telling yourself to feel the flow of the scene in every cell of your body is a way of reminding yourself to use physical sensations as a resource. (The image of feeling it “in your cells” is a way of accessing sensations without feeling you are required to perform particular movements in order to feel something.)

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So how are these two requirements related to each other? What you need to find is a non-hierarchical relationship between the elements of what you experience during the scene. This is one example of the larger requirement of improvisation technique: that you use everything you feel at every moment as the source for the scene: your physical sensations, your emotions, the energy and presence of your scene partner, the color and light and ambient sound in the playing space, your sense of the rhythmic flow of the scene, etc. These many elements are experienced holistically, that is, as one complex entity, not as a huge list of separate components. The improvisation space is a boundaryless space in which everything you experience is part of one complex whole moment.

The magic word that can help you (in your preparation) to find this boundaryless, complex whole space is “includes.” To make sure that you cover the two most important resources, physical sensations and emotions, you can remind yourself to feel the scene with every cell in your body, which always includes the emotional center. But this word can also help remind you of any part of the complex whole of experience for which you feel you need a special reminder. An actor who keeps her eyes closed too much of the time can remind herself to always include the space she is in. An actor who has a dull, insensitive and repetitive sense of rhythm can remind herself to always include the rhythmic qualities of each moment. An actor who doesn’t pay enough attention to the physical relationships between actors and props can remind herself to always include an awareness of spatial relationships.

Even the Prime Directive of the technique, the requirement that I open myself up more with every phrase, in order to feel the flow of the scene more fully, is based on the concept of “includes.” The more I open myself up, the more feelings I can include as resources for the scene. All difficulties I experience during the scene can be solved by opening myself up more, so that I can feel, that is include, more of the scene’s source.x

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