Just do it.
In the improv community, I have been privy to many discussions about how to handle consent culture, touching, physicality, and flirtation and sex in scenes and classrooms and workshops, when you can’t plan or prepare in advance.
Kind of like, you know, life.
Where you go on a date and things just happen and there’s no real opportunity to plan.
My improv students ask about this a lot. Usually it happens after a class in which someone has touched someone else, i.e. Player A is on the ground playing some sort of animal, and Player B wants to ride the animal and hold it by the shoulders.
(Yes, this happened.)
Player A is either fine with it, or, as in the case of this class, really didn’t like it. It felt too rough, and she felt stuck and unable to “get out.”
We talked about it afterwards, which I’m glad is a thing that now happens in improv spaces, at least some of the time. It was not so much of a thing when I was a student.
There was a lot of discussion about the relationship with the other player, how playing with people over time leads to the kind of ongoing relationships where you “know” what you can do with someone else, reading cues, how a group can discuss boundaries beforehand, how to “get out” of an uncomfortable touching situation while still “Yes, and-ing” the scene’s premise, etc.
So many words. So much deliberation. So many ideas. So much talk.
So, for real, I felt silly when I was doing a training with staff at a treatment facility for LGBTQIA youth. No one there had improvised except me. I led them in a round of Sound in Motion, a typical improv warm-up I’ve probably participated in hundreds of times and led just as many. It’s a mirroring game where you do your best to mimic what the person next to you does and pass it to the next person. Very simple.
And not once has a group of improvisers done what they did.
They just baked consent right in. They didn’t discuss it, they didn’t ask about it, that’s just what they do and how they are. It is, truly, part of their individual way of being and part of their organizational culture.
When I asked them to do a version where the sound-and-motion escalates or “heightens,” it inevitably led to a point where touching via a hug would be the natural next step.
So, before doing so, one of them just said, “Can I touch you?”
And voila, it was part of the game. It took 0 time, 0 effort, 0 disruption and because of the mirroring nature of the game, became an established norm. Instantly, everyone did it. It just was how it was.
Which got me thinking about how sometimes all this talk and hemming and hawing and trying to really talk it through and figure it out and make sure nothing will be lost or will change too much, is a way of unconsciously upholding the status quo, or negotiating our ambivalence about the real, systemic change that will be necessary to undermine and undo a White Supremacist, hetero-normative, patriarchal, society.
So, the next time someone comes to me with an equity or social justice-based dilemma in improv or any space where I have power or influence, I intend to keep this in mind. I will make whatever change is needed if it feels like the right thing to do and is what I’d want done in “the real world”— even if in this space it might bring me discomfort or be different — and assume everything else will fall into place around it.
I’m an improviser, after all. That’s what I do.