When I was starting off as an improv teacher, and leading one of my first or second classes solo, I was told that I was going to have a student in my class with a significant stutter. I am embarrassed now to admit that my reaction at that time was irritation. Why would someone with a stutter do improv? This was going to make the class challenging and difficult for the others. And for me, as the instructor.
In a random twist of class sizing and distribution, the student was moved from my section to another instructor’s. That improviser is now one of the most talented on the scene in Washington, D.C. and every time I see him perform I feel like an ashamed idiot.
I can talk about how my reaction was a result of my insecurity as a new teacher. I can talk about the impacts of my own imposter syndrome. I can talk about how being a woman teaching in a male-dominated improv world influenced my response. I can boil this all down to explain how my anxiety led me to feel irritation, which really reflected self-doubt at my ability to handle this in the class. All of those things were there and true and real.
And, I am relieved to report that if the same scenario presented itself today, I would respond completely differently. I now know that improvisation was invented for all students, regardless of what they bring to the experience. I now know that I can handle any student in an improv class and help the group to do so as well. I now know that every student — and anything they bring into the room with them — adds to the quality and experience of improvising, and doesn’t take away from it.
That, in fact, working with what is, is the heart of improvisation. Duh.
But I didn’t always know this, and to mark this moment and this experience as a reflection only of those issues would not be to do it justice. For improvisation does, and must, put us face to face and body to body with differences and diversity and experiences that we may well otherwise be able to avoid — even when the people who embody them are literally right next to us.
If, for instance, I am in a talk therapy group with a person who is blind, or in a wheelchair, I can still evade and ignore many realities of our different experiences. I can talk past and over them while grappling with our emotions and the challenges of our lives and marriages and work and whatever else. Unless speech or hearing is the differing ability facing us, we can co-exist next to one another without really sharing and connecting around our very obvious and real difference, which shapes and impacts who we each are and how we move through the world.
Improvisation has the power to force us to deal with those things, together, in a connected and supported and important way. I learned this, ironically, as I do most things, while “leading” or “teaching” improvisation as a speaker at a conference.
Having me lead the conference was a risk for the organizers. We needed to move the conference to a theater space instead of the conference room that had been used for years prior. While I would provide some information via PowerPoint, my plenaries would be fully experiential and not didactic. And there would be no preview or plan. I would have a sketch idea of what we might do, but I would make final decisions about the course of the presentations on the group’s energy, the space, and the questions and experiences related in the debrief periods after games. There was much to be anxious about, for everyone.
In addition to this new format, I was also aware of great anxiety existing around some participants. People would whisper to me, or tell me over the phone in our planning calls, “Now, you know Janet is in a wheelchair. And Sara is blind.” Unlike when I was presented with the student who stuttered years before, this information didn’t phase me.
I was, in fact, genuinely perplexed by everyone’s concern. I had learned, over time, to help my students adapt improvisational games to their own physical and emotional capacity, saying, “It’s like yoga or working out. If you need to make an adjustment for yourself compared to the instruction I give, feel free. Do whatever I ask, in your way.” I would often use the physical limitations presented by my previous pregnancies or periodic foot or back pain as an example.
But others didn’t have my experience in learning this previously. They were not so sure. I would introduce a game and someone would interrupt my presentation, gently pulling me aside to say, “But Sara is blind. She can’t do this.”
I would nod to indicate I had heard and continue with what I was doing.
They anxiety was making me a bit anxious, and I also kept thinking, “If Sara is navigating the world and her life without being able to see, surely she can navigate a simple improv game.” There was a certain condescension I heard in the comments that I became aware of. The intent, I was sure, was to be accommodating and respectful and sensitive and loving. The effect was a sort of infantilizing of people with disabilities. Janet has gotten through her whole life in a wheelchair, I would think. I think she can manage Zip Zap Zop.
What became clear as the group continued throughout the weekend was that this sensitivity wasn’t about Janet or Sara. It was about the abled people in the room. No one would directly own or name their anxiety directly, but I hinted at it a few times. Does anyone resent having to accommodate them? Does anyone not want to have to think about how to shift things yourself to work with them? Does anyone feel awkward about not knowing how to name or talk about their different bodies with them?
It turned out that Sara and Janet were quite capable of improvising and playing improv games, and that it was their abled partners who, at times, struggled to engage fully in the games. In a paired mirroring exercise, where the participants have to face one another and silently do exactly what the other is doing so that they look like mirrors of one another, Janet shared in the debrief afterwards that she had stopped the game at one point to tell her her abled partner, Sally, “You aren’t mirroring my left hand.” Indeed, Janet’s left hand, which had curled-in fingers, and her left arm, which had less mobility, was ignored by her partner, who shared that she wasn’t sure what to do. “Would mirroring be insulting or mocking to her? Was it more polite to ignore the disability?”
It turned out that it felt more impolite and bad to Janet to have a part of her ignored and not seen. The improvisation forced this to be addressed, faced and discussed — to pose the ableism as the issue, rather than the person with a body that wasn’t like most people’s in the room. This question could, in most traditional “talk” settings, be avoided entirely, whereas the improvisation, because of its physical and mutual nature, forced it.
As part of the weekend, I brought in an improv troupe, White Privilege, Black Power, a duo who focuses their shows on exposing and examining areas of oppression in their own lives (a Black woman and White man) or the lives of an audience member. Their audience member for this show was Sara and their show, which was hilarious, ended up being a commentary on how silly seeing and abled people can be in their smugness about their own capacities compared to others, and how many “superpowers” Sara had due to her lack of traditional sight. Again, the ableism became the issue, not the person who sees differently than most.
Later in the workshop, I led an exercise where pairs had to do a drawing together without communicating or planning. Then they had to present their drawing, usually a scribbled sort of mess, naming it as a “thing” and elaborating on it with great expertise. A White man in the group, one who usually talks in nearly every group setting I’ve ever seen him in, often multiple times, relayed afterwards that he was speechless. He felt inept and powerless, unsure and insecure, unable to contribute. Meanwhile, overall, I noticed at the conference that I heard more from minorities, women, and disabled people than in any other large group, professional setting I had ever been in.
I wondered about this afterwards, and concluded that it must be that improvisation dismantles the confidence of the privileged, which is so often based on the intellect, on knowledge, on quoting literature or big ideas. On debating and competing and winning an argument or demonstrating superior knowledge or experience.
Improv, instead, focuses us on the body, on feelings, on the imagination, on creativity, on what is unknown and unsure, not what is “right” or “correct.” Improv privileges the territory and the wisdom of the oppressed — the instinctive, the connected, the relational, the non-hierarchical, the collaborative, the unstructured.
This is not really a new idea. Neva Boyd, one of the mothers of improvisation, described improv games as “non-competitive play” and “a democratizing force” in her book, Handbook for Recreational Games. I have read that before and understood it intellectually. But in traditional improv theaters, often the home of performing White males and hierarchical audition-based troupes, or even in more accessible, but often still racially and socio-economically homogeneous improv classes, this is harder to truly grasp. It has, sadly, been stripped away, I believe, by a focus and privileging of performance and comedy and money.
At this conference though — a more diverse, less structured environment — I was able to see it, literally, in play, and to witness its power to give voice to those who often sit quietly, listening to White men espouse knowledge that we’ve all been taught we should value more than a discussion about the experience of the person sitting next to us.