Goodman - Improvisation for the spirit: live a more creative, spontaneous, and courageous life using the tools of improv comedy

Copyright 2008 by Katie Goodman
Cover and internal design 2008 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
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Cover photo iStockphoto.com, Doctor_bass
Portions of Chapter 11 originally published in altered form in O, The Oprah Magazine.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Goodman, Katie.

Improvisation for the spirit : live a more creative, spontaneous, and courageous life using the tools of improv comedy / Katie Goodman.

p. cm.

1. Self-help techniques. 2. Improvisation (Acting) 3. ActingReligious aspects. I. Title.

BF632.G66 2008

158.1dc22

2008006780

Printed and bound in the United States of America.
SB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

For Soren & Logan

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A book on how to live a more creative, spontaneous, and courageous life needs a lot of heroes to emulate. So here are all the people to whom I owe an expensive dinner: First of all, I want to thank Brian DeFiore. Its really nice when you like having lunch with your agent, just for fun. And to DeFiore & Company: what a bunch of on-the-ball people. I am incredibly grateful to my mastermind of an editor at Sourcebooks, Shana Drehs, who I miraculously always agreed with. (And I want her husband to know that she is always right and to just accept that.) Of course, to Sourcebooks: every single person I worked with there was brilliant, fun, and easy. And wed be nowhere without Carrie Gellin and Tony Viardo. And sorry about those CubsTo Spontaneous Combustibles, including Craig Stauber; Kent Davis; Brian Dugan; my husband, Soren Kisiel; and past actors who let me try remarkably stupid things in rehearsal to see what would happen. And occasionally to do the same in a showThirteen years of making things up together is a lot of shotgun weddings and popes. To my teachers: Mark Lindberg, who taught me improv back in a different millennium and whom I continue to emulate as a director and teacher. And thanks for that directors note about adding the wedgie. Very helpful. Thank you to Ilona Gerbner; Harvey Diamond; Nina Kaleska; Nancy Stetter; Cheri Huber & Living Compassion; Thich Nhat Hanh & Deer Park Monastery; O, The Oprah Magazine; Amy Gross; Deborah Way; Carl Honore; The Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health; Chico Hot Springs; Kari King; Debbie Green; Zehra Osman; Kathleen Crawford; Rachel Lewis; Cameron Goodman; Stephani Lourie; Broad Comedy; Vootie Productions; The Equinox Theatre Company; Camp Equinox; and Bozeman, Montana. To my workshop and retreat participants, who have all added to the practice and to this book directly and indirectly with their honest and unique stories that Ive blended together. Thank you for your enthusiasm and courage in the workshops. To the friends and interviewees whose stories are jumbled in hereI appreciate your insight and sharing your time with me. To our large families, including our eight parents and twenty-plus cousins. Thank you for coming to our shows in the snow and across state lines. To my father, Tony Goodman, for sharing writing and editing and zen work. To Bob Levey for training my funny bone. To Kent Davis for being Sorens and my partner in crime for nineteen years. (I think nineteen is the Plexiglas anniversary. I cant wait.) Thank you to my mother, Ellen Goodman, and to Soren Kisiel and Maribeth Goodman for editing at the eleventh hour. Bless your flying fingers. And thank you for your insight, humor, and cutting to the chase. And most of all, thank you to Logan and Soren for, well, love.

INTRODUCTION

I am standing on the stage, facing a full house, lights blinding my view of the huge audience, and I am desperately trying to come up with a rhyme for vegetarian.

I am performing with Spontaneous Combustibles, a professional improv comedy troupe Ive been with for twelve years. Its our typical routine: we ask the audience for a location where the scene could take place. Someone shouts out The Oval Office! We have no script, no time to plan, no safety net, and we dont know what the other actors are thinking. We have two seconds to launch in and perform a never-rehearsed four-minute scene. It needs to have a beginning, which establishes the location and the characters, a middle that creates a conflict, and an end that resolves the conflict. We need to be captivating, funny, and creative throughout. And my team on that stage needs to work together if we want it to succeed.

Time to pull out the Tums?

This may sound like an exciting challenge to some of you, and to others like a recurring nightmare. This is my job.

Packed with successful punch lines, scattered brilliance, a few blank stares, and utter unpredictability, its been a complete whirlwind. Most important, though, its been a steady stream of laughter and fun.

But its also been a laboratory for the rest of my life. What I have learned is that what we do and practice in improv can be used in life and relationships and work. The skills required for improvisation are the skills needed for any collaborative or creative process: stay present, be flexible, let go of the goal, gag your inner critic, listen to others with an open mind, dont struggle, give and take, trust yourself and the process, and more. I have struggled on stage with all the same issues everyone has in regular lifecompeting with others, wanting my own way, wanting to just once not have to make a group decision, being distracted and unfocused, not trusting that Ill have a good idea, and having a great idea that doesnt get used. The tools we use to handle these issues in improv are skills we can transfer to all kinds of areas of work and life.

First of all, improv forces you to stay present. If your mind starts to wander, the scene will fall apart, so you get focused pretty quickly.

Improv also asks you to be spontaneous, to open up, to allow mistakes to happen, to be flexible, and to forge ahead. If you are standing on a stage with an audience watching, you cant just quit or say, Wait a second while I think this through. You must concentrate and carry on.

You must be aware of others and your surroundings. If you played nicely in the sandbox in kindergarten, chances are youll do well at improv. Comedy improv games are rarely played aloneyouve got to listen to your teammates and share ideas to make the scene work.

Improv teaches you to take risks. It teaches you to be courageous, to trust yourself, and to trust the process. From these skills, youll learn how to surrender. You must surrender two things: First, you have to let go of the past (Oh, what a dumb thing I just said!) and move ahead. If you stay stuck in your Past Moment of Lameness, then you will have nothing to add to the present, and things will just spiral downward. And second, you must surrender attachments, such as ideas you have for the way a scene should go. For example, if I enter a scene all prepared to be the character of a tax collector, and someone says, Hey, Doc, we got a man in trouble here!well, then I have to let go of my idea and go with the flow of whats being presented to me.