Women in improv: Support vs. Submission

I've heard a couple of different improv friends lately mention a person being "the kind of player who takes good care of her partner" or "the kind of player who takes good care of himself." (I don't think the pronouns were arbitrary; more on that further down.)

I'm going to suggest that this is not the most helpful distinction. It's important to take care of yourself AND to take care of your partner, but you can kill both of those birds with one stone by making strong choices. What we need here is a deeper understanding of the word "support."

In Improvise, Mick Napier puts it this way:

If the first thought in your head when you approach an improv scene is "Support your partner" ... [w]hat are you supporting them with?

Are you supporting them with thoughts about supporting them? That's very nice but not very supportive. ... Do you say nice things to them, do you uber-agree, do you pat them on the head, offer them a chair, rub their shoulders? No, the most supportive thing you can do is get over your pasty self and selfishly make a strong choice in the scene. Then you are supporting your partner with your power, and not your fear.

If you want to support your partner in an improv scene, give them the gift of your choice.

So, what's the best way to take care of myself? To make a strong choice. No brainer.

And what's the best way to take care of my partner? Also, to make a strong choice. Not deferring to them, saying "yes" a lot, and keeping your own ideas to yourself.

For me, the latter concept was difficult, because I confused 'support' with 'submission' for my first couple of years of improv. I'm sure there are guys who deal with this, too, though I haven't met many. I have seen this over and over with evangelical women.

Conservative evangelical gals grow up being told that good Christian girls are polite and deferential. We're told, for instance, that the only reason Deborah and Jael were allowed to lead is that Barak and the rest of the Israelite men were too wimpy to step up. A woman could only be strong if all nearby men had abdicated their manhood.* Even if you don't consciously buy into these ideas, they're in the water, and they need to be fought.

Being polite will not serve you or anyone else. Being generous will. It means giving of yourself, not abdicating yourself. Generosity means making strong choices.

It's not as though strength is a single cake, and for one woman to have more of the cake, it means a man or another woman has to have less.

Strength is NOT a cake.** It's more like the widow of Zarephath's oil, which never dried up during the famine; she always had enough to give some food to Elijah.

Or like the other widow's oil, which Elisha told her to divide into other jars. She took all the jars in the neighborhood, and no matter how many jars she poured her oil into, there was always enough to fill another jar.***

In God's upside-down economy, giving things away doesn't necessarily mean you have less for yourself. Grace isn't a zero-sum game. The more I give of myself, the more I have. That's how we're supposed to live, and good improv is a small, concrete example of how it can play out.

Making strong choices yourself doesn't mean your scene partner can't. My strong choices should make it easier for you to make strong choices, which will make it easier for me to make strong choices, in an endless loop of strength and support.


 *Here is a more reasonable interpretation of that story, preached earlier this summer by Rev. Karen Miller. I highly recommend investing 20 minutes of your day listening to this.

**THIS IS A WAY IN WHICH IMPROV IS NOT LIKE CAKE. My world may collapse.  

***Elijah and Elisha had a thing for widows and oil, I guess?

Technique, Form, and Substance. Also, cake!

I posted this once upon a time on an old blog. I've kept the old comments, because I have insightful friends.

If improv were a cake ...

Exhibit A: Lauren and I made this for a friend's birthday. My mom probably helped with the icing.

 ... technique would be your kitchen tools.

You know, wooden spoon and mixing bowl and spatula and measuring cups. It'd be really messy to make a cake without those things, and the ingredients probably wouldn't be well-blended.

It will make your improv so much smoother if you get good at acceptance and heightening. If you want to be very fancy, you could learn miming, singing, rhyming, and contact improv. 

But if all you have is a really great bowl and spoon and spatula and measuring cups, you'll still go hungry. At least, hungry for cake.* And you can accept and heighten and mime all you want, but that's not enough for good improv.

Exhibit B: I made this cake for my friend Meredith, who is a vegetarian.

 ... form would be the cake pan. 

Cupcakes have the potential to be as delicious as bundt cakes, layer cakes, or crazy sculpted cakes; a run of short form games can be as fun as Harold and Armando. They're different shapes in which to pour your awesome scene work.

You don't need a bunch of flashy forms any more than you need 18 highly-specific cake pans. However, if you have no pan at all, nobody is going to want to eat your delicious cake, because it won't look appetizing. A formless show is hard for the audience to know how to watch. Have a form. Your form can be as basic as Exhibit A or as complex as Exhibit B, but don't let your show get into Exhibit D territory.

Exhibit C: My husband made me this cookie cake and iced it with a Marc Johns drawing.

 ... substance would be your ingredients.

There is no definitive list of what to put in a cake to make it a good cake, just some general guidelines. Most cakes have some combination of eggs and flour and sugar and milk. Some have cream cheese or carrots or cocoa; some are vegan or gluten-free. It's a lot of stuff that wouldn't necessarily taste good on its own but works in combination with the other flavors to make something new. There's flexibility there, as long as you keep your proportions reasonable and your ingredients are good quality.

Most scenes have some basic ingredients, too: relationship, character, environment, game, and that indefinable magic that comes out of a group working together. There are probably more I can't think of. Or fewer, depending on the kind of scene.

If your milk's gone rancid or your sugar has ants, your cake will be awful. Your cake pan and egg beaters might have been fine, but that doesn't save your cake. There's no sense investing in an expensive Kitchen-Aide mixer if you're not going to bother with your ingredients and proportions.

But once in awhile, for some inexplicable reason, a cake with all those great ingredients still doesn't turn out the way it's supposed to. Some scenes won't work, and you can't always know why. You just have to double-check your ingredients, clean up your tools, and try again.

Exhibit D: My mom probably did not help with this icing. This is all me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

... and comedy, of course, is just the icing on the cake. 

You don't have to have icing for a good cake. In fact, bad icing will ruin an otherwise good cake, and good icing won't save a gross cake. If I have to chose between a cake with bad icing and a cake with no icing, I'll pick no icing.

And I'll take a good, interesting scene that doesn't me laugh over a weak scene dripping with gags. Even good icing doesn't make up for bad cake, and funny jokes don't make up for shoddy scene work.

True confession: Icing is my favorite part of cake. But it gives me a stomach ache to eat it by itself. Good icing on good cake, though? Life doesn't get better.

Exhibit what?: This is from when my mom pretended it was my birthday so my friends would come over and watch Schindler's List.

And, hey, when you're done, make sure you clean everything off and store everything in a cool, dry place, because fresh ingredients can spoil and attract bugs. Take care of yourself and your tools, or you won't think the whole enterprise is worth the trouble.


*Is there any other kind of hungry? I submit that there is not.