Walking in Neutral - or - Stay alive.

The last time I played "Standing in Neutral," my class told me I looked like:

• a person who judges people in public places
• a teacher who isn't friends with other teachers
• a woman watching nervously out the window for gremlins

I wrote here:

That was four years ago. At the time, I was struggling with anxiety and depression. ... I'm curious to know if my neutral has changed since then. The best way to find out is probably to get into a room full of honest strangers and ask. 

So I was excited/terrified when Paola had us play a variation of Standing in Neutral* in our clowning class this week. I was afraid I'd be the same as I was back when Noah led the game.

Instead of just standing in neutral, we walked in neutral, and five people walked behind us. Paola told us that the leader was to think of these other five people as an extension of her own body -- not to ignore them, but not to worry about them either.

And instead of just commenting on what sort of impression we made, she made each of us do it again and again until we were truly neutral.

After the first few people had failed, someone asked, "Paola, what are you looking for? How is it supposed to look?"

Paola** said, "This is like you ask me how you ride the bicycle. I write you the book on how to balance, how to ride the bicycle, but that does not make you do it. You do not learn to balance with words from other people. You know when you see, and you know when you feel."

Then it was my turn, and I was resigned to failing a time or two at least. I walked across the room. This felt totally surreal. I was just thinking, "This is the strangest I've ever felt. I do not anything could take me by surprise right this moment, and also, I think I'm floating," when there was this odd little gasp from several people. When I arrived at the front of the room to face Paola, the gasps turned into little groans.

Paola said, "Alyssa. You do this very well. In neutral, you walk like a queen. We all see this and soe we understand what I say about the bike. But then you disappoint me. You disappoint the whole room!"

"Oh no! What did I do?"

"You apologized! You apologized with your eyes. You were a queen, and then you used your eyes to hide being a queen. This is like you apologize for being alive. You were alive when you walked, and you died when you stopped. Stay alive."

I told this to my friend Steve tonight, and he said, "She's right! You do that thing with your eyes!" (Someone please point this out to me the next time you see me do it so I can start breaking the habit.)

"Queen" definitely trumps "judgmental teacher plagued by gremlins." Now I have to grow into it and quit doing the thing with my eyes.



*I now see that "Standing in Neutral" would be better called, "Standing in Natural." Natural and neutral aren't even close to the same, apparently.
 
**Italian is her native language; she tells us that her brain translates from Italian to French to English before words come out of her mouth. Imagine her words accompanied by lots of big hand gestures.

Standing in Neutral -- or -- Just another day with the gremlins

Standing in Neutral 

Ideally, you would do this exercise before you had time to get to know your class very well.

One at a time, stand in neutral in front of the group for 45 seconds. Don't grin, stiffen up, or layer any quirks onto your ol' regular self. Try your best to be a blank slate.

After those 45 silent seconds, the class should make observations about what unconscious ticks or habits they observed. If this person was a character just as they are, what character would they be?

When you hear your classmate's thoughts, you'll want to argue. "But I wasn't being a character! I wasn't playing anything! I was in neutral! Where are you getting all of this?"

But the truth is that there's no such thing as true neutral. My neutral looks radically different from your neutral. We project all kinds of things about ourselves without saying anything. We can control this to some extent by what we wear -- for instance, I dress professionally for a job interview so that I will be seen as a professional.

For the most part, though, we're totally unaware of how we come across to others. If you're going to do improv, it's helpful to get a sense of how others see your neutral, because that is how they're likely to endow you in scenes. If I want someone to see me differently from the way they see my neutral, I have to do something to throw my body, face, and voice out of their normal alignment.


Like so much of improv, this exercise is easier to show than it is to tell, so here's how it went the first time I did it in Noah Gregoropoulos' class:

After noticing that I was standing very straight, my class noted that I look with my eyes instead of with my whole head. Then they discussed what kind of character I made them think of:

"She seems like that person at the library or on the bus who keeps looking over at you, not because she's interested in what you're doing, but because your iPod is too loud or you're tapping your fingers on your book. She probably won't actually tell you to shut up, though, unless you really do something to push her over the edge."

"Really? I thought of her more like that teacher that has a great connection with her students. She's amazing in the classroom, and the kids love her and work hard for her. She doesn't fit in with the teachers, though. If she has to spend time in the teachers' lounge, she sits in the corner and reads."

"I thought she looked like that woman who is staring out the window and trying to be calm, but she knows that the gremlins are coming. They've come often enough that she really she shouldn't be startled, so she's trying to play it off like she's not upset, like this is just another day with the gremlins."
 
That was four years ago. At the time, I was struggling with anxiety and depression, and I wonder how obvious that was. I'm curious to know if my neutral has changed since then. The best way to find out is probably to get into a room full of honest strangers and ask.