This is Improv - Part 2

When you're in rehab, part of the process is losing your personal freedoms. Even if you're in a great rehab with your own room, fantastic staff who are present and helpful, nice amenities like an amazing kitchen, and the ability to go outside whenever you want (In the rehab I went to, I was limited to a group morning walk most days, and a ride down to the gym in the afternoon), you lose many of the things you used to take for granted. You don't really set your schedule, you don't decide when you talk to your loved ones, you're doing a lot of sharing of resources like TVs and laundry and tables and games and all those little things you used to be able to do whenever you wanted to. One of the most profound freedoms I lost was the ability to listen to music.

Since getting an iPod almost two decades ago and with the advent of music streaming serivces, I can listen to pretty much anything I wanted when I want. My rehab had a small number of cheap generic MP3 players that could be lent out, but even then, you were at the staff's whim to get those players loaded with MP3s. On my first trip to rehab, I decided to buy a cheap Discman and some CDs, which was one of the best purchases I made, but even then, I was limited to four discs: Two albums by The Mountain Goats (Transcendental Youth and You Shall be Healed) and two albums by They Might Be Giants (Flood and John Henry). It's the closest I'll ever come to that desert-island-albums meme.

I mentioned one Friday during group therapy that I missed being able to listen to anything I wanted, and the counselor said that she'd pull up one song request for us at the end of the meeting. I don't remember what I asked to listen to, but I do remember one of the songs that led me to something that's been helping me in improv recently:

Bruce Lee: Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.

That song contains a sample, the sampled interview snippet is quoted above, of this interview of Bruce Lee on the Pierre Berton Show:

There's so much in this interview with Bruce Lee that I think is useful for Improv, and also perfect for me on my journey. The week before last, I mentioned thinking about improv as a martial art and that the Harold is a sort of kata. Then Last week, I wrote about how doing a craft is doing a craft, and all the stuff that happens when doing the craft is part of the craft. Bruce Lee distills that here:

Pierre Berton: It's interesting, we don't in our world, and haven't since the days of the Greeks who did, combined philosophy and art with sport. But quite clearly the oriental attitude is that the three are facets of the same thing.
Bruce Lee: Man, listen to me, ok? To me, ultimately, martial art means honestly expressing yourself. Now it is very difficult to do. I mean it is easy for me to put on a show and be cocky and be flooded with a cocky feeling and then feel, then, like pretty cool and all that. Or I can make all kinds of phony things, you see what I mean? And be blinded by it. Or I can show you some really fancy movement, but, to express oneself honestly, not lying to oneself....and to express myself honestly, that, my friend is very hard to do. And you have to train. You have to keep your reflexes so that when you want it...it's there! When you want to move, you are moving and when you move you are determined to move. Not taking one inch, not anything less than that! If I want to punch, I'm going to do it man, and I'm going to do it! So that is the type of thing you gave to train yourself into it; to become one with it. You think....(snaps his fingers) ....it is.

The honest expression of self, the Truth in Comedy, the flow of water, I move when my feet move, I think snap it is. This is Improv.