Welcome to Play Fool. This is an excerpt from my book: Yes, But: Essays on Improvisation. It’s an exploration of the ways that unofficial practices become encoded in official disciplines, and the way that those disciplines then exclude the very practices that brought them into being. It’s an invitation to see improvisation as profoundly ordinary and almost everywhere.
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A year after returning from iO Chicago, I fled Australia again, this time to Tanzania. I lived and worked there for eighteen months, and it is so far my longest sabbatical from improvisation. To fill the improvisational void, I took to playing soccer (in Australia, the name ‘Football’ is given to Australian Rules Football) with my Tanzanian work colleagues. I hadn’t played soccer since I was eight years old, when Dad would trot me down to the local pitch on a Saturday morning. I remember we would line up like little tin soldiers, and one-by-one the coach would toss a regulation soccer ball at us, and we would have to head-butt the ball. I always flinched at the last minute and took a bruising or two to my left ear. After a few failed attempts at industrial-style soccer training, my parents let me stay home on the weekends.
This is often how soccer looks in Western societies: It is a particular discipline performed in a particular place. You’re encouraged to get good at soccer the way you might get good at piano: through a kind of rigorous, joyless discipline. For the naturally competitive eight-year-old who is comfortable in their body, this is all well and good. For a future theatre geek with soft hands and an anxious disposition, I found it terrifying and joyless. That people would ‘play’ games of soccer confused me, as there seemed to be nothing particularly fun about physical competition. Televised soccer only added to this sense of horror: Watching people who are deeply invested enough in the competition to scream, yell, and riot. Players with multi-million dollar contracts, swapped between teams like trading cards. The soccer at my local pitch wasn’t this serious, of course, but it had the flavour of it: The straight lines, spray painted boundaries, the yell of the coach and the eyerolls and groans when shots were missed. As Spolin suggested, the structural competition seemed to invite anxious tension.
Tanzania provided me with an opportunity to see if I could re-acquaint myself with soccer and find some measure of joy in it. My hands were no less soft, but my heart was a little hardier and I relished the chance to connect with my colleagues. Soccer is enormous in Tanzania, as it is Western Europe and much of the Global South. Polyester football shirts are worn with pride and Man U vs. Liverpool is as divisive an issue in Tanzania as it is in an English country pub. It is the rallying cries of the Global South that have made soccer into the world’s most popular sport.
With my colleagues, I found I was more able to enjoy soccer. We played on a large, vacant lot near the school where I was working. A couple of backpacks marked the goals and the road marked the edges of the pitch. It was also considerably less competitive: we didn’t keep score and experienced players would go a little easier on newer players like me. We played with mixed genders, and even the school chef: A portly woman in her 50s, took off her apron and joined in. Soccer with my colleagues was just a way to break a light sweat and generate camaraderie: There was no pressure to be good. Of course, I’m not saying that soccer in Australia is competitive and soccer in Tanzania is casual. These are differences in degree, not kind. In wealthier, industrialised countries the dial shifts a little more towards the structured and competitive. In Tanzania and much of the Global South, it shifts a little more towards the unstructured and social. Indeed, sometimes it shifts so far towards unstructured and casual that we begin to wonder how we can recognise it as soccer.
I had a brush with Tanzanian soccer fame hiking in the Usambara mountains. My guide was Chande, a young Tanzanian who was the region’s local legend: He had gone as far as shortlisting for the Tanzanian national soccer team. Over four days, we hiked together from Lushoto, the main tourist town, towards Mtae, a small village perched on a high cliff which overlooks the Kenyan-Tanzanian border. The tour strung together dense natural forest, cultivated Eucalyptus forest, and countless small farms huddled together around narrow creeks and steep mountainsides.
On the final day of the hike, I passed through a village straddling a mountain ridge. A dozen, single-room clay houses sat on either side of a wide road. Four young boys were kicking around a bunch of black plastic bags bound together with duct tape. They glanced at each other and ran excitedly towards us when they saw Chande (and I) coming up the road. They hounded him down and begged him to show them a few tricks, which he did obligingly, given the ball didn’t quite have the bounce of an English Premiere League regulation soccer ball.
Anyone would recognise that those young boys were playing soccer, albeit at its most unstructured and social. I could recognise what they were playing as soccer even though there was no pitch, no goals, no painted lines, no real ‘teams,’ and no ball. Whatever rules they were playing weren’t important enough that they couldn’t stop the game to chat to Chande. If the ball is round, there are small teams, and your hands are used only sparingly then you’re probably playing soccer. When soccer was played by the Aztecs thousands of years ago, a rubber ball was kicked around a field as a tribute to the gods of day and night. In Florence, the game was often played over entire towns, often leading to property damage and violent brawls. Even in England, as the game gained popularity in the public school system, each school had different ideas concerning the size of the ball, team sizes and match duration.
It was only in the mid-19th century that a handful of wealthy Brits got together and marked out the contours of the game forever: grassy pitches, teams of eleven, and deciding the opening kickoff through a coin toss. When Tanzanians fans gather to watch the Africa Cup of Nations, these foreign rules are what they’re watching. If you’ll spare me my liberal language a moment, it is a kind of colonisation of the idea of soccer: Dead, rich Britons decided forever what is classified as real soccer. Of course, when those young Tanzanians are in the streets kicking around a ball of their own design, inviting whomever is around to join their open ended game, the tradition they’re tapping into is far deeper. That kind of soccer game is uniquely theirs, and yet they don’t own it either.
Watching those boys play reminded me of the extracurriculars in my improvisational experience that had waned in my memory over the years. I remember, with my iO cohort, the way we would arrange ambient takeovers of drop-in jams at smaller theatres. I remember a long conversation in which we all cast each other as roles in an extended family (I was the distant cousin, fond of sleeping in airports to save money), and we played with those roles for a bit. I remembered the living room improv jams, and I remember Improv Fight Club, and we all know the first rule of Improv Fight Club. These unofficial improvisational experiences shaped my experience as much as classes and performances did.
When I returned from iO back home to Perth, my partner at the time had managed to snag a cheap commercial lease on a storefront in an affluent Perth suburb. She’d used the space to try and help a few local clothing designers reach new markets. For the final day of the lease, she asked if I might like to do an improv show there. My troupe brought everything: A civil engineer brought floodlights to light the stage, a couple who were moving house loaned us some couches. Fairy lights and bluetooth speakers provided the ambiance. We spray-painted Harold Improv Cagematch on the back wall, marking the evening as Perth’s first Chicago-style long-form show. For one evening, we turned an empty store into a church for misfits.
Improvisation’s Adam and Eve, Elaine May and Mike Nichols, were notorious for not only performing, but for living improvisation. The two courted each other by improvising a scene on a public train, in which they pretended to be undercover Russian agents. A desiring Nichols delivered the opening line (“May I sit down?”) and Elaine May fell into lockstep by responding in character (“If you veesh.”) This impromptu improvisation scene, in which the stage, setting, and audience were also improvised, was the meet-cute for May and Nichols. What began on that train ended on television.
If we define soccer as FIFA does, then very few people in Tanzania play soccer. Fresh cut grass and imported soccer balls are hard to come by in a country where most people live on less than $2USD/day. However, if we relax our definition of soccer to include those boys in Mtae and their plastic-bag soccer ball then soccer is, by far, the most inclusive sport in the world. The working classes of Europe and the poor of the Global South adopted soccer because it is a sport that anyone can make their own. This is why the rich play golf, water polo, and equestrian sports: Those sports can’t be adapted by the poor, and so maintain the air of exclusivity the rich so deeply value.
Improvisation, like soccer, has its official and unofficial dimensions. There is official improvisation, which is something like a perfect long-form performed on a stage to a paying audience. Official improvisation is how you get into a Saturday Night Live audition or get a five-second character piece in a fast-food commercial. More interesting, I think, is unofficial improvisation. If I immediately recognised two kids kicking around a bundle of plastic bags as a kind of “unofficial soccer,” what might we recognise as “unofficial improvisation?” Were May and Nichols improvising when they met on a train, or just goofing around?
If unofficial soccer is any sport where “two teams of roughly equal size kick a ball around according to some agreed rules,” then let us then define unofficial improvisation as any situation where “two or more people adopt characters and then react through those characters without significant planning or premeditation.” In this view, Nichols and May performed their first improvisation scene on the Chicago Red Line, not at the Playwrights Theater Club. If we take this as an imperfect, working model of unofficial improvisation we can begin to ask the question: Is this art? If so, what sort of art is this? What kinds of things might it open up for us?