Welcome to Play Fool, a newsletter about the games we play and the games which play us. This is a short excerpt from Yes, But, a book about improvised theatre.
Improvisation runs like an underground waterway through Play Fool. Improvisation is play at its most bare-knuckled and austere, which is why it is challenging and occasionally sublime. In this post, I unpack one of the basic ideas we learn in improvisation: “The offer,” and ask what it might mean to be able to improvise, or play, without the burden of intention. If you enjoy it, please consider sharing and subscribing.
Every improvisation scene begins with an offer. If you were to take an improvisation course, you would learn how to make an offer in the first class. The offer is a move which expresses some idea about what the scene is going to be. A light offer provides just a little morsel of information to your scene partner, like casting a shy gaze and saying “Muriel,” or sitting in a chair absently twirling the stem of an imaginary wine glass. A heavy offer, by contrast, gives your scene partner more information: “Ah, Barry, I’m afraid this Tower of Babel is in violation of Council height restrictions1.” The heavy offer lets your scene partner know exactly who they are and what the scene is likely to be. The heavy offer gives you and your scene partner a clear game to play and get you to the action quicker. The light offer gives you and your scene partner more room for interpretation, play, and discovery. Neither the heavy or the light offer is right or wrong. When improvising, the appropriate choice depends on context. Improvisation has tools, not rules. The logic of the offer suggests that we must begin our scenes with some moment of agency: an act or a choice. Every scene begins with something in us, small or large, that pushes the scene gently or strongly in one direction. We imagine our scenes to be like a pendulum which needs to be pushed to one side before it can begin to move under its own momentum. The push of the offer bridges the intentionality of our lives with the spontaneous unintentionality of the scene itself.
However, if we consider Viola Spolin’s Mirror exercise, in which players follow each other in super slow motion, we see an alternative to the logic of the offer. In Mirror, players are instructed to remain still until they see movement in the other player. As we are incapable of remaining completely still, inevitably, some small movement is noticed, and a sequence of movement begins. Mirror provides a way of starting a scene that doesn’t clearly distinguish between one player giving an offer and another receiving it. In Mirror, players commit to getting caught up in the flow of something going on between them. It becomes unclear who is giving the offer and who is receiving it. Mirror is a training game rather than a performance piece. Just as footballers practice track-and-field, performing improvisers use games like Mirror to work on specific skills. Taking an exercise like Mirror and putting it into our scenes is challenging because we leave behind the safety of the game and enter the free play of the scene. In a game, particularly with a good coach, someone will be there to help us have the kind of experience we need to have. By contrast, when we are in a scene we are, in the words of actor and improviser Keegan-Michael Key, “at war together.” So, we must be careful about applying lessons from Spolin’s games directly into theatrical scenes. In a scene, there is a lot more going on than in a game.
Mirror provides a way of starting a scene that doesn’t clearly distinguish between one player giving an offer and another receiving it. In Mirror, players commit to getting caught up in the flow of something going on between them.
Experienced improvisers can enter a scene with the same spirit that players bring to a game of Mirror. A Mirror-style scene might look like both players beginning on stage in a neutral position but actively reading their scene partners’ presence as a kind of offer. Neither player makes an active, intentional offer, but acts as though their scene partner has made one. A Mirror-style scene is like reading tea leaves or seeing faces in the clouds: It’s a stance where we assume something crucial is going on and we follow from that assumption. None of this is woo-woo or has anything to do with psychic powers. A Mirror-style scene merely builds on our tendency to tell stories about other people. A person sitting on the train with a blank stare, a creased face, and a smudge on their collar instinctively appears to us as a Ronald rather than a David, or an accounts manager rather than a Presbyterian Minister. Spolin’s Mirror exercise points us towards a simple truth of human behaviour: Our presence reveals itself, whether we like it or not, and we actively interpret the behaviour of others, whether we like it or not. We cannot do nothing, and the something we do by accident becomes available for interpretation and inspiration. This is why an exhausted sigh during a meeting can sometimes lead to a resignation, or why a sidelong, lingering glance in a restaurant can lead to a breakup.
Starting a scene with an offer is something of a consensus position in improvisation. It is a neutral-feeling or even generous word, without obvious baggage. However, what Spolin’s games teach us is that the offer is never as neutral as we claim it to be. We don’t, I think, have as much control over the offer as we think we do. Light offers, in particular, often give away far more than we expect. Spolin might argue that there are no light offers, only heavy offers. The offer carries excess baggage. We always say more than we intend to.
Where improvisers speak about the offer, poet and anthropologist Lewis Hyde describes the ‘gift’2. When we give an offer in improvisation, we have a sense that the offer is something which comes from us. The gift, by contrast, is something that passes through us. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre described writing as a gift when he compared it to “sword-strokes flying off… yet writing remains.” When we want to describe someone who has artistic talents that appear to come from nowhere, we describe that artist as ‘gifted.’ The offer comes from our idea, however small, of how we would like the scene to be. The gift comes from outside us, and isn’t concerned with our wishes for the scene. If the offer is heavy or light, the gift is weightless.
When we give an offer in improvisation, we have a sense that the offer is something which comes from us. The gift, by contrast, is something that passes through us.
As the gift must pass through us, it cannot be burdened down by our expectations of how it will be received. The gift that comes with intentions cannot be received fully as a gift (a person cannot receive our intentions, only act upon them). We know this instinctively when we are given a gift that is burdened with expectations about how it will be used, like when someone offers a free sample in a supermarket or a door-to-door proselytiser leaves behind a little pocket Bible. These gifts are presented as free, but they come with the excess baggage of the gift giver’s intention. If we accept the free sample, the expectation is that we now have some future obligation: To buy the cheddar or join the church. When a gift is given with hidden intentions, it ceases to be a gift and becomes an offer. When we give a gift, we must be able to give the entire gift away.
The conceited idea of the offer in improvisation is that we can give something to our scene partner but still hang on to our intentions. We wrongly believe our offers can be received exactly as we intend. As a result, we are not giving the entire offer away, and the scene is forced to bear the weight of our expectations. When I shyly call my partner "Muriel," I have some preexisting idea of who they are to me. When I tell my scene partner that they are building a Tower of Babel, I have a pretty good idea of the scene I want to be in. The offer in improvisation becomes an offer that cannot be refused. It is a little bit selfish. The gift, by contrast, is entirely unselfish because it is unburdened by the improviser’s intentions and so can be fully given away. Fully giving a gift is a cathartic act of abandonment. It is leaving our baggage at the airport. The baggage, ironically, is not the things we don’t intend but the things we do. It is our intentions, our ideas and beliefs about how things ought to be that prevents us from travelling to new places. The best vacation is the one where we leave the most behind, to better receive the gifts of the place we are visiting.
Improvisation in the tradition of Viola Spolin allows us to practice this cathartic abandonment, day after day, and scene after scene. Like Mirror, this is an exercise we can only practice with a scene partner engaged in the same activity with the same (un)intentions. This involves gratitude: The gift must be received as a gift, as something to be increased and exchanged in return. According to Hyde, when this reciprocal gift-giving takes place between two or more people, “the vector of the increase… stays in motion and follows the object.” In the improvisation scene predicated on gift-giving, the scene expands and becomes a story. Two people at a bus stop becomes a meditation on the pleasures of waiting. Two coworkers raiding a boss’ office becomes a series of ridiculous hijinks. The scene becomes something that neither player could intend or communicate in an offer, and yet was hidden all along in their opening gifts. This process only works when both players commit to gift-giving. One player’s gift cannot become another player’s offer.
This line is courtesy of Rory Machell, one of our improvisers, and it the most enjoyable opening line I have heard in years.
The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World