I’m still thinking about courage and this idea that courage is like a muscle. How do we flex it? What does it take to get stronger? I realized I wanted to talk to someone who knows a lot about taking risks and being responsive, and I knew the perfect person. My long-time friend and colleague, Boyd Branch, is a digital arts and performance specialist who does work in live theater and improv. Over the years, I’ve loved watching him help scientists explore what these artistic forms can unlock for them.
Boyd graciously allowed me to take us into a fabulously meandering conversation. Here is a heavily edited representation of just a few of my favorite bits!
Okay so, I have been thinking that when we face hard choices, we don't have to wait until a moment of crisis to find out, ”Do I have it in me or not?” Instead, there are things we can do to rehearse, prepare ourselves, and build up muscle memory for making brave choices. My animating question for this chat is, how does courage show up in improv?
When you’re on stage, you simply don't have time to process or to think interesting thoughts. The action is happening. You have to know how to tap into extremely quick assessments of the social dynamics of a situation: to recognize and make choices in how to respond. Imagine a mentor, for example, giving you feedback. Maybe they’re encouraging you and giving you feedback… but you can tell that they're really sort of putting you in your place? You have options: you can counter defensively, you can try to be submissive, there's different choices you can make. We naturally retreat or engage depending on a variety of factors. It's not necessarily hostile or negative, we just naturally engage in this.
The nature of improv - the magic of it - is about understanding these automatic behaviors. It’s about recognizing dynamics separately from the specific content. Because again, you don’t have time to think. It really is about disengaging your prefrontal cortex. And the only way to get there is to learn how you respond to those stressful states.
For someone like me, there is nothing more stressful than being told not to think. Disengage my prefrontal cortex, excuse me? Put me in front of an audience, while I’m busy not-thinking… come on!
So much of what we do on stage is fear-based. It naturally arises when you're performing: a fear of failure, of being stupid, of humiliating yourself. And by tapping into that fear, we can access a heightened sense of awareness of what's going on, that can then drive interesting behaviors.
And that I think is potentially instructive for life situations, like your question about how do you say no to someone who you've felt sort of under their spell?
Right. Yes! How do you?
I don't think it's something that you can do cognitively. I think it's something that you have to rehearse. You have to understand your emotions in the context of that conversation, and understand your options for responding. So how do we train ourselves to do that? Improv and acting are the places where we can go to learn about how we behave.
Right! But wait. No. We are… learning and deeply thinking about how we behave, so that we can stop that thinking?
We like to think that our thoughts and our conscious behaviors propel us through life. Like you know, “I have wants. I'm planning. I'm strategizing. I'm, you know, setting my mantras. I'm thinking about my five-year plan. I'm negotiating. I'm very engaged and that's how I live my life.” But in practice, that's not really what happens. Most of our life is lived in reaction. We're punctuating moments of life with some thought and we're often reflecting, but most often we’re thinking about a reaction that's already taken place.
This all comes from improv theorists - Keith Johnstone, Del Close, Augusto Boal - they plumb the depths of this question: how do we train? If the engine of behavior is very emotional and if our behaviors are automatic, what can we do to change that? How can we intervene? And there are things that we can do. It's just, unfortunately, not thinking.
(This is not helping me. I can see myself scrunching up my face on Zoom.)
Improv is stressful. But it begins to feel really good when we confront fear. It begins to feel great, in fact. It's interesting, the more people improvise, the more they chase a drug of excitement and can do kind of silly, crazy, wild things, you know, like dancing in ways that their body probably shouldn't be dancing, just because of physics. I mean, improv is addictive. It's this way that we can confront and face fear in a way that gives us not just a rush, but maybe an idea about the possibility of change.
Of course, you can bravely do very stupid things.
Like dance in ways that your body can't handle.
I've been guilty of that myself. I've broken things.
Wait, you've broken bones in performance?
Worse, I was teaching a slapstick class. I thought I would demonstrate a little kick move in the air, a little sort of heel click. Yeah, I was much more enthusiastic than I should have been.
Did you get a good laugh? (We both are laughing by this point)
Oh yeah, great laughs. But there's a popping sound in my foot and I’m thinking “there's no way I did what I just think I did” but out of embarrassment I kept teaching. And it ended up yeah… I broke my foot and had to get surgery.
Oh no! Okay, but did you tell? You take the chance, you suffer the consequences, you feel embarrassed, and then… do you share that? Do you go back to it and tell those students what happened? How do you regroup after a failure? It seems like another layer of courage to me.
Yeah. So for me there's a kind of enjoyment that I naturally get from revealing the stupid things that I've done in life.
I don't understand, but… congratulations?
It's much more fun for me to share my silly foibles and get a little bit of a laugh than it probably should be. But there are things that terrify me, that I wouldn’t easily or naturally do.
Listen, our fears are all born from our past experiences. The act of going back and dealing with quote unquote “shame” of breaking my foot in class… it's an opportunity to see that maybe it's not that bad. Maybe that's the impulse - by revealing it, it doesn't have the power to make me afraid anymore.
Doing something that's difficult gives us the opportunity to say, “This thing happened.” I can choose to maybe laugh at it or learn from it. I think it’s all part of being able to control your own narrative.
Thank you Boyd!