Would You Rather Be Right Or Would You Rather Be Happy?
There's an expression that goes, “Would you rather be right or would you rather be happy?”
This applies to improv.
I have seen my students time and time again wanting to "do it right" and follow the rules, rather than trusting their instincts and having fun. They would rather be right than happy.
There are a lot of reasons for this, and they all boil down to fear.
The longer I teach, the more I believe that the most important thing in improv is being in the moment.
Spolin said it first: “Improvisation is transformation,” which means scenes will naturally evolve into something else and go to unexpected places. But transformation can only happen when you are truly in the moment.
And in improv, the best way to be in the moment is to trust your instincts.
Easier said than done when that nasty fear is involved.
Sometimes after my students do a long form in a class or workshop, a student will say, "I wanted to do a walk-on, but I was not sure if we could do walk-ons."
I get it. My whole life I was always looking for approval or permission. I didn’t want to make a mistake and look like a fool and be called out in front of the class.
When that’s how you have been living your whole life, it's hard to let it go in a silly improv class.
Today, my philosophy about improv has changed. When we start doing a specific game, exercise, scene, or type of long form, the instructions are just a starting off point. The goal of the game or scene is for it to transform. I’d rather see the students trust their instincts over my instructions.
Wait, Jimmy, if people don't listen to you, won't it be chaos and nobody will learn anything? Thanks for bringing that up. For the most part, people follow instructions and if they do take risks, they’re not going to even come close to sabotaging what the class is doing, so the benefits of a game transforming outweigh the negatives for the students.
I have done Zip Zap Zup where it transforms to saying people's names or saying sounds or even students passing objects. If you resist the transformation, you miss out of the fun.
Yes, at times I may give specific instructions in game or a long form. For example, let's say I have seen too many walk-ons in class. I may give a direction that there should be no walk-ons in the next long form. And guess what? Students will trust their instincts over my instruction and I may get three or four walk-ons, which is far less than the 12 that they did in the previous exercise.
Even though they didn’t follow my instructions exactly, we have succeeded as a group because my point with saying no walks on was to limit the number because they were getting in the way of our scene work, but we also had people trust their instincts and take a risk over an imposed rule.
So the next time you are in that fear place on stage or in class or in rehearsal, ask yourself would I rather do it “right” or would I rather have fun?