Peter Lutzker - The Art of Foreign Language Teaching

I love the Pivot Dance because it has a very poetic dimension. This dance is about receiving and giving … Beginner improvisers often feel they need to come up with good ideas or be funny. This structure invites you to do nothing until your partner finishes her turn. The stress of feeling you need to come up with something often stops you from seeing what your partner is doing, or from receiving the world. Through this structure you get to realize that what makes good stories has nothing to do with coming up with good ideas. It’s more to do with how you receive the world that is going to make stories happen. So it’s not about what you do, but about how you receive what is happening around you. That creates a profound shift in how to understand improvisation. Up to that point you could be forgiven for thinking that the success of an improvisation depended on what you did. And here, you get these very moving stories and relationships that appear not so much from what you do, but from the space you give to your partner. (Interview 3 )

These games are intended to create narratives and are based on the imaginative possibilities within a group of spontaneously creating stories together, either in pairs or in a group. In the group stories , every member of the group contributes something to the creation and further development of a collective story, sequentially adding an element, either a sound, word, or a sentence. This game requires listening closely, following the direction of the developing story and responding quickly to the contribution of the person who has just spoken. Since the story often takes unexpected directions, all forms of thinking ahead become a hindrance rather than a help to the spontaneous and organic creation of the narrative. Both the individual imagination as well as a ‘collective imagination’ are thus called into play.

Another game belonging to this type of work is The Mime and the Storyteller in which one person is the mime and the other is the storyteller. The storyteller looks at the mime and tells the story she thinks she is seeing. It often happens then that the told story is quite different than was intended, in which case the mime has to go along with these new developments. These kinds of games involve a constant ‘sharing and shifting of power’ in the creation of each part of the story.

By the end of the second phase, having completed an entire series of warm-ups and played a number of different games, participants usually experience themselves and the group in a fundamentally different manner. A sense of understanding and trust has been developed and this is clearly reflected in the atmosphere which is present. At the same time, the necessary basis has been created for what is to follow:

The warm-ups establish a basic set of rules that not everyone understands straight away. You are building a language or understanding around emotional presence and authenticity which you hope participants will carry on stage. All the warm-ups and games basically prepare you to focus not on what you have to do, but on giving expression to your feelings. So feeling shy, stupid or embarrassed or not knowing what to do when you are on stage gradually becomes o.k. (Interview 4)

For participants taking the workshop for the first time, the significance of having learned to accept embarrassment and insecurity only becomes fully apparent in the next phase.

The improvisations can be considered to be the heart of the clowning workshops. Certainly, all previous activities build up to them and the choice of warm-ups and games are thematically linked to the specific improvisatory structures which will follow in that particular workshop. With the beginning of the improvisations a clear line is delineated between all previous partner and group activities and the following solo and group performances. Until this point, the exercises and games were done with the others; either in pairs, or in groups, and generally simultaneously. Although there are some elements of performance which can be found in some of the warm-ups and the games, most notably in the pivot dance, the feedback indicated that this was not generally experienced as such, probably because at least half the group was generally doing the activities at the same time. Moreover, since there was a strong focus placed on the presence and contributions of the others, there was generally a concurrent lack of self-consciousness.

However, even the simplest introductory exercise with which the solo-improvisations begin evokes all the qualities and feelings associated with performing alone before a waiting and expectant audience. In the course of increasingly complex improvisations, this basic framework remains. In reviewing the feedback letters from the participants, this demarcation line between the first part of the workshops with the warm-ups and games and the second part with the improvisations was clearly experienced by the participants. Whereas only some participants experienced fears and anxieties in regard to the first phases, nearly all described different types of fears with respect to their initial improvisations.

There are central rules underlying all the improvisation exercises. The golden rule of improvisation is not to prepare or plan anything before coming on stage. At first, this rule invariably frightens people and seems to them like a certain recipe for disaster. What only becomes clear for the participants during the process itself is that it is exactly this absence of planning which opens them up to be more receptive and to listen to what is actually happening on stage. Moreover, this rule is inextricably connected to the very nature of clowning for it is more important to see how the clown ‘lives’ than to see the clown actually do something:

It is an invitation to do something that feels totally counter-intuitive to any normal people – that is to come on stage and not plan what you are going to do or come with an idea, but to wait until something happens – not to make it happen, but to wait until it happens. The thought is terrifying and totally weird. (Interview 4)

A second essential rule is to look at the audience . This is what grounds the clown in the reality of the here and now. It establishes that unique and fragile relationship between the clown and the audience which is based on transparency and is thus dependent on eye contact. It creates a feeling of a kind of immediate complicity between the clown and audience which is one of the significant distinctions between clowning and acting:

Clowning invites you to look at your audience and makes that relationship very visible and explicit. Because clowning is about being emotionally transparent, we get to see how the actor feels about the role he or she is playing. In clowning, we know whether the clown is enjoying playing the role of a king. In the theatre, the actor isn’t also telling us how they feel about their role. They have to be the role. In a way, clowns are ham actors. If, for example, they play a death scene, their eye contact with the audience will tell us they are playing at dying. If they did that as actors, they would be considered to be very bad actors. (Interview 7)

The third rule of improvisation is not to touch, remove, or refer to the clown’s red nose . The nose has been called the smallest mask in the world. It clearly defines the character of the clown and thus protects and transforms the person behind the nose. The audience sees the person first of all as a clown:

You cannot touch it, look at it, point to it, or talk about it. Don’t take it off – it’s part of you. Never say this sentence, “I’m a clown, Hello” because you never know who you are. This is the only taboo in clowning. (Vivian at the English Week Workshop, 2004)