Several times in the Daily Improviser blog, I’ve referred to the ExploreFlexSupport model as the foundation for effective action by both the performance improviser and the Daily Improviser. Today I’d like to focus on the third part of the model: Support.
On the improv stage, Support means: Say “Yes And” to your fellow players by building positively upon their lines and actions (i.e., their “offers”). If both partners provide this kind of mutual support, they can collaboratively create a rewarding scene.
By contrast, an obvious action that undermines support is saying “No” to a scene offer. In his book Truth in Comedy, Kim “Howard” Johnson cites a scene in which a female player tells her onstage partner that she wants a divorce. The partner replies, “But what about the children?” to which the first player responds, “But we don’t have any children!” As Johnson says: “Naturally, she got a huge laugh. Naturally, she had completely destroyed the scene” – because the laugh was at the expense of the scene and her partner’s offer.
This Support model sounds a lot like the positivity-based And Stance I’ve described as a guide for the Daily Improviser as he engages with others in a joint search for truth. But as I’ve been saying in my past few articles, I’m starting to wonder about the possible limits of the And Stance, with its emphasis on finding points of agreement and common ground. By focusing so much on agreement (and being agreeable), are we perhaps discounting the energy and complacency-busting power that can accompany throwing a bit of creative abrasion into the mix? In the name of smoothing over our interactions, do we run the risk of holding back how we really feel?
In fact, Mick Napier has raised the same type of questions about the Support model even as it applies to the improv stage. Napier has confronted head-on the Conventional Wisdom of the “Support Your Partner” model with the Uncommon Sense notion “Take Care of Yourself First.” As Napier writes in his book Improvise: Scene from the Inside Out:
"If you want to support your partner in an improv scene, give them the gift of your choice. I only feel supported by my partners if they make a move, if they do something. If they just stand there and look at me thinking about supporting me, I am absolutely unsupported. The more powerful a choice they make, the more I am supported." [Emphasis added}
Napier thus recognizes another aspect of the Support model that often gets lost: Support doesn’t just mean accepting and building on your partner’s offer. It also means giving your partner something solid to work with in return.
To illustrate: Partner #1 says “Look at those giant blue manhole covers raining down from the sky!” Partner #2 responds, “Yes! I wonder what they’re coming from?” In this situation, Partner #2 would be totally in agreement with the reality established by Partner #1. Partner #2 would also be totally non-supportive of Partner #1. Why? Because rather than making a strong choice of his own that can carry the scene to the next level, Partner #2 has essentially punted the verbal ball back to Partner #1 and said, “Here, you figure out how to run with your reality.”
Napier’s observation nicely (if I can use that term) resolves the apparent contradiction between the Conventional Wisdom and Uncommon Sense I described above by basically saying: I can best support my partners by giving them the best of myself and my thinking! Or, to state it as a formula: Agreement does not equal Support!
I think this formula can also apply to the Daily Improviser as she encounters others on the journey to truth. If we equate “support” with “being agreeable,” then we run the risk of holding back our best ideas and discounting the validity of our own perspectives. If a group of us do this, then we run the risk of generating Groupthink, that implicit (and sometimes explicit) peer pressure we apply to team members to stay within the bounds of “approved” thinking, even if it leads us to march collectively over a figurative cliff. Again, as Wilbur Wright said, we don’t want to be too quick to give up our own hold on the truth in the rush to accept our partner’s sense of truth.
And yet … I wouldn’t want to go too far down the path of saying that, for the Daily Improviser, truth is best served by a knock-down-drag-out encounter between two different views and perspectives, with each contender going to the mat to try to prevail over the other’s position. First, as I’ve also observed elsewhere, adopting this attitude often means that the “victory” goes to the best arguer, not to the most valid argument. Second, humans are not purely rational, argument-processing, truth-sifting machines that can put aside their emotions during a struggle for the truth. We can win the rhetorical battle but lose the relationship war, at a cost of bad feeling and lingering resentment. As was the case with the Wright Brothers, at some point we need to quit contending and start looking for common ground.
I'll continue this topic next time by further exploring the meaning of "Support" for Daily Improvising leaders.
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