People often ask what they might get from coming to improv classes.
There are plenty of good answers: you might become more creative, more expressive, more playful, more comfortable with uncertainty.
But there’s another, more paradoxical answer: you might get something that isn’t useful at all.
We live in a culture that wants to know what everything is for.
- What will this do for me?
- What will I get from it?
- Will this make me more productive?
If we’re not careful, even mindfulness, exercise, creativity and play can get swallowed by that mindset.
- I meditate so that I can be calmer.
- I exercise so I’ll be healthier.
- I do improv so I’ll become more confident.
- I play so I’ll become more creative.
None of these are bad reasons. But something gets lost if they’re the only reasons.
We turn life into a journey towards some imagined destination — one we never quite reach.
Improv is a chance to laugh and enjoy yourself here and now without turning it into yet another project.
For a couple of hours, you can just play. You don’t have to be good at it. You don’t have to get anywhere. You don’t have to make it about achieving anything else.
It’s something we do for its own sake.
And maybe that reminder is the biggest — but hidden — benefit.
It reminds me of this clip of Alan Watts:
“We thought of life by analogy with a journey with a serious purpose at the end. And the thing was to get to the end. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.”
