Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Like a Toaster in a Bath


When I want to work and my son wants to play, he will give very strong 'I am playing' signals in an attempt to pull me back into his game. All people relate to each other in this way, but most teachers are afraid to give 'I am playing' signals to their students. If they would, their work would become a constant pleasure. -Keith Johnstone

This quote is is from Impro, a book about practicing and teaching improvised theater that I have read many times. I am returning to it again now, having just recently returned to improvafter a four year hiatus. My connection to improv is curious (I intentionally do not say funny), because of how much I struggle with humor. My sense of humor comes in and out over months and hours, in a way I don't feel I have much control over, but that obviously relates to what's going on in the rest of my life. And so I have started thinking a lot about my feelings about humor. There's a lot I haven't begun to articulate, but I'm writing to capture what I know right now.

When messy situations used to come up at staff meetings, the principle of the school I was working at would use the phrase with lightness. He is an amazing man: serious, empathetic, articulate, self-aware...even of what an inflated ego he had. I felt a unspoken resonance with him, sharing the kind of self-importance and gravity that allows a person to see their own over-seriousness, but only be able to muster in response to them self a pensive, deliberate reminder that it is possible to approach this situation with lightness.

I say all the time (jokingly I guess) that I have no sense of humor. It's not exactly true, so what do I really mean? At least these things:
When I don't understand jokes, I like when people explain them to me, and then I laugh at the explanation...even I have enough humor in me to recognize how strange that is. I don't enjoy banter. I'd pretty much always prefer people talk about something serious (and equate serious with interesting), so I'm often annoyed when people crack jokes. And most of all, I hate, hate being teased. even gently and lovingly, even when part of me knows its funny. I often feel like I have no natrual capacity for lightness.

I haven't found the impetus to make myself laugh, but the joke is in there somewhere, like a toaster in a bath. -Samuel Lang Budin/Weird Chess
I had this quote stuck in my head the whole time I've been writing this post. Maybe I can rewrite and work it in in a more clever way....but it makes me chuckle about this seriousness in straining for lightness.

But lightness isn't just funny. It also means ease. When some situations presented themselves a few weeks ago that I knew would be internally very hard for me, I lay in bed chanting to myself with lightness. with lightness. with lightness! I'd also say relinquish, Rachel! relinquish! (this is the other word I am infatuated with). But the words felt heavy, commands banging down on my gut, in action as if saying to myself repress repress repress. I didn't sleep very much.

And there is definitely a relationship between lightness and relinquishing. I haven't put my finger on it yet, but what I know so far in words is this: Relinquishing is about experiences of non-mutuality, letting go of what we thought we wanted/needed in situations where we know we're not going to get it. Totally mutuality is impossible, and relinquishing is a necessary skill. Lightness is a coping within that, a way of allowing onesself to relinquish expectation without dissociating. When looking at the big picture isn't working, lightness is allowing yourself to look at the even more infinite no picture, relax and laugh.

This makes me think about my parents, who think I am a comedic genius. There is a lot of commonality between us to play with...you know, since they raised me, but also a lot of non-mutuality in that relationship, inherent in the fact that I'm no longer their kid, living out their vision for me. But the terms of that relationship are relatively set, and so there is a lot of ease in it. As a comfortable coping for non-mutuality, my family is just about the only place where I am consistently experienced as funny.

Teaching is a a messier space than family:a huge site of personal work, challenge, and growth. I read this quote of Johnstone's as saying that he believes teachers don't let themselves play with their students because they are afraid of enjoying their jobs. ...and this makes a lot of sense in the context of my job, lately. My coworkers don't particularly like their jobs, and the attitude is contagious. They talk about the children collectively as brats...at best, cute brats, and they are quick to yell at them. There is a lot that is unsolvable and outside of our control about how our after school program works, and it is definitely a frustrating job. But in the abstract, I love my job, so I've been working on ways to actually feel satisfied in the moment.

A lot of my job is supervising large groups of children in un-programmed time: hallways, snack time, recess, dismissal. These all happen in public places, where there are other adults watching how I take care of the kids- which is so stressful. The main mode adults relate to each other in seems to be to greet each other wearily, affirming our position as outside of whatever small ruckus is inevitably taking place within earshot of us. I feel pressure to relate to other teachers this way, and am totally sized up when I am the educator in charge of the group of kids who are making the noise. I try not to buy in to this small exaltation of child docility, but in some basic sense I still assess whether I've done my job well that day by how quietly my students can walk in a straight line down the hall. And so like my coworkers, I get comfortable barking orders. Which doesn't work. Lately, I've decided instead to try not to care if the kids are 'misbehaving'. I say to noisy clusters of first graders, Hey look! some people here are standing in line! It looks like Alex is almost standing in line, except that he's facing the wrong direction, and he's 5 feet from the line, his backpack is still on the table, and his cheez-its are spilled all over the floor! I can't claim this makes them get in line any faster than when I yell, but they don't get ready any more slowly either, and I finish the day feeling like I've been playing, rather than feeling like I've smothered the spirits of children.

Johnstone says, if educators could learn to play with children rather than boss them around, they could love their jobs. And maybe it's even bigger: If we all could more mindfully access where we place our sobriety and lightness, and use lightness where we don't actually need to have control over the situation, we could be liberated from all kinds of energy-suck, we could feel good about what we do, and with the new buoyancy we could have energy to do better in the places in our lives where maintaining or taking control really are important. So for me right now this means, identifying more spaces for lightness.

Enter improv. After a four year hiatus, some friends from an old troupe of mine started up rehearsing again...and it's just honestly amazing. This activity that was so petrifying and crucial to me when I started in high school. Cathartic, if not nearly as scary as it was when I was 14, I ask myself as i re-enter: why is this important and energizing to me? On the surface improv is about things I say I'm not interested in: being funny, and making stuff up (someday I'll write here about fictionality...).

I fall back in to the same approach I had cultivated, which is to take improv seriously. I do not attempt in the least bit to be funny, stumbling on it like an accident, believing that any funny you work for is basically just dumb. I increasingly find myself playing out my politics- the other week I showed up as a protesting long time resident in a sequence about a fancy new bar in brooklyn. I like to play characters who clarify plots as they emerge, give serious feedback after practice, and I am visibly pissed when my troupe mates seem unfocused... for example, choosing to play out an extensive, illogical sequence about jacking off.

In past improv troupes, this seriousness has made me feel outside of the main action of the group, and I know in other parts of my life my insistence on taking myself so seriously is a way I make myself feel distant. In this new improv group, I often feel self-conscious about acting this way, and I sense that at least one other troupe member is really not pleased with the way I am/am choosing to be.

Allowing space to unapologetically embrace what I'm just naturally prone to be like, I also find myself thinking about how else I could behave in improv, at work, and elsewhere. What if I didn't feel that kind of detached, would it be possible? I know this gravity is what made me start thinking of myself as an educator, and yet in my work as a teacher find myself feeling I'd be better if I weren't quite so....teacherly. I rarely really know how to play with my students. I am aware this places me outside of my student's world: the seriousness with which I orchestrate the logistics of their afternoon is so far off base from the priorities in their world, a world that is mostly about fun. And all people were kids- the world of self-generated play is someplace we all crave. I think about how I relished seriousness as a child, how I felt alienated from most of my peers, even then, because of how playful they preferred to be, and I wonder lots about how we culturally define the job of Teacher that made me feel so strongly, for as long as I can remember, that this serious disposition made me especially qualified to shape young people. I do feel that there is a lot in the world that needs to be approached with more gravity...but that in handling the real discomfort that exists in almost any situation that involved people, didactic seriousness can only get you so far.

And I feel a lot of gratitude too: for the fact that improv was a big part of my education, and now is something I can make for myself to continue learning. For this chosen livelihood that can function as the site at which to face my heavy self hood, for the joint opportunities to expand my relationship to lightness.

expand my relationship to lightness. Seriously, Rachel, is there a heavier way to possibly say that? What about if you said.... lighten up?







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