Joyful Bewilderment, etc.

Improv instructors are constantly asking students to “leap into the unknown” and “embrace ambiguity” and “sit in discomfort.”   This is essential to doing good scenes.  Getting stuck in ruts; relying on schtick; pushing an agenda: all of these default positions guarantee a stale scene that will leave the audience complacently amused (at best) or dissatisfied and hostile (at worst).  It will definitely leave the improviser empty and ego-driven.  I’ve been down this road many times and know the difference between a grim, workmanlike evening and one in which both the performers and the audience make discoveries together.  The latter is preferable.

Maybe improv relies on joyful bewilderment.  I know that sounds like a bumper sticker (“Ask me about my joyful bewilderment!”) (“Thanks! What?!”) but it’s a rare and exciting state of affairs when performers get lost in the moment and invite the audience along with them.  Twin Cities people:  have you seen the group Foley Moley (sp) at HUGE?  They create a 25-minute scene that incorporates a series of pre-recorded sound effects that only the person in the tech booth has heard before.  Watching this group discover plot, relationships, and characters based on random noises is thrilling, and it works so well because the cast embraces these disorienting gifts with abandon.  It’s not that the cast doesn’t get thrown by the unknown.  It’s more that they seem genuinely delighted by being off-balance and uncertain.

Which leads me to my second day in Pakistan.  The sound track is different here and I’m aspiring to find joy in my bewilderment.  It’s about 2:00 and I’ve done okay.  Here’s a photo to provide some context:

After graduating from high school I was a foreign exchange student in Bangkok for a summer (Go Poly! Thank you, AFS) where I learned the essential lesson that wherever I went I would eventually show up.  My Thai teachers took good care of me. My Thai family didn’t kick me out.  I made friends that I’ve kept for over 40 years (hello, Pongsak! Gloria! Hernan!) (and Barbara, belatedly!).  And yet my primary memory of that time was being flattened by homesickness, by being astonished that EVERYTHING was different and I couldn’t find my footing.  There were moments when I could see the beauty of Thailand and feel the affection of the people around me, and there were moments when I cracked up laughing because it was absurd that I was a hairy, six-foot-something American in a Thai school uniform sitting in a math class that wouldn’t make sense even if it were in English, which it wasn’t.  There were many moments, usually after the fact, when I realized that I was SO LUCKY to have been chosen for this exchange program.  And yet if my summer in Bangkok were an improv scene, I’d have entered it and sat down and said, “no! no! no!” and then wept with regret when it was over.  Which I did.

And now, in another stroke of luck, I’m in Pakistan and I am currently bewildered and I am very grateful that I’ve had hundreds of nights of improv to help me navigate and, yes, enjoy this baffling and beautiful place.   Some examples:

So far today I’ve eaten enough (delicious) food to sustain an entire neighborhood over the course of a week-long harvest festival.  Javed, our cook, has kept me company at the long, otherwise empty table, and I appreciate his good humor as much as I do his dahl and aloo and the eight different kinds of fruit whose Urdu names I repeat once and then forget (I do remember the Urdu word for “glass,” however; it’s “glass”).  I’m eating this much because I made a stale quip about “eating the entire kitchen” and then confusing matters further by trying to explain and apologize for (exologize?) my leaving leftovers on the table, all of which was served again along with a whole other meal in the 90-minute break between breakfast and lunch.  On top of this, I agreed to eat with the Fulbright people at the Fulbright office but then was sent home (with Ali, the driver) for being vegetarian even though I said, sincerely, that I’d be happy to eat whatever had been prepared.   And this is in a country where hunger is a very real, very pressing problem.  I am the problem.

A similar thing happened at the Fulbright office where I met with dozens of people who treated me like a beloved guest (I was introduced as “Dr. James Arthur” many times; in Thailand I was given the name “Ahtorn” because it almost-rhymed with my middle name.  And because, in Thai, ahtorn means “worry.”  I think the Thai people understood me better than I did myself).  It was really exciting to meet with them and talk about the upcoming three weeks and all the different groups I’ll get to work with (counselors, psychologists, actors, teachers, rehab technicians, students, and the Fulbright staff) and then, after I promised I’d email them with times that would work for all these wonderful opportunities, my gmail account has betrayed me and shut down because of insecure security.  Come on!  I panicked, and not because I had come face-to-face with the fact that security is an illusion but because I now would have to find ways to get this information to them and not appear like an ungrateful guest who eats all the food (or doesn’t eat it, which feels a bit more obscene) and then vanishes. I guess I’ll have to improvise.  Hmmm.

I exaggerate for (mild) comic effect.  I came back to the Fulbright office to be around people (and give Javed a break) and was given an entirely empty office that had to be cleared by three staff members so that I could have the swivel chair that both faces the window and benefits from the air-conditioner.  I am not worthy.

And yet, in improv terms, each of the generous and confusing gifts is an actual gift, and so I want to stay open to all the embarrassment and confusion and real gratitude that these situations offer.  I do want to say “yes” like a real improviser, both to the excitement of being with these gracious hosts and to the mind-frying realities of culture shock.  I do want to be worthy of this scene, to serve it well and not be such a heavy presence when it doesn’t go how I expect it to go.

(On another note: I teach students at home who have had to leave their countries because of war and oppression and torture.  They haven’t chosen to expose themselves to bewilderment, haven’t chosen to try to learn new words for absolutely everything.  These people need our respect and our good graces.  That they are currently demonized by powerful people is perverted.  Immigration is a complex issue, of course, but decency ought to be the order of the day.  How wretched to be treated like a burden instead of a gift).

I did meet with one of the program directors who volunteered that she had worked with an actor before and that she liked him less and less the more she was exposed to him.  “It’s all schtick,” she said.  I grinned and grimaced and thought, “I’d better shut up.”  And so that’s all for today.

I lied. One more: