Month: June 2022

I abandoned the entry I started last night. With each sentence my ideas became more listless (“people change”; “time passes”). I wasn’t invested in what I was writing. What I really wanted to do is rant.

In improv, we often begin a class with a rant. The students line up against the back wall, get a topic (“traffic!”; “weather!”; “democracy!”), and then purge their streams-of-consciousness onto the stage (we used to start shows with rants; I’m not sure this bolstered ticket sales). The goal is to increase our energy while letting our minds run free. The emotional contagion we create from yelling in unison helps us forge a group mind; ideally, when we begin our scene work we now have an unconscious pool of images and emotions from which to draw.

Or not.

I don’t like rants. No one listens. We talk over each other. Everyone gets hot and bothered. More than anything, the scenes that emerge from the rant are just a relief after all that aggression: “Thank god they stopped that hollering. What does a talking turtle have to do with democracy? Please let there be an intermission.”

So I won’t rant.

Much.

Just a bit about news from home.

Okay. Imagine this at full volume from the back wall of an airless theater:

(Lights up. Yelling)

I’m sick and angry about US politics, about the anti-democratic behavior of a marauding minority whose only objective is to dominate and diminish others.

I’m disgusted by the racism, the White supremacy, the winking apologies.

I’m weary of watching prominent men who physically and sexually abuse women get rewarded, like they’re the victims because “people can’t take a joke.”

I’m dumbfounded that you expect me to live by the rules of your religion.

I’m not really dumbfounded. I’m used to it, but I thought we’d made some progress.

I’m furious that ONCE AGAIN gay people are being accused of “grooming” children when, week after week after week after week, sanctimonious men in America’s houses of worship expect their wives and parishioners to forgive them for their actual pedophilia.

I’m tired of feeling helpless, because this helplessness is a lie. We are still, tenuously, a democracy. This is not the time to give up.

I know we’re technically a republic. Point taken.

Whew.

(What I really want to do is swear.)

(Piano gliss; lights change; begin scene; go for laughs; regret becoming a turtle because, at my age, it takes forever to stand up and so I’m doomed to be on all-fours for most of the show. Blackout.)

Speaking of righteous rants, it’s the fifth-third anniversary of the Stonewall Riots today.

While I don’t particularly believe in ranting, I do believe in boundaries, a fundamental part of healthy improv scenes and human relations. In light of that, I’m going to curtail my diatribe and look at borderlines, healthy and otherwise.

Before shows we will often go around the circle and voice our physical boundaries (“my back is killing me, so please be careful”) and, occasionally, our emotional ones (“I’m not up for too many divorce scenes tonight”) (although this can backfire; divorce will be the first word on everyone’s lips).

At first I was skeptical of this practice. It seemed too precious. Performing requires some bravery; we really don’t want the audience to have to take care of us (talk about a boundary violation). The words of my first improv teacher, a remarkable woman named Cynthia Szygeti, have stuck with me for over thirty years. When we were tentative or self-conscious she would lean back in her chair, throw her arms above her head, and bellow, “There are no extra points for fear! JUMP!”

I really needed to hear that.

Now, however, taking about boundaries before we go on stage makes good sense to me. In fact, it’s a way of practicing the “yes, and…” principle that is at the heart of improvisation. We aspire to make our scene partners look as good as possible, and to do that we have to respect them. We honor their gifts; explore their declarations; try, with real commitment, to listen to them and respond. We don’t jump on their backs in a heedless scene about a messy divorce. We help each other get back on our feet when, after five scenes, an aging improviser’s been a turtle and then an ottoman and then a toadstool and then a beetle and, finally, a scone.

We try to recognize each other’s sovereignty while knowing the limits of our own. And when we violate a boundary–something that will surely happen–we listen and apologize. It’s not easy, but it’s worth the effort.

I think about my students here at AUW. They come from Bangladesh, of course, but also from Afghanistan and Myanmar and Syria, among other places. I don’t know what they’ve been through to get here–I hope if they share that with me I’ll have the good sense to shut up and listen–but I do know most of them have lived intimately with fundamentalism of the religious and political variety. Some, because they’re women or an ethnic minority, have been driven from their homes. Talk about a boundary violation. Where do we humans get off deciding some groups of people are worthwhile while others are not?

I should paste that on my bathroom mirror. Read it every day.

Seriously, when I think of the trauma inflicted by religious and political authoritarianism (often disguised as Patriotism and Love of Country and–god help us–God’s Plan) and the wastefulness of it all, I feel enraged. My students here don’t show that fury. They are going into careers in sustainability and environmentalism and management. Even if they struggled a bit with the first exam they can’t blame their grades on cynicism. They are, at least in class, resolutely positive. I love being around them. And there will be extra credit.

Let’s look at Bangladesh:

Just to the left of the photo above is a building that, apparently, has been under construction for over five years. The concrete shell is finished, but none of the interior work has been done. While I was waiting for the shuttle with another faculty member we heard a very distinct “Moo.” “Cows,” my colleague said to me, and then explained that a herd of 20 cattle is living in the building until next weekend when they will be slaughtered for Eid al-Adha, the Islamic holiday honoring Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son at God’s command.

Later this afternoon a student brought me a rainbow heart pin in honor of LGBT Pride here at AUW. The world is complex and barely knowable. Another good thing for me to keep in mind.

This poster, just outside the library at the Asian University for Women, took up a lot of my time this afternoon as I tried to untangle the competing fonts. When I finally saw that it read “Embrace Ambiguity” I felt a bit hoodwinked. Annoyed, even. There I stood, flummoxed, doing the very thing the poster was imploring me not to do: I was losing my patience. Classic.

Even more karmically comical, I had just tried out some improv exercises with my psychology students, telling them (no lie) that I was “going to create some ambiguous situations” that would make them “uncomfortable,” but if they were willing to “be in the discomfort” they would “gain some insight” into how they could take some control over their reactions and “discover the opportunities in the moment.”

This is me, being in my discomfort, just before I read the admonishing poster and after a walk around sweaty, dripping Chittagong:

Despite my personality and the profound humidity, the psych/improv experience was a success. Because the course is Intro Psych, we spend about 45 minutes on each topic before swerving to the next one (history of psych; statistics; research design; neuropsych; childhood development; tears and blaming; exam one). This can lead to rapid-fire lecturing with everyone desperately trying to write down everything I say. It’s ridiculous, like those home renovation shows where the hosts have to knock down a non-load bearing wall, re-tile the backsplash, and be sure the marble for the open-concept kitchen island doesn’t crack because it all has to be done in three days or something arbitrarily awful will happen involving shame and disgrace. I hate feeling stampeded by time, both on TV and in my class.

So…instead of rushing through a lecture on the various functions of the hind-, mid-, and forebrain, we did a few exercises that evoked some panic (as improv does), required attention, involved our senses, taxed our memory, and insisted on human connection and collaboration. After all the running around (and the laughter…lots of laughter) we debriefed to identify which structures of the nervous system had been activated at various times in the game.

The students did a great job of discussing the fight-or-flight response, the hippocampus and memory, the frontal lobe and its role in deciding whom to zip-zap-or-zop. We talked about eye contact and vocal cues and how to listen with our mammalian bodies. We tried to describe what it felt like to be in an ambiguous, unfamiliar (oceanic?) situation and how when we didn’t allow ourselves to check out our bodies and brains reacted in surprising and adaptive ways.

It was fun.

Along with the laughter, improv also gave the students a stake in the class. They couldn’t be spectators and I couldn’t be the sole expert. A huge relief. We could actually converse because of this shared experience we had all created. Time flew. I think people learned.

While we were rummaging through the topic of research design we also considered the Dunning-Kruger effect and the dangers it presents (I looked this up on Wikipedia: “The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a certain type of a task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge”). I bring this up because I’m about to write about Bangladesh from the perspective of a person who has been teaching here for six whole days. Buckle up.

The traffic is impressive, seemingly free of road rage (although my Bangla consists of the numbers one through five and the word “shamosa,” which means problem, so I don’t know what the drivers are saying). “We are bad drivers!” a colleague in the university shuttle said to me on the way back to faculty housing. I disagree! Maybe it comes from living in one of the most densely populated places on earth (“Dunning, table for Kruger”), but Bangladeshi drivers’ and pedestrians’ spatial intelligence seems nothing short of genius.

Yesterday, during a break in the rain (northern Bangladesh has been hit, again, with catastrophic flooding; climate change is accelerating these historic events at a terrible rate), I walked around the university neighborhood. I love being here. Chittagong is green and fecund (it is) and filled with pockets of silence amidst the overwhelming noise and motion. Some photos:

I also love the aspirational names of the apartments:

And:

Some signs that gave me pause and hope:

And finally, this, from the AUW dining hall. I think each sign reinforces the other (and, just before taking this photo, I put a heaping table spoon of salt in my tea) (it wasn’t all that bad) (and it wasn’t all that good) (it wasn’t intentional) (“every direction is a possibility”).

I changed the title of this blog to “Yes, and… Islamabad (and Beyond)” because, well, I’m beyond at the moment. For the next month I’ll be teaching general psychology at the Asian University for Women in Chittagong, Bangladesh. My goal (ha!) is to make the course largely interactive, using what is now called “Applied Improvisation” (as opposed to Theoretical Improvisation?). Wherever possible I’m going to link the course material to improv exercises in hopes that the students’ rushes of adrenaline will seal the information into their long-term memory. Evidence suggests that emotional reactions provide visual and somatic cues to information acquired at the event. Unless, of course, our fight-or-flight response erases everything.

Classes begin in two days.

For now, however, I’m in my faculty housing, wondering why the key is so reluctant to open the front door and if I should keep wearing the compression socks that saw me through 36 hours of air travel. It’s glorious to be out in the world again. It’s also bewildering: the past two years of the pandemic upended everything–or many things–and the desire to retreat is strong. Maybe this is just age talking (I remembered my omeprazole but forgot my umbrella); when I was younger I’d rush around on the first day, trying to see as much as possible. Now I’m sitting on my bed tinkering with this blog.

In trying to remember how to post photos in this format I accidentally uploaded this quote from Howard Zinn, anti-fascist pacifist whose history texts threatened many a “patriotic” legislator. It’s been sitting on my desktop for much of the pandemic, largely ignored as I nurtured despair about the rise of cultish authoritarianism in the US. Zinn emphasizes the power of finding hope in the moment, that history (and life)(and improv!) is a series of moments, a series of opportunities. With resolve and practice, perhaps, we can direct our attention toward the generative and inclusive and redemptive and responsible. I decided to keep Howard Zinn’s words and imploring gaze here.

But what of Bangladesh? I’ll post more when my mind catches up to my jet-lagged body (and also when I have some actual experiences here). For now, here are some photographic moments from the trip, taken by this monoglot who, in seventh grade, told Mrs. Leonessa that Spanish was hard because “We don’t conjugate verbs in English,” which is to say that the Bangladeshis’ creative use of English puts my Spanish to shame:

Finally, this: