Improvisation Developing Creative Freedom
hi everyone
and uh thank you so much for coming and
visiting us today for these talks
um i hope you’ve been enjoying the
previous talks between the other
talented speakers that we have here at
asf and
i wonder what were your expectations
coming to this event today
did you expect to be inspired and
motivated
did you expect to see a new world view
just for a moment i want you to
feel a little bit of discomfort a little
bit of anxiety and a little bit of
fear i want you to pretend that we
were in the auditorium we had a real
audience around us and that we were
actually surrounded
by people and now i want you to pretend
that i’m asking everyone to stand up
and to sing together now it makes sense
i mean i am a music teacher like of
course
i’m going to include singing in my talk
or better yet
i’m going to ask just you
to stand up in front of everyone and
sing completely
by yourself how would that make you feel
how would you react in that situation
i think for most people it’s a true
nightmare of a situation
and i mean if it’s not a nightmare about
getting up and singing in front of
people
then it’s at least a nightmare about a
presentation that you didn’t finish
and now you have to get up in front of
everyone and maybe also
you forgot your clothes at home
in this example of singing in front of
everyone
most people would not have sung
or even the people who did sing would at
least feel
nervous and anxious
and this is normal i mean spontaneous
presentation
in front of a group of people is
extremely difficult
and asking people to sing in front of
each other is
like the worst of the worst and that
would be true for
public speaking that would be true for
acting be true for painting even for
just writing something down
in front of an audience it would be
difficult
now most people are certain of what they
can
and cannot do and especially of what
they
cannot do given
experiences like this in uncomfortable
situations
our anxiety prevents us
from giving the presentation from being
fluid
in our creation prevents us from
spontaneous
creation and that’s what i want to talk
to you about
today i want to talk about spontaneous
creation
i want to talk about improvisation
now when you think of improvisation you
may have a mental image of a
jazz musician or of a theater group
and truthfully this is the perspective
that i am coming to you
from as a music educator as a musician
i would love nothing more than to tell
people to go
and to join a choir to join some kind of
a performance group
but it’s a lot to ask
a group of people who are listening to
some stranger on a screen
just tell you to join a performance
group so instead
what i want to talk about is how
improvisation
can truly help us in many different
areas
and with many different experiences
now there’s a good quote
by stephen nakmanovic and he says this
beautifully in his book
free play he says doing without being
too attached to the outcome because
doing is its own
outcome now this is a little bit like
the cliche the
journey is more important than the
destination
but i really like this quote because it
really tends to explain
why we enjoy creation in the first place
now i’ve been working for the past three
years with
a community choir here at asf and
this community choir is made up of
faculty of staff sometimes we have
students sometimes we have parents
we have foreigners we have people from
here in mexico
and really it’s a diverse group of
people and especially
a group of people with a diver diverse
relationship with music and with
performance
introducing improvisation exercises has
really helped
our group here are
three of the exercises that we use so in
the first place
we have an exercise where we excuse me
where we do an improvisation warm-up and
in this kind of warm-up we start by
singing rather softly
we don’t really pay attention to what
the other people are doing around us
maybe we’re standing very far away
from the other people and the point of
this exercise is not
to collaborate we just try to create
something very personal and quiet
in that moment in the second exercise
we start to collaborate with the people
around us and we try to do that
in as ugly a way as possible and we try
to do it loudly
this is just developing some kind of a
comfort with the idea of
ugly things in the third exercise
we do begin to collaborate
as well but we also try to maintain that
confidence and that comfort
with the idea of ugly ideas
we’re not specifically trying to create
ugly ideas
but we are trying to allow them to
happen
but also the beautiful ideas that happen
at the same time
now this level of improvisation took
practice
and has taken time and you may imagine
that the music teachers in the group
have an easier time
learning and working through this
process
that’s not necessarily always true
sometimes the people with the most
experience have the highest level
of self-judgment and sometimes have the
hardest time
experimenting but this is one of the
advantages
of these improvisation exercises it
really helps us to accept those truly
ugly moments
now
i have noticed from my own experience
that there are several
concrete benefits to practicing
improvisation
there is an increased level of teamwork
and collaboration
there is an increased level of
self-acceptance
there is an increased level of
the ability to encounter ideas that are
new and unique and unexpected
and there is a healthier relationship in
general
with the process now it should be
unsurprising
that a lot of the research that is being
done on improvisation
centers around music and theater
in one study lindau and lamb
measured the cognitive function of
musicians during the improvisation
process
and they explained that improvisation is
a remarkably
complex process but
they measured that musicians actually
showed reduced
cognitive function in certain areas
the musicians were monitoring themselves
less they were quote
creating a more immediate connection
with the music this is certainly a skill
that we can use in all areas another
study
the causal inference of cortical neural
networks
in musical improvisation a title that
was definitely not improvised
um found something very interesting
that audiences really resonated
appreciated found more beautiful the
music with
free emotional expression rather than
the mechanical
rendition of music the audience enjoyed
the improvisation
more than they enjoyed the prepared
music
this is one of the great strengths of
improvisation
by opening ourselves up and by
practicing these strategies
the community choir has been able to
encounter
these these moments
that would not have otherwise happened
they have practiced to make this happen
and they have worked on taking those
risks
now how many anecdotes do we have
of chance encounters that led to
truly profound and famous historical
moments
how many inventors and investors who met
in a moment and came up with an idea
that became a product that is now
ubiquitous and famous
steve jobs and i mean of course i was
going to include a quote by steve jobs
steve jobs recognized that creativity
comes from spontaneous meetings from
random discussion
david radcliffe who is an architect for
says that casual collisions are what we
try and create
in the work environment you can’t
schedule innovation you can’t schedule
idea generation and this openness
to spontaneous creation to
serendipity leads to beautiful and truly
profound ideas
now in full disclosure it can also lead
to ideas that make us
deeply uncomfortable but practicing
improvisation
teaches us to accept these uncomfortable
moments when we accept every possibility
we open the door to this spontaneous
creation now this is a study
where they took certain strategies
from theater and they found that these
strategies were being used
in certain business situations so here
peter hackbert
describes how the design firm ideo
is using these theater exercises
in their idea generation process now you
can see
that there are a number of strategies
that they are using i want to talk about
two of them
the first is this idea of deferring
judgment
and this is the idea that we should
avoid criticism of others
and of ourself during the creation
process
now this doesn’t mean that every idea is
a good idea
but like we saw with the musicians they
didn’t allow
their self-criticism their self-judgment
to stop the flow of creativity
[Music]
peter hackberg continues to say
that people are safe within the fortress
of our images
and are reluctant to come out and give
up control
so often in education in our jobs in
music
we find that the thing that holds us
back the most is our own ego
or is our fear of judgment and we know
that we judge ourselves more harshly
than most other people
peter hacker also says the creativity
involves
risk-taking if an activity is under
control
it is not risky
in order for people to really reap the
benefits of practicing creativity
they need to give in to spontaneity and
to their true selves
as shown by uninhibited improvisation
now please
do not start practicing these strategies
in your next meeting in your next
science class
coming in and saying every single idea
that comes into your brain as fast as
possible
is not a good strategy but we can start
by practicing these things
in as many ways as we possibly can
now one way to start practicing
and one way that we can start
implementing these things in
our daily life is to join
a performance group and i mean that
seriously
sometimes practicing something in its
most
obvious context is the best way to try
it
and i know that at the beginning of this
talk i said i wouldn’t ask you
to join a performance group
but i kind of am and not only
does it help us with our improvisation
does it help us with our presentation
skills
it’s also just nice at the end of a long
difficult day to
create with other people
but if creation if performance with
another group of people
isn’t right for you i mean that’s fair
enough
we can still take these strategies and
try them in our daily
life this study
done by peter hackbert goes into detail
about different strategies
that we’ve been used both in the theater
world
and in the business world and i
recommend checking it out you can look
up the strategies
that were used by etheo
but most importantly i want you to
remember that this takes
time this voice of self-judgment
that we have takes practice
to silence and the truth is that
sometimes it never fully
goes away but by practicing
improvisation
we can learn not to allow that voice
to interfere with our creative process
to stop our flow of ideas
so however it is that you may use
improvisation in your life it is an
incredibly powerful tool
that is largely untapped by many people
if you are looking to gain an edge or if
you are looking to
improve a team dynamic if you are
trying to discover your own creativity
or if you just want to enjoy
the creative process more improvisation
is one of the best
tools that we have
thank you