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

google

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