Imagination and Improvisation

The foundation of all improvisation is what Carl Jung referred to as an Active Imagination.

Imagination and improvisation are intimately related. One cannot exist without the other. Through the imaginative faculty, the improviser taps into a library of images consisting of sights, sounds, and sensations (even tastes and smells) and uses this as raw material for creating music, cartoons, jokes, dance moves, or any other art form in which the final product is an unplanned, yet brilliant piece of innovation.

How does the improviser do it? One word – practice. Comedian Jonathan Winters was interviewed about the art of comedic improvisation. The way he put it is basically that you rehearse being spontaneous. At first glance, this seems like an oxymoron or a non sequitur…a paradox that violates conventional thinking, but when you think of the results (Jonathan Winters was mentor to the comedic superstar and Oscar winning actor Robin Williams) you can’t help but wonder what he meant by that sentiment when you contemplate the results it achieved.

His explanation is that by rehearsing for a specific hour a day using different props and prompts that stimulate the imagination to generate characters on the fly…that you develop “tapes” or recordings of these spontaneous undertakings. The more one practices this spontaneity…the better you get at it. Sounds simple doesn’t it? But it is not that easy.

Unlearning the inhibitions that we tend to learn as we get older and take on more responsibilities takes a regimen of rehearsing and specific rituals that enable you to go back in time to the period of our childhood where all the inhibitions we learned were absent and our spontaneity of play was the order of the day.

I watched an interview with comedian Jim Carrey who stated that to tap into his own creativity that he spent an hour every day – or sometimes more – practicing funny faces, voices, gestures, dances, etc. until his inhibitions began to subside and more creative material began to bubble forth from his unconscious. People in general may think that this is silly; however, it resulted in him being one of the highest paid and funniest comedians in Hollywood history.

Nevertheless, improvisation is not just in the domain of comedy. It has been used and it continues to be used in fields such as music, dance, and the visual arts such as cartooning. What is developed when exploring it in these domains is the ability to think on one’s feet, to develop things in a snap, or to respond in a more effective manner to events in our life that are unplanned or unexpected.

The idea that everything that transpires in our life is always anticipated, planned, and expected is as silly as as some myths of the world’s beginnings such as the Earth being supported by a large turtle and some elephants…or by the shoulders of Atlas. Developing our imagination would be the precursor to mastering later the art of improvisation, and by developing this art…we develop a little more “savvy” in handling the unpredictable events that tend to hit us in rapid-fire succession in our sometimes chaotic world.