Ideas - Say Yes: Improvisation in Art and Life

Episode Date: February 24, 2025

For many people, public speaking is horrifying. Imagine trying to make people laugh. Without a script. IDEAS explores the art of improv — a skill that isn't just for entertainment. It's tapping into a vast well of human potential, and maybe even making the world a tiny bit better.

1942, Europe. Soldiers find a boy surviving alone in the woods. They make him a member of Hitler's army. But what no one would know for decades, he was Jewish. Could a story so unbelievable be true? I'm Dan Goldberg. I'm from CBC's personally, Toy Soldier. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. This isn't actually us introducing the program. We're just going to play a couple of games that's going to serve as background.

Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. So the first one is going to be one word at a time. So we're going to... Is it going to hurt? No, you know what? You cannot go wrong. Okay.

I wasn't so sure. This is me with Ideas contributor, Peter Brown, who's in Edmonton. Who's starting? I'm going to have you start. Okay. So anytime, kick us off. Once there was a home for flowers. Which? Try not to laugh. Improvisation is much more than comedians making up funny scenes out

of thin air. It's been the lifeblood of artistic creation for centuries from the age of Homer to Homer Simpson. So I'm going to start round two. Okay. Once there was a turtle fire because, because, because time proved beyond any doubt that we can stop turtles. Laughing. I'm going to ruin your recording here. No, this is exactly how it's supposed to go.

Peter Brown's documentary is called Say Yes, Improvisation in Art and Life. People love spontaneity. It's wonderful to see human beings being playful. Like grabbing someone's hand and running down a hill together. We're doing it together. It's a little dangerous, it's a little crazy, but we're doing it. You sort of step out into open air and then ah, there's a stepping stone. It's being so perfectly in your body. It's like you really fill yourself to the fingers. You're discovering at the same time the audience is. What does it tell us about listening? Like really listening to what's going on around us? What does it tell us about listening? Like really listening to what's going on around us.

What does it tell us about trust, about social obligation, about adaptability? And so that is a shared experience that is palpable inside a live setting that really, really causes a reaction every time. You are too good to me. Oh no, papa papa. Yes, I am your papa papa.

I was the papa of the papa of your papa. And suddenly you're on an adventure. People aren't used to it, and people don't know how it's done, and they keep thinking there must be some trick. The trick is there isn't a trick but there are principles at work or should I say at play. Then I should put on my finest fineries from my mama mama mama mama. Improvisation may feel like a new art form and and some of it is. Comedy improv, as we see it now, was born in 1950s Chicago.

And the best known improvised music, jazz, originated just a few decades before that. But improvisation has ancient roots, and it can show up in places you might never have expected. Some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., August 1963, delivering what we now call his I Have a Dream speech. Staggered by the winds of police brutality. But in fact, The speech did not contain the word dream.

Stephen Nachmanovich. I'm a musician and author. I'm the author of two books on the creative process, The Art of His, and Free Play. The first seven paragraphs of the speech, the way it got finally transcribed and spoken, were in the written speech. And his very dear friend, the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, was sitting close by him, she had just sung, and she said, tell him about the dream, Martin, tell him about the dream Martin, tell him about the dream. She just interrupted him, shouting out, tell him about the dream.

And you can see without a beat, you can see behind the podium where he picks up the pieces of paper that he was speaking from and he shifts them over to the left where he picks up the pieces of paper that he was speaking from and he shifts them over to the left and he starts speaking at the audience and he says, I have a dream. I have a dream. And he improvised the rest of that speech. One day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. There's echoes in King's voice of Lincoln,

of the Declaration of Independence, of authors that he read. I have a dream. These influences were so absorbed and taken into his personality that what comes out is a complete utterance by a complete human being who is depending upon his forebears and the past and the literature and everything that he's ever read and experienced, and that's where improvisation comes from. My four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin,

but by the content of their character. I have a dream today. Stephen Nachmanovich has devoted much of his career to answering a question posed by the legendary violinist Yehudi Menuhin. I was sitting with him in his hotel room in San Francisco and he asked me, well, how do you play from nothing? Stephen's answer begins in ancient Greece. Homer was this extraordinary great poet who lived in an age where people were illiterate,

that somehow people memorized these very, very long poems. Stephen also looks beyond Western traditions. Many, many poets, thousands of poets in the griots in West Africa, skilled people at using rhythm to line up syllables and to help propel a story, which is the old story, the story that the ancestors told. Tibetans have the tales of Gesar of Ling, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. In India, there are the Eddas in North civilization. There are many, many epics, very, very long works of extraordinary poetry and myth-making that have come down the ages.

But how do you recite a poem on the scale of the Iliad or the Odyssey so that every line has the perfect number of syllables? You leave yourself options. In the Iliad, Homer used several different adjectives to describe Hector. These phrases varied in length, so when he needed fewer beats to complete a line, he'd just say, Coruthiolos Hector, Hector of the Flashing Helmet. If he needed more, he would use a phrase like,

Hectorus Androphonio, Man Slaying Hector. Or sometimes, Hectorus Hippodamio, Hector tamer of horses. That flexibility helped keep the rhythm on track. It also allowed the storyteller to add their own flourishes and details to the original. I'm telling the old story, but I'm also improvising it. But it's also the real, real, real story as it's passed through the ages. But I'm also telling it to you now in my own words and I'm snipping the syllables and slicing everything so that the rhythms come out beautifully. The The

The The The The The The The The noted as an extraordinary improviser. People did gather to see Beethoven improvise, and they were magical, thunderous, hilarious.

He used to break out in boisterous laughter after he finished a piece. Mozart was also a great improviser, as were Bach, Handel, Liszt, Chopin. They were all extraordinary improvisers and they were also great composers because in their day there was no recording equipment and so there was one way, oh that was a great idea I should write that down. idea, I should write that down. And there was a kind of fluid hybridity between improvising and composing. In fact, the composer Arnold Schoenberg called composition slowed down improvisation. And that disappeared in the 19th century. So, for musicians like ancient poets, one answer to the question,

How do you play from nothing? is to start with an established structure. The most important thing, and it provides it, is that the melody always stays here. It always stays on top and I always hear it. This is one of Canada's greatest musical improvisers, jazz pianist Oliver Jones, sitting at his grand piano in his Montreal apartment. And so what I play underneath or on top I can always come back to exactly where the melody should be. So if I was playing something like

I learn And so forth. Yet Oliver Jones' first music teacher wasn't a fan of improvisation. He says both you and Oscar do the same thing. She was his teacher, Daisy Peterson Sweeney. And Oscar was Daisy's brother, jazz legend Oscar Peterson. When her students tried doing things their own way, teacher Daisy was not impressed. So she said, no, you have to play the same way, the way that is written.

So I said to myself, that seems awful dull to have to do the same thing. But I think that's what impressed me with jazz music. Everything changed for Oliver Jones when he first heard or overheard that other problem student Oscar Peterson improvising. Sometimes I would sit down at a doorstep of Oscar's and wait until he started to play. He would always find a way to make it seem more interesting to me but he would never play it the same way twice. George Gershwin who I loved so

I'll play a lot of his these are all tunes that he has written And so forth and so forth. What are you thinking about? Are you thinking about notes or phrases or what's in your mind when you play? Usually with the drummer on bass player I can feel them. They also rise at the same time so I'm also listening for dynamics. That's so, so important. I'm gonna be a man, I'm gonna playing the same thing. The melody is still there. When you say I'll try a new thing, so does it occur to you

as you're going, oh maybe I'll throw in this chord, or are you going for a feeling or a phrase or what? How does that new thing appear? I'm going for both. I'm going for both. I'm going to go for broke. Music teacher Daisy may have tried to discourage improvisation, Music teacher Daisy may have tried to discourage improvisation, but improv in comedy actually began as a teaching tool. See if you get a new experience. I'm trying to get you to have a few new experiences here. That's Viola Spolan, often referred to as the mother of improvisation, teaching a class in Chicago in the 1970s. And again, I come back to the games. I think, I feel that the games do do this. She believed theater games could help children, especially immigrant children,

feel more comfortable on stage and off. So she invented a series of games to help them overcome the hurdles that come with the new culture and language. When you're standing all alone in a crowd, right? And you're all alone in a school room, or you're all alone in a school room or you're all alone in wherever. And this following the follower does produce a unity and a union.

Her 1963 book, Improvisation for the Theatre, is still studied by actors. And her legacy was carried on by her son, Paul Sills. When Paul was at the University of Chicago in the early 1950s, he began playing his mother's theater games with his classmates. And those games became the foundation of the theater companies he started. First was called the Compass Players. Then in 1959,

we will need some suggestions from you and the audience. First of all, we'd like you to suggest a character. he founded what may be the most famous comedy improv theater in the world, the Second City. Say, I can't make head nor tail out of this modern novel. You find the heroes dull, the heroines lack sex appeal, nothing ever seems to turn out right in the end. Well, why not change to Ernest Hemingway? Who? Those early years produced the first stars of comedy improvisation.

Scalpel. Scalpel. Gauze. Gauze. More gauze. More gauze. More gauze. More gauze.

More gauze. More gauze. More gauze. Mike Nichols and Elaine May were two of the original Compass players and founding members of Second City. The duo introduced millions of Americans to improvisation on radio, on television, and on three wildly successful albums. As Nichols and May were charming America, improvisation was exploding.

New companies sprung up in Chicago and beyond. Comedy improv had not only star performers, but star teachers. Most of those were in Chicago, but Canada had its own star teacher. What we're trying to do is to start from zero and say if we can take our audience with us, we'll see what we end up with. Keith Johnstone emigrated from England to Canada in 1972. He'd wanted to foster spontaneity in art, but back in England, improvisation on stage was illegal. You couldn't say a word or make a gesture on the stage without sending it to an official at the palace first.

Even after the infamous law was repealed in 1968, it had handcuffed theater. Theater has lost its audience. I mean, even if people go to the theater, they're afraid to respond spontaneously anymore. They don't boo, they don't throw pennies, they don't stand up and cheer. And they don't work like a sporting audience would work. So Johnstone took up a job at the University of Calgary.

In my second year of university I had the good fortune of enrolling in Keith Johnstone's acting classes. And he changed my life. Canadian improviser and actor, Vena Sood. Keith had invited seven of us from his acting community to start and co-found the company. We would rehearse or practice twice a week in his basement. And then we started doing small little improvisational shows at the university called the Secret Impro Show at lunchtime in one of the rooms and audiences were able to come and it was free.

I was teaching them never to kill anybody's idea so we set up teams and the moment you killed someone's idea you lost. And we put this terrible game, it was very primitive, into our improvisation show and we suddenly packed out our theatre. Kids who never go near the theatre would cram into our theatre. Those shows became theatre sports, a format that has become an international sensation. Keith Johnstone's company became Calgary's Loose Moose Theatre. Generations of Canadian actors and writers cut their teeth at loose moose, including Venusude, Andrew Fung from Kim's Convenience, and two members of Kids in the Hall, Bruce McCullough and Mark McKinney.

Keith's improv exercises had a way of unlocking our imagination. Our imaginations were let off the leash. My job is to remove the fear and And in the theater, the directors are friendly actors, and everyone is friendly everybody. The point to start with is to remove the fear. You fail gloriously. You leap joyously.

You commit fearlessly. Patty Stiles is a former loose mooser who now teaches improv around the world. Fearless improvisers will let their characters follow these stories. We will jump into the world. preventing action and stopping their characters from being changed or affected. As playwright and actor Neil Grahn says, the improviser has one main lesson to learn. Fail, fail, fail. And not just to fail, to love failing.

Because if you're willing to fail, you will succeed. You have to rush into failure. You can't learn anything without failing. Therefore, we have to change our attitude to failure. Failing should be fun and failing should be something you do good-naturedly. You're not going to be punished for it. He always used to say to us, make sure you try and make at least three mistakes tonight. There's a golden rule in improv. Always say yes and. Meaning you accept what your fellow actor offers and you add something to it.

Agreement and listening are basics. Getting excited by each other's ideas. Jacob Banigan is a Canadian improviser now based in Austria. Be they intellectual or emotional or physical, to get inspired and run with it. Not just a little bit. But then run together, like grabbing someone's hand and running down a hill together. Let's say, Peter, you and I are in a scene, and I come in the door and you're vacuuming.

You don't want me to start driving the car. You know, all of a sudden, youring has become irrelevant and I've blocked it. Now the scene is in an awkward place. Many of the most profound lessons of improv and the most difficult involve unlearning the psychological armor we wear to protect ourselves in social interactions. I am not funny and I don't improvise well. You don't have to worry about either of those things. It's a matter really of not thinking.

Just hit the ball back as fast as you can. It's what I do best. Not thinking. Exactly. Let it be silly, let it be wrong. Okay. Because all beings should flow more like flowers. You're listening to Ideas, where a podcast and a broadcast

heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on SiriusXM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also find ideas on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayaad. I'm Sarah Trelevin and for over a year I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody.

Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, the con, Caitlin's baby.

It's a long story, settle in. Available now. You can't teach spontaneity, but you can get people to not do the things that stop them being spontaneous. Keith Johnstone. You remove the obstacles. And of course, the main obstacle is you, your social self, which is so concerned with being

approved of and liked and all the rest of that. And it screws you up. So all improvisers are taught some crucial don'ts. First, don't try to control the scene. There's no possible way you can decide ahead of time how a scene is gonna go. You have to constantly just give up control. If improvisers try to be safe,

if they try to play in the future, if they try to play in the future, if they try to calculate improvisation so that it's good or predictable, you know, they're removing the risk because what they're doing is they're minimizing the possibility for them to be altered. Second, and this one may seem counterintuitive, You should never try to do your best. Trying to do your best is a recipe for stage fright. When you're trying to do your very best, there's a certain level of tension that happens in their body. The muscles get up tight, you're in your brain going,

Oh my God, so and so's in the audience, I really hope I'm impressing them tonight. There's all these things that happen to us when we're doing our best. When you let go of that and dare to not do your best and dare to just be a little bit more boring, then all of a sudden the muscles relax, you're much more present. And the third don't. You should never go on the stage to be funny. As soon as I learned, oh, you shouldn't try to be funny, it's way, way better if you don't try to be funny, then the weight was off my shoulders and I had total enjoyment. Instead, Johnstone taught his actors just be obvious.

Be obvious. Be average. Be present. It removes the fear because you're not saying be brilliant, be funny, impress. The underlying idea here is that if you give the audience what they're expecting, they'll reward you. There was somewhere in the back of their mind that that's what they wanted to see, whether they were aware of it or not.

And so when they see the obvious that's happened, they're elated. It's what they wanted. Pointing out the obvious is the best thing you can do. And at the end of the main road, a church. This is from a show by Gordon's Big Bald Head. Mark Muir and Jacob Bannigan are improvising the beginning of a fairy tale. The bell peels out, gong! It is one o'clock.

And it's funny, because everyone understands it. It's something that just happened right there and we're building and building and now here's something really obvious and banal and then we can go mystical again. So there's that the laughter of recognition. I'm here. I'm on the same level as you. There's a reason a lot of improv doesn't work as well on TV or other recorded media. The essence of the experience is that we're

all here together now. Many times what happens in improvisation isn't all that funny. Neil Grohn. But what is funny is we all discovered it at the same moment. That thunderbolt happens in the audience as well. Patti Stiles. The first time I did this was a theater sports show in Calgary. And there was an improviser on stage. We had the couch on stage, so it was clear that they were in their home. And no words or anything had been spoken. They were just person in place watching TV, doing something. And I went freeze. And I came out on stage and I said, what color is the wall?

And the audience in unison said blue. Wow. There had been no reference to a color. The improviser didn't go over and look at the wall. But because we were present, it was present. Because we were present, it was present, the audience was present, and the audience's imagination started coloring in the picture on stage. And in many ways, the audience is the more attentive improviser because they don't have the panic and the fear of failure, so they see everything. Being fully immersed in the moment means there's no such thing as an accident or mistake. Author and musician Stephen Nachmanovich. One memory that I have is I have my violin up.

I'm just about to begin playing and I'm on stage. I have the bow just above the violin and I'm about to play some tone or other and then the air conditioner comes on up in the upper area of the backstage and I just kind of shivered a little bit and I went boom and the bow skittered and bounced across the string. And I just began skittering and skittering and skittering and making the whole piece out of that. And it was quite wonderful, and it would never have happened without the air conditioner.

Find some place in the wilderness to live. I cannot, for if I betray the prince now, he will kill you! This is more of Mark Mir and Jacob Banigan at a later point in their improvised fairy tale, when there's a sudden noise from the audience. Perhaps he will cut off my... my peota. Peota, I... I will do everything in my power to give you a place of honor in the court.

Gesundheit. Someone's coming! Someone with allergies is coming! Someone with allergies is coming! I must go! I must go! When an audience member sneezes or kicks over a bottle or something, the timing is always perfect.

It's always, oh, then there's that. And there's always a way to heighten the stakes in the moment. These things are not mistakes. They are gifts. Any accident is a gift from the improv gods. And one must receive it with open arms. Because it reminds everyone of the fundamental purpose of theatre which is to be live, which is that we're bearing witness to these things for the first time.

That last voice is Adam Megiddo. Here's Adam performing in London's West End in one of the most successful improvised shows ever brought to the stage. What brought a beautiful woman like you? Oh? Oh. To the big Tescos on the A40. Oh.

Well, it's quite a long story. We've got... It's a long story indeed, and it's a long story that is inspired by Bernstein and Sondheim's West Side Story. It's called Showstopper. We've got time. Well... Every night, the Showstoppers improvise an entire two-act musical.

They invent songs complete with harmonies, choruses and group choreography. You see, I was working at Lidl. Lidl on the A10. Little, it's not so little, but it's nothing to Tes miss you, miss you at all. The audience suggests different styles of musical theatre. Maybe West Side Story, or Phantom of the Opera, or even Stephen Sondheim. I'd like to see the world, the world I see And I'd love the world to see me just as I see me And I know the world is curling and it's curling for free, but I don't see it

I'd like the world to see I'd like the world to see a different side of me. I'm a name that people know but that's all they seem to know. It's just a name. Can a name be the same? It's the first improvised performance ever to win a prestigious Olivier Award. The first time I saw it, it was jaw-dropping. I wondered, as do many audience members, how do they do that? Well firstly we all have to go away and do our own listening. This kind of performance demands a lot of homework and a lot of conversations beforehand. And then we come together and our musical director Duncan Walsh Atkins will, he might say, has anyone got a sondheim they really want to play or talk about? We might look at particular moments of Sondheim that are incredibly or

quintessentially Sondheimian and go, what makes them incredibly Sondheimian? So for me, for Sondheim, there are certain little patterns and repetitions, motifs. There's also a certain aspiration to incredible lyrics. So there are certain things that we might pool our resources and say, oh yeah, these things are Sondheim. And then all we do is we just get up and do loads of songs like practice over and over again, loads of songs in the style. And then we all look at it and go, yeah, like, do you know that bit in the middle when you suddenly went really fast? That feels a lot more Sondheim than the bit you did at the start. So we're trying to find out how to reduce everything to its recognizable essence

and then use that chemical to explore something new. Believe it or not, there's yet another level of improv where the air gets even thinner. In most improvisational formats, the performers have something to build on. Ancient poets start from a story already in their cultural traditions. Jazz musician Oliver Jones focuses on the melody of the song. The showstoppers build their musicals on a set of agreed structures. They all have a starting point, and they know the architecture of what they're building. But some improvisers prefer to leap into the void with as close to nothing as possible. And that brings us back to an earlier question.

How do you play from nothing? Stephen Nachmanovich. Those who play from nothing understand that there is no such thing as nothing. We haven't rehearsed this conversation. We're just speaking naturally as human beings having a conversation. But we have had innumerable conversations before. And we've thought about these things before. And we know language.

If you're a musician, you've heard thousands of pieces of music of all kinds. If you're a writer, you've read thousands of books. The ugly advertisement that you saw driving down the road this morning and your reaction of dislike also goes in. So the human unconscious, which is infinitely vast, absorbs all of this stuff. And for that matter, the last 70 million years of mammal evolution are part of how we speak

and how we play an instrument and how we draw on a piece of paper. And really the past three and a half billion years of organic evolution since we were protozoa is all in there. So there is no such thing as nothing. Hello and thank you guys very much for being here. This is Mr. David Pasquese. And this is TJ Jagodowski. Of all the improvisers I've ever seen, the Chicago duo TJ and Dave comes the closest to starting from absolutely nothing. We're very much looking forward to improvising for

you. Trust us. This is all made up. When the lights come up, they just stand there on stage, looking at each other. Slowly, gradually, they start to make small gestures back and forth. All of this in silence. I asked TJ and Dave to watch a video of one of their shows and talk me through all the tiny unspoken moments of communication that happened in those first silent seconds. The lights come up and for the first time I'm seeing how TJ is standing, how he's relating in the space even if he's standing still, his posture, the look on his face, also my posture, and imagining what my face looks like, what he's getting. And then there's a bit of back and forth before there's any words spoken,

where we are able to figure out who we are to one another in general. I'll tell you what my untrained eyes noticed. You were both standing, shoulders were up, your chest weren't out, your hands were by your side. So not really relaxed, but not really tense. And you were about three feet apart. What did you notice in just the way you were standing when the lights came up? These people are no threat to each other. There's no defensiveness with them. They're close enough that there's a familiarity there

and this doesn't feel like the first time they've been this close to each other. And they've already been here. They had shared an awareness of something. Also from TJ's face, he's trying to comfort me in some way. Like, yeah, that was a, it's by his face, like that was a, you just experienced a shitty thing. David, you did a, like a small, tight-knit little nod,

like you might've dropped your chin a couple inches. And then TJ came back with a more enthusiastic nod and like his lips were pursed, like, yeah, buddy. There was a smile on David's face that looked to me like it didn't go to his eyes. So I think what that said to me was, this is the smile of someone who's trying to hold composure and not the smile of someone who's actually happy.

And then my nod would be a way of being like, yeah, man, I'm with you, you know? And I think the pursed lips is some, is acknowledging whatever it was that you're holding your composure from. That was tough. Bear in mind that everything they've just described has taken place in 16 seconds of pure silence. So what do we know at this point before anyone speaks?

What do we know at this point before anyone speaks? What do we know? I think we know I'm on his side. I think we know we're comfortable. We're comfortable with each other. We have a friendly past. We know that something unpleasant just occurred more than likely just to Dave and that we're not done with it. Yeah, I think what strikes me up to this moment too, and this,

and this might be something we get from, from the physicality. I'm an ineffectual guy, shoulders down. None of it was like, Hey, I'll help you out or I'll take care of it. It was that it's all on you, man. Like it happened to you, you're gonna fix it. It was you, you, you, you. And then for the first time, TJ speaks. You'll bounce back, man. You'll bounce back. I don't want to get into it. Yeah, you'll bounce back. Tough day. Breathe it out, breathe through it, right? Is that what they say?

Breathe through it, breathe into it. You know, when you're getting a rub down and it hurts, like breathe into it. Breathe into the area that's bringing you the pain. Breathe into it. Yeah, breathe into it, man. You can hear some of the screaming from out here. Yeah, look, you know, I say what I need to say.

That's what I do when it happens. You know what happens if you keep it in? You keep it in? Yeah. Cancer. Right, yeah. Like Jackie Robinson. Yeah, right. Right. Yep. Yep. Yep. As they continue talking, they reveal that Dave's character had a confrontation with

their boss. It was heroic. It was like you were riding into battle for everybody. You brought the banner in there and that's pretty awesome's pretty awesome you know what if you don't stand you know because you'll fall for anything right right right you know and i know it's a softball team but we start somewhere we start somewhere we start somewhere he's gonna play shortstop because he's a fucking district manager and there it is. What strikes me every time about that moment is it was absolutely surprising to me and it absolutely made sense. Yeah.

I mean, that's the way it looks to us too. Like, oh, okay. Yeah. This was this like, it's been like this all along. It, it's crystal clear because it's what it always was. We like picture it as though when the lights are out, there's the full pie of what this world could be. And from the moment the lights come up,

60% of what this could be is immediately ruled out. And then someone says something specific and now clearly it's a workplace. And then eventually, hopefully, if we don't panic, get complicated, get cute. Get funny. Yeah, then it just reveals itself to be what it always was,

not what we made it, but what it was always from the start. So when did it occur to you that it was softball team? I don't know, but as you're going along, these things, if you pay attention, they just show up. And, you know, part of it was, of course, Jackie Robinson. So that's in there. There's, there's a line there where you rode into battle for everybody. You brought the banner in there and that's pretty, that's pretty awesome. Dave didn't go in asking for a raise for Dave, right?

It had to be a group goal. So it also makes sense of that, that it was numerous people he went in there trying to make a change for. I didn't consciously think, okay, this is all about baseball. But, you know, if you look back on it, look back on it like oh breadcrumbs are there. The lessons that improvisation teaches, listening, patience, collaboration, flexibility, presence, can be applied far beyond the stage. As soon as you start implementing these things in workshops and in shows, they do affect your life. Jacob Banigan. What I think is really cute is when I'm teaching people who are new to improv

and they take me aside after a class and they say, you know, I think these are good rules for life. Then I act surprised. Like oh oh really yeah. Other performers also see the principles of improvisation at work in their everyday lives. Well in many of our most critical life moments all of us are improvising. Playwright and improviser Neil Grahn. We don't have a plan. We're there. We are listening. Our minds, that's why I think our minds go on permanent record during those moments because they're so rare. And so I think that the life is, you know, we try our best not to

improvise life, but no matter how hard we try, we improvise life. The present is where everything exists. The past is gone, the future hasn't happened. Venus sued. And this is the big challenge just in life, right? It's not just on stage. It's certainly easier to be on stage and be present than to be in life and to be present. What you have to let go of is the notion that you are in control.

You're not. Marjorie Malpass. There's a randomness to life. There's a randomness to everything that happens to us. It's not your fault that you got cancer. You just got cancer. It's random. And the artists that are the best improvisers on the planet, and

I don't even count myself among them, I love them, I watch them, what I will say about them is they all embrace the chaos of randomness. We're always busy thinking, I've got to get home, do this, I've got to remember to phone that person. If you're present in your world, you are absolutely listening, you're receiving what the other person is giving you. You're not involved in yourself anymore. You're putting it all back onto the other person. And don't we all want to feel seen and heard?

Improv has taught me that this is the good times. This is the best time of my life. You say yes, you will enjoy yourself so much more than the average person. If you are stuck in traffic, you go, hmm, what can I do? I'm going to enjoy my podcast. It's whatever, if you can find that yes to stuff and it allows you to find paths that other people might not. Do you think that being an improviser makes you a better person? I have no idea.

I think my life is better for having studied with Keith Johnstone because him placing the idea of yes into me has made me a kinder, more listening person. It's hard to imagine the animal I would have been without him. You know, my therapist tells me I should really try, really try to apply these things that really try to apply these things that I believe and feel comfortable with in the safety of the stage but I never be like man if I just went about this day as though I was going about a scene then everything would be okie-dokie. Yeah my wife says she wishes I would listen to her and she knows I can do it right she's seen me listen. She wishes I would listen to her and she knows I can do it. She's seen me listen.

Around the world, improvisers have taken on a new role outside of entertainment, coaching. Improvisor Marjorie Malpass works with people in the business world on presentation, public speaking and leadership. I help them with what they have, see how I can make it better, which is what I did as an improviser

when I was at my best. It's the same thing. I cannot fix the problems of the world. I can't. I can do something though. I can help you be happier and healthier at work. I can help you have a laugh for a second so you can go off and do the hard work. The stuff that you're really good at. That's my job. Ajay Heble at the University of Guelph goes a step further. Something's happening in that moment when musicians improvise. Something very powerful, something very profound.

He thinks it's possible that improvisation can help solve the problems of the world. I'm the director of the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. The main research question, it's kind of a hypothesis that we want to test, is whether improvised artistic practices can play a role in facilitating social change. Would you go so far as to say that improvisation can in fact facilitate social action? I would say yes in its most provocative historical instances for me, you know, and I'm thinking largely of the instances that emerge out of African-American creative practice. Out of those instances I would

say that improvisation has functioned as a powerful tool for social change. Improvisation has been just more than a model. It's actually been a way for artists to sound off against structures of fixity and structures of oppression. But again, we need to be cautious about making blanket statements. When I ask him to connect the dots between improvised art and social action, Adjaye Heble offers many examples. Perhaps most notably, Paul Robeson's Peace Arch concert, which took place at the Canada-U.S. border in 1952.

During that period, he was prevented by the United States government from crossing the US border, as he had actively participated in worldwide struggles for human rights and social justice. For that concert, he stood one foot from the Canadian border, that he was not allowed to cross into, on a makeshift stage at the back of a flatbed truck. And he delivered this now historic concert to some 40,000 people on the other side.

Don't say nothing, he just keeps rolling. Robeson's first improvisation was using the materials he had at hand. In this case, a flatbed truck, a foot from the border. It's really, yeah, working with what you've got, adapting to the situation in which you find yourself to make a way out of no way, right? Famously, in that particular concert, he improvised upon the scripted lyrics of Old Man River in order to insert what I would call a kind of resistant presence into the heart of what was a popular show tune. So for example, instead of singing the scripted lyrics which were,

get a little drunk and you'll land in jail, Robeson famously sang, you show a little grit and you land in jail. And a song that might otherwise have fostered these stereotypical representations and portrayals of African-American people now gives rise to a powerful example of resistant creative practice. Whether they believe improv can bring about social change, improvisers Marjorie Malpass, Adam Megiddo, Stephen Nachmanovich, and Neil Grahn do believe it can offer a model for action on a global scale. It is our job as improvisers to keep reminding humanity

that this is now and also this is now and this is what's happening. Again, it's all about attentiveness to the moment. We're not taught to listen. And if you look at what's happening at the moment in the world politically, we need listening right now more than ever. We are so estranged from how to listen.

Our behavior has gone wrong in things like climate change because many of us have not seen what's in front of us or been distracted from what's in front of us by shiny things that are being dangled in front of our eyes by entertainment, by tribalism, all kinds of things. So just to begin to see whether what's in front of you is a tree or a fire hydrant in a city or the corner wall of your room, to begin to see your surroundings,

to begin to see that you are part of a world and that world is interconnected. And if you agree with what's happening, if you can accept what's happening, then you can do something about it. Then you can get some of your control back. And I can't imagine a world where we really listen to people and did our darnedest to say yes,

wouldn't be better. And if we can say yes to what the other person is saying, then that just opens doors. Say yes. Say yes. Say yes. You were listening to Say Yes, improvisation in art and life by ideas contributor contributor Peter Brown.

Special thanks to Andrei Moschetto and Ghilermi Fancini for Archive Tape of Keith Johnstone, Corey Haberstock at CBC Edmonton, Daniel Pereira and Lily Martin at CBC London, Mirren Abrahamian for recording Oliver Jones in Montreal, and Selena Stewart, Director of Classics at the University of Alberta for her readings and translation of Homer. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for Ideas. Technical production, Danielle Duval and Laura Antonelli. Nikola Lukshich is the senior producer. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly and I'm Nala Ayed.

Therefore, always sleep under the flowers. So like I think we're, did we mean six feet under there? I think we did. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.