POSSIBILITY!

[a drawing I made for Célia back in October - a black and white inked figure on the left edge of the frame with doodley triangles and shapes swirling around her outstretched arm]

I'll admit to being mildly road-weary and jaded at times. After nine full months of organizing my life around improv, I'll admit to some disillusionment, some uncomfortable realizations about when it inspires me and when it just doesn't, as much as I'd like for it to. Now a little over nine months in, I am bewildered, energized, and exhilarated to FALL BACK IN LOVE with it!!!

I love to play and laugh and make mischief, I love to fail happily and share adventures. But when it comes down to it, I also just fucking love theatre. I always have. I love good stories well-told and sincerely played. I love honest connections and complex characters and big questions.

After an enthusiastic string of high school theatre productions, I graduated and stopped performing because I felt like I wasn't 'allowed' to continue. At that point I had never seen anyone whose body looked even remotely like mine on stage,* and had barely even seen a disabled character on stage or screen – certainly none outside of the tragedy / superhero binary. I knew that my appearance would severely limit the roles I would be considered for, and who wants a life of fighting to get onstage if once you get there, you have to play the pitiable plot tool? Even thinking about it made me feel rejected and sub-human.

As it turns out, you can only hide from what you love for so long. Luckily a few years into college found me absolutely obsessing over Imaginary Enemies – our small, supportive, self-directed, story-based improv group. We mostly experimented and played, and eventually we made up plays on the spot and performed a few times.

We shared an interest in finding reality in our characters and stories, even (/especially) the bizarre ones. A lot of us were secretly theatre or cinema nerds, (interestingly though, I don't think any of us were actually theatre majors, though Jenny was a media studies major). We did lots of monologues, followed lots of characters through their lives and worlds, explored lots of human to human connections. We got messy with what was 'us' and what was 'character' – playing truth and playing fiction. And then we talked about it. Always robust, heart-felt debriefs. For me, having conversations is such an important way to learn and build trust. Playing with these buddies became one of the most liberating explorations of my life!

It took me a while to realize that part of that liberation was being supported in playing so many different kinds of characters. For a period of time a lot of my characters were quite gruff - I imagined them to be broad-shouldered and muscular - sometimes they were guards, boxers, or hit-men. I remember thinking: no casting director in traditional theatre would ever in a million years cast me in such a role. But in improv, nobody even questioned it: improvised theatre is self-directed and already requires such great suspension of disbelief – and also I was lucky to be in a supportive, tight-knit group. There was certainly humor in the mismatch between expectations people have for my body and the contradictory traits and behaviors I played with it, and that was really fun. But it also didn't usually feel too gaggy because a. they were genuine humans, and aspects of them were still very 'me', and – b. importantly – they were not treated as gags or called out for laughs by other characters. For the most part, they just existed as a normal part of the world we were in.

For SO MANY REASONS (I should make a list) I believe that improv is a theatre-form especially well-equipped to play with and challenge normative narratives! And sure, that doesn't need to be every improviser's primary goal (who am I to say what people should do?), but I have to admit that I feel confused and disappointed that improv quite often does the opposite. I recently had the absolute privilege of taking Patti Stiles' “Gender and Genre” workshop, which I highly recommend to anyone able to take it. We detached gendered traits from physical appearance and played with and against the normative expectations of our bodies, resulting in characters and relationships that were at times subversive, refreshing, hilarious, and intensely relatable. And it was DIFFICULT. As feminist and gender-progressive as I think I am, this work exposed a lot of my internalized assumptions! Which I find so EXCITING! Because tripping over them means becoming aware of them, and becoming aware of them means beginning to break from them, and breaking them means blowing open a WORLD OF POSSIBILITY!!!

*There is one exception, now that I think about it – a girl on Seasame Street when I was a kid who also had OI. Seasame Street is kinda badass!