Walking forward and/or walking forward backward?

[Mike Weaver]

I have a dilemma. Last night while reading the book, Impro, I came across an insightful comment that I highlighted, "The improvisor (story teller) has to be like a man walking backward. He sees where he has been, but he pays no attention to the future. His story can take him anywhere, but he must still 'balance' it, and give it shape, by remembering incidents that have been shelved and reincorporating them." Keith Johnstone's point is that great stories have interrelated ideas, connected to one another and are not a series of ideas strung together with no form. Storytellers interrelate the past with the future in meaningful ways.



On the other hand, I read today from Erwin McManus' book, Chasing Daylight, "We were not created to walk backward into the future. Just the decision to look forward to the future has a healing power in itself." Within it's context, this quote is referring to getting unstuck from the past that is holding us back from pursuing the future.



Are McManus and Johnstone talking about the same thing or different things?



As a storyteller, I resonate with Johnstone because he's exactly right. We do weave in the past and build on it as we move forward. As a Christian and human being, I resonate with McManus that I do need to move boldly forward toward the future.



If I put these two thoughts together, I realize that as I weave the story of my life, making choices toward the future, I do so at God's lead. But I am also a product of my past and our collective past. I'm not stuck in the past, but I do stand on the shoulders of the saints (as one theologian aptly put it) peering toward the future.



What do you think?

[Paul Levy]

I don't fully agree with Johnstone's view. I think Rudolf Steiner's (admitedly outlandish-sounding) idea of the "time organism" is actually more at play in impro. The future is not only "ahead", but also something that is in-process. In one sense the future is coming towards us, to meet us. I have sometimes said it is actually the future that "kicks our asses" and the past we are travelling towards. That might sound crazy but here's one example of "changing the past in the now". There is something we have done that "didn't seem to work at the time - say, a visual joke that fell flat. It's now in the past. We continue with our impro, carrying with us the memory of what didn't work. An idea comes to us "in the moment" and the impro piece develops. If you look carefully, the idea that has "come to us in the present" is really sitting there in the future, waiting to be fully developed and realised. When we remain awake in the moment, the future starts to "spray" its essence towards us and seems to kick our present-centred asses into action! over time the whole idea (when it works well) which sat in potential in the future, becomes realised fully as the number of "now seconds" becomes a number of completed minutes. The piece ends. We have the future realised and then (sometimes), we look back at the idea that didn't seem to work in the past, and there it is BEFORE us (meaning both infront of our gaze AND behind us in time) and we realise that IN THE CONTEXT OF THE WHOLE impro'd piece, (past, present AND future), the idea WORKS now! We've changed the past!

Excuse my clumsiness, but I do think that Guru Johnstone was rather short-sighted and rather stuck in the present, which is only one part of the "time-organism". We pereceive time in daily awareness as along a line but, in pure impro - past, present, future are both a time line and a time-whole!

[Kay Scorah]

Never having been completely sure that linear time exists, I'm happy to see this discussion crop up. I found myself homing in on the phrase "Just the decision to look forward to the future has a healing power in itself" because I'm seeing a lot of distress and fear among my clients around looking into the future. I think it's the quality of the looking forward that matters. I remember learning a great improv lesson from Daryl Olson, he said something like "If you decide to start a scene negative, you may want to think about what effect that 's going to have on the audience and the rest of the scene." If we imagine a negative future (perhaps filled with violent terrorists), we may want to think about the effect that will have on the future we create. What we imagine now is the future we create. What happens is we rewrite that phrase "Just the decision to imagine a positive, harmonious future has a healing power in itself."

[Daniel Knutson-Bradac]

Thanks for this thoughtful post Mike. I haven't read Chasing Daylight, but the two ideas seem different but complementary to me. We can be stuck in our past psychologically, but on the other hand, we can only build our story with an honest awareness of our past and where we came from.

Looking forward can keep us from being present enough to interact with our fellow improvisers, or it can be an act of spiritual bravery. What is ahead of us after all, but God? At my age, that's what you look at.....not your next accomplishment or validation.......God's up there waiting for you.....the great improvisation of aging out.

In the end, our presence informed by our past, conscious of our future.....both directions hopefully bring us back to the present moment, aware of self, our fellow improvisers hanging out on the edge. Ahhhhh, what's next? I can hardly wait. ;)

[Charna]

Hi Folks:
Just saw this post and wanted to comment.
In improvisation, your past and your future come out of being in the moment. By being in the moment, you discover your past. There is a poem at the begining of my first book, TRUTH IN COMEDY that goes like this:
If you want to know where we went wrong
we needn't look to far.
For where we'll be and where we've been
is always where we are.
And everything that comes your way
is something you once gave.
Somebody feels the water
every time you make a wave.
Keith is right. Improvisation is like driving and looking thru a rear view mirror. you can only see where you've been-you have no idea where you are going. And you discover it by staying in the moment and seeing what you and your partner create together.
Charna Halpern
I.O. Theater

[William Hall]

Lovely thread....yes.....may we all stay in the moment...despite the desperate attempts of our brains to protect us with planning.