Good Girls Don’t Improvise: Seeing and Sticking

In the women’s improv class I’ve been teaching now for almost a year, we have made some incredible progress.  New women can now join in the class and get swept up in the unity and positivity that is the foundation of what we are building.  And the transparency of all that comes up in us and between us as women.  Postmodern gals who are a confusing mass of vying for alpha-female and being “the one”; obsessed with being liked and being nice; desperately seeking affirmation and doing it right;  and not caring one iota what anyone thinks because who really cares anyway?  And all sitting next to this beautiful impulse to be more, create more, work together as ONE, support the best in each other, and always get back up when you fall and give it your best because you care about each other and what we’re building.

Recently, we have been playing around with gender.  At the start we stayed clear of it because it’s far too easy to rip apart what “other women” do while never really seeing it in yourself. Our goal is to see the universality of WOMAN and that whatever we see out there is to some degree in here. And from THAT place, expose, explore and create. But after watching the Harvard Sailing Club’s fantastic trio of you tube videos where the men are actually like women, the women are actually  like men, we got inspired to add our spin to the whole thing.  So the women all picked real men they knew and took them on as characters throughout the class.  They played guys “internally” – pretending to really be these men they knew, not really caring if on the outside we could tell of they were men or women in the scenes.  They didn’t do a cartoony/Mad-TV send up of over-the-top, crotch-grabbing, foul mouthed guys that we as women so often do when we are told to “play a guy”…they were real people who were men.

What happened was very, very interesting.  And best of all the women in the class saw and felt it immediately…I didn’t have to work hard to point it out.  Their scenes were more simple, more unified, they listened better, and it was as if there was one line through everything instead of a bunch of tangents, curves, and swirls to the story.  And there was a lot of ease.  Space.  And like I said, not only was I amazed, but so were they.  They saw and felt the difference.

The difference being that a lot of our conditioning is a distraction to that straight, simple, focused way of being and creating. And that confusing mass I described is usually much louder when we’re nervous and under pressure (which happens in improv as you can imagine). So making choices that by-passed all of that had very noticeable results…without needing to make any of the internal stuff a problem…we just eliminated the option to get caught up in it.

Now, yes, they all saw it. But interestingly enough, the next week they came in and the first warm-up we did, it was like watching the Donna Reed show…lilting voices, giggles, big smiles, everyone so nice and passive and doubting their choices….UUUG!!  So I asked them to do it again like the men characters they had been doing and it went back to straight, smooth, to the point, focused.

The point? Just seeing these things is huge in itself…we have to be interested and willing to look at parts of ourselves that we’d rather not own up to – and these ladies have been willing and able for a year to keep going and keep digging.  And yet, the real work seems to come in on having it stick.  Having it stick means change happened.  It means that you actually go against your impulses and instincts to back down, get small, be nice, bail…and do something NEW, something else…something driven by the kind of woman you WANT to be.  And that’s a whole other level.  It’s both humbling and exciting to think about…but the first step I feel is recognizing the difference between seeing and sticking.

Good Girls Don’t Improvise: You should smile.

This last Saturday I gave my GOOD GIRLS AREN’T FUNNY talk to a great group of women at The Barrow Group School in Midtown Manhattan. It was a lively discussion and we went about an hour over the published time, but no one seemed to mind.  (Least of all me!) I appreciated how open the women were to recognizing the GOOD WOMAN in ourselves and how it isn’t our authentic voice, and it isn’t going to get us where we want to go.

One question or comment that always seems to pop up at some point is that is being GOOD isn’t helping us, is being BAD the answer? And it most definitely isn’t the point of my talk or the answer, I feel.  But a fair enough question. I think when we start to learn where this GOOD WOMAN came from in culture (read more here from my first post), and how it’s a construct with very specific goals in mind, we can often begin to get upset about her and want to chuck her out the window. And a “screw that!” attitude can come up…one that wants to fly in the face of anyone that tells a woman that she has to be nice, pretty, good, and selfless.

I remembered during this last talk of when I was a teenager, walking through town in St Louis, Missouri where I’m from, and an older man passed me and said, “You should smile.”  He said it with such a confusing mix of politeness, flirtation, superiority, condemnation, and…something else…almost threatening?  Hard to remember…but I just remember feeling both ‘bad’ like I SHOULD smile because girls smile and men like that…AND complete rage and wanting to kick his teeth in, with a powerful comeback line like, “…and you should mind your own business and not tell women what to do old man!!!”  However, I did neither…but it obviously has stayed with me all these years.  What WAS the right thing???

And I think about what a lot of younger women are expressing these days…and what I expressed in my early 20′s, tasting the freedoms that I had…and it definitely had a twinge of “no one tells ME what to do!”…I felt completely justified in pursuing whatever I wanted and doing whatever I cared to and hey, watch out if you tried to tell me I couldn’t or look at me funny if you didn’t approve.  And I look at the “role models” for young women today…Britney, Paris, Lindsay, and the other train wrecks out there. And they all seem to have a mantra in there that  says “I won’t be a good girl – in fact, I’m going to be BAD!” Is it explicit?…for some yes.  Look at magazine covers, listen to lyrics or watch music videos. It’s everywhere. For other women, not as explicit…but it seems to be there.

What I have been discovering in the work of EnlightenNext’s Evolving Women Project, is that postmodernity was a total rejection of the modern and traditional woman.  It said, “we will no longer accept the confining roles you place on us and we want to create our lives the way WE want them, not by your definitions, thank you very much.”  And so, as with any reactive movement, it seemed that women were defined by NOT being what came before.  But is that where the story ends? Is that how we’re going to define the new woman? But NOT being like the old version?  So is rejecting the GOOD GIRL end up meaning that we can be as bad as we want?  I surely hope not.  I want to co-create with my sisters a new woman who has moved on from that…because THAT motive is still not free…not any more free than being IN the structure that confines you. Whether you’re in it or proving that you’re not in it, you’re still relating to it to define you.

So what would happen if we take our attention off of it all together and start thinking, more importantly, who do we WANT WOMAN TO BECOME?  I start thinking of words and phrases like: dignified, respected, women as leaders, supportive, non-dramatic/overly emotional, not merely sexual beings, valued for more than our ability to attract, new…the list starts to look less and less good girl vs. bad girl to me, and more and more what I want to create and be an exemplar of for the younger women that I see every day, looking desperately for the right direction to go. If we aren’t the ones showing them, who will? Britney? Paris? If so, that will be such a loss and such a crime, especially since so many women fought so, so, so hard for so long to win us the freedoms we all take for granted.  Did they really fight that hard so we could be just be bad girls and have a lot of fun? I don’t think so. And I want to make good on the promise they brought to the table…we can be FREE WOMEN for the first time in the history of women.  So let’s do THAT.

Good Girl’s Don’t Improvise: History is Our Friend

I remember taking history classes in school…I certainly got a lot from some of them but in general and don’t think I ever felt connected to history as how it connects to my life, my choices, or my future.  It was the study of THE PAST and it was old and it was over, it was something interesting to look back and see, but it was always ‘less than’ where we are now.

I have now been giving my GOOD GIRLS AREN’T FUNNY talks in New York City for a few months and what I have seen, over and over, is that it is the HISTORICAL perspective on being a woman in 2010 that is the MOST liberating, the most helpful, and the most alive.  It’s fascinating!  The minute I put up the slide from my power point presentation that has a timeline starting in 3000 BC and goes until the present moment, something shifts.  Suddenly we are all talking about WOMAN, not just the 40 individuals in the room. We’re talking about all of our SHARED past lasting thousands of years, though countless cultural shifts and leaps — instead of our individual, unique paths that make us seem more different than similar.  It’s like the camera dramatically pulls back and back and back until we see our lives as the tip of an arrow that’s been moving for a long, long time. We’re looking at who we are and what our lives look like now as a result of a PROCESS, as a result of things continually happening throughout history that we keep adjusting to or pushing against.

And it goes beyond “oh, that’s an interesting fact”…it actually starts to free us up because we can see WHY we do and think the way we do. We can see what ideas, roles, assumptions, fears, and values we have inherited…and WHY they are what they are.

For example, in the recent talk I gave at the Tribeca Film Center for a group of wonderful women, (and 1 man) members of the New York Women in Film and Television, 1 young woman was challenging the statement I made that Disney heroines (Snow White and the lot) are exemplars of the modern/Good Woman structure. Kind, selfless (interesting word), pure, innocent, non-threatening, passive. She was a little upset because she said those were the ‘old’ characters but the new ones were different…Mulan, Ariel and the lot. She said they were tough, smart and not like Snow White. However, I pointed out that in the end, they are still  beautiful women who are good girls at their core and win a man over because of how beautiful and good they are.  And the whole point of those films is that reward=man.

Understanding how even the ‘updated’ version of a Disney film is still playing out the Good Woman/Romance-based storyline is something one can see with much more clarity when we see where the Good Woman emerged in history, why it emerged, and how recently it was the main point of a woman’s existence. (see first posts for more about this) On a historical timeline, the 1950′s housewife was who we were this morning and the real women of Jane Austen’s world were here just a few days ago. History is our friend…it helps explain who we are, how we got here…all so that NOW we can start to decide what of our collective past we want to take with us and what we want to leave in the dustbin.

Good Girls Don’t Improvise: Having Each Other’s Backs

Good Girls Don’t Improvise Post #4

Last night may seem to have been just any Thursday night, but in New York City it was the debut of our all-woman’s improv troupe. We are calling the troupe “13 degrees” because of the talk I have been giving about the GOOD GIRL structure in women’s consciousness and a series of photos I found: the stereotypical “GOOD WOMAN” all with a slightly passive and selfless tilt to her head, and all at about a 13 degree angle.  There is a scene in IRON MAN 2 (great movie if you haven’t seen it yet) and in one part Gwenyth Paltrow is talking to Robert Downey Jr and she goes from being very angry (straight ahead-head) to suddenly being the very understanding “good” girl and WHAM!  her head tilts 13 degrees. It’s fascinating and I have started to see all the times I do it as well…all very interesting.

Anyway, I digress…the show last night was a huge success and the 8 women performing worked together really beautifully. And the fact they were women was not the point or the focus of the troupe. It was not the point of their scenes. They were all improvisers FIRST and women second.  What I thought was perhaps most significant was a comment I kept hearing from them after the show: “I was aware that all the other women had my back.  I never felt that before.” They said it made them relax and not worry, not feel competitive and that they had to out-do one another; that their scene partners were not going to betray them or use them in any way to put themselves on top; that whatever inkling of an idea they might put forward, the others would take and run with and support.  For anyone who has performed a lot, you will know this is a very rare thing. And then it’s ALL WOMEN, even more rare. And all it takes is ONE woman to decide to put herself first and break the trust that has been built over these last 3 months for the whole thing to fall apart.  It still would have been an entertaining show I have no doubt, but the quality of joy and ease and togetherness that was palpable would not have been there, and I’m sure the ability to take risks and “be out there” would have disappeared.

The GOOD WOMAN structure cannot inherently trust other women because it is designed to set you apart from all the others.  “How will the man pick you from the rest if you’re all together?” It may not be totally conscious but that is its motive.  Women are seen as competition first, and we know that we are all capable of stabbing each other in the back at the drop of a hat.  Think of all the times, whether it’s been you or the female friend you’re with, when you are together and then an attractive alpha-male comes up…that movement to get his affirmation and attention at all costs…that is this GOOD WOMAN’s M.O. and unless we make that conscious and see that we all have that drive BUT we all do not have to act from it, we most likely WILL be acting from it.  And then imagine the tempation to “be the one” when you’re on stage and everyone is looking at YOU. What it would mean to still trust all the other women and know that no one is going to pick up ‘the dagger’ but instead, pledge to have your back no matter what happens.  It is a real victory!!! and judging from last night’s audience, a victory that everyone can reap the benefits, and implications, of.

Good Girls Don’t Improvise: Universal versus Personal

GOOD GIRLS DON’T IMPROVISE: POST #3

We are in our third cycle of classes in our women’s improv class at my school in NYC, Improvolution! There are now 12 and counting.  I also gave a talk (the first of many to come!)  at HB Studio in the Village on Sunday.  There were 15 women present and both what hit me then, and has been so liberating in the class, is what happens when we see this Good Girl structure almost as an entity, person or voice outside of ourselves.  To see and recognize that she is not who we are, but one of the many cultural constructs that make up who we are.  It is no secret (as I wrote about in my last blog) that we are not merely made up of our psychological habits and conditionings – what we experienced as an individual growing up makes up a lot of who we are but does not explain everything.  We are made up by the culture we come from and also values and patterns of thinking that have come before.

A story that I tell that now makes more sense to me is when I was in college (1986-1990), I had gone from St Louis, Missouri to Los Angeles, California.  In St Louis, my values were pretty much the norm – I was proud to be from St Louis (Go Carninals!!!) and then as I got older, I was a true blue American (USA, Number ONE!) I cried every 4th of July.  But after being in LA for only a few months, I remember walking on campus and this thought just popped in my head as clear as day, “I am a citizen of EARTH!  Earth FIRST! One planet!!” I had absorbed the values of postmodernity that LA is rampant with and it felt like home!!! “I am independent, no one tells me what to do, this is my life and I can do what I want!”  Perfect! And in a city full of the same, I fit right in.  But then I went back to St Louis for Thanksgiving and at dinner, I had such a bizarre experience…I was getting dressed and had wanted to wear the most conservative, Little House on the Praire outfit I could find…???  And after dinner I was more than eager to clear the plates, do the dishes, and clean up after the men who, as usual, didn’t do much to help but make encouraging comments, as did the women,…”Oh Holly, you’re such a help.  What a good girl.” And I ATE IT UP.  And at the same time, I also had the voice screaming “Why aren’t thee men lifting a finger to help!!??? F*^(*#*()(@ men!!!”  Yes, I felt crazy.  But it also felt deeply RIGHT to clear the table and make coffee. Was I nuts? Well, maybe.  But knowing there are different values and shoulds going on all the time, between postmodern, modern, and traditional also makes sense of this example.

Ok, so that all sounds fine but what does that have to do with improv? Well, when the pressure is on, when we’re in the unknown and not sure how best to navigate, there are suddenly a lot of different motives going on and the GOOD WOMAN often speaks the loudest.  We can look at this deep panicky need to be perfect, to be seen as good, to be affirmed and told we’re doing it right, to feel competition with another woman who 10 seconds ago was a friend until a charismatic guy walks up…and when we can recognize it not as “just me”, something “I do” but that it IS the values, shoulds, and motives of a very specific structure WE AS WOMEN have, it gets a lot more interesting, less threatening, and also, not something anyone needs to spend a dime in therapy talking about.  We don’t need to beat ourselves up for having these thoughts and feelings that at times feels both primitive and irrational. This GOOD GIRL structure isn’t ‘good’ or ‘bad’, it just is.  But it’s only a problem when we’re unconscious to it or are trying to pretend it isn’t there.  When something is made conscious, it is then not YOU anymore. It is seen and therefore, YOU are what is seeing it.  That’s very good news.  So when we see ourselves suddenly overcome with that ‘should’ voice, when we suddenly leave our bodies in a moment of insecurity or panic and begin to look outside of ourself to find out what to do next, we can now SEE that as a movement of the GOOD WOMAN. That is much more a UNIVERSAL response of ‘woman’ than it is a PERSONAL one that only ‘you’ do. And when we see THAT, we can begin to choose something else…more free, more authentic, and not concerned with what the GOOD WOMAN is concerned with…being perfect, right, and safe!

Good Girls Don’t Improvise: There IS no right

GOOD GIRLS DON’T IMPROVISE: POST #2

One of the effects of the GOOD GIRL that I have noticed playing itself out in my improv classes is what I have called the “leaving your body” moment in a game or scene. You see it happen right in front of your eyes. The woman performing seems grounded and in the moment, having her ‘character’ engaged in a conversation with another ‘character’ (ie. co-workers at Pizza Hut talking about who complicated pizza toppings have become) when all of a sudden one of the women doesn’t know what to do /say next…you can imagine this would come up a lot being that it’s improv. :) …and what I have seen and have battled against all my teaching career, is that in this moment of panic, the response most often to this panic is that the woman leaves her own experience, her ‘self’, and you see her start to try to figure out what she SHOULD say, what the RIGHT thing to say is. And we have talked about this phenomenon in our all-woman’s class enough to see how universal this response is.
I am making the connection to THE GOOD GIRL because this is a structure that says to women, “when you don’t know what to do, just make sure you do the RIGHT thing, be a GOOD GIRL and everything will be ok. Being GOOD is BEST.” This voice was put into place culturally for women for a very specific and important reason, as I have been learning, studying, and observing.  THE GOOD WOMAN was born to deal with the uncertainty of life in the 17th – 19th Centuries in Europe and America. (I learned much about this by the way from Dalma Heyn’s fantastic book, Marriage Shock…just read it!, you’ll love it) In human development, it is widely recognized that humans have developed through stages (one way to think of these developmental ‘stages’ is Traditional, Modern, and Post-Modern.) They are marked as separate stages because they represent a shift in values, among many other things. (Integral philosopher Ken Wilber goes into depth about these stages if you’re interested – read more here)

So this is the emergence of the Modern Era. Times were changing fast – Industrialization allowed men upward mobility and a life no longer denied to them by their birth. As they became wealthier and a middle class was born, one thing was missing: wives. There weren’t enough eligible women of stature for these guys to wed. So culture brilliantly created a value system that would allow seemingly unmarriable, poor, common women to, overnight, become worthy of a noble husband (ie. Darcy and Elizabeth from PRIDE AND PREJUDICE…Jane Austen was the queen of this plot line)…and that value was being GOOD. PERFECT. Self-less, virtuous, pure, humble, and content to do nothing much more than run a home and make an oasis for your husband from the new battlefield of the modern dog-eat-dog world. So the message to women was: Be GOOD, be PERFECT and all will be ok. Don’t and BUH-BYE.

What does this have to do with improv? Well, I think a lot. We have been programmed when we don’t really know what to do or say next, to default to the RIGHT thing, the PERFECT thing…that’s not risky, that’s not real or authentic. And in improv, it’s all about AUTHENTIC. You want to be grounded in your experience and to be IN the situation and respond from YOURSELF…going outside one’s self is dangerous territory in improv because you suddenly disconnect from your own experience, your own point of view, and most of all the other performer. It’s like pushing the eject button on your seat – you’re outta there! This ‘looking at ourselves from the outside’ is what the GOOD GIRL is designed to do…she knows right from wrong, good from bad, and this ‘ideal/imagined’ version of ourselves is where we go to for the ‘right’ answer. But how interesting she lives OUTSIDE of us. Big clue.
Over the last months, our class has been working on just seeing when the GOOD GIRL comes up in is, to see when that eject button wants to be hit and then choose NOT to hit it. To stay in the moment, stay focused and TRUST that your own experience/response is what’s needed. There is no RIGHT in improv. And when you know that, and know your scene partner will “YES, AND” and accept whatever it is you say or do, you begin to see women trust their own responses more than seek the RIGHT one. And that’s a very exciting thing because it gives us something the GOOD GIRL has been designed to suppress: CONFIDENCE, AUTONOMY, and STRENGTH.

Good Girls Don’t Improvise

GOOD GIRLS DON’T IMPROVISE: POST #1

A few months ago a female improv student of mine approached me about starting a day class. I told her if she can get together a group I’d teach it, which luckily didn’t take her long to do. However it wasn’t how fast she pulled it together that was most noteworthy, it was that, by sheer accident, the class ended up being only women…spanning different ages and backgrounds. I walked into the room that first day and thought, “Wow, you’ve got to be kidding me…!” I was overjoyed!

So I decided to bring in everything I have been learning, seeing, and experiencing in my many years as not only an improv teacher, director and performer, but also with a recent exploration I’ve been involved in which is looking into the structures that make up “WOMAN”…not just our psychology but our biology, our cultural identities, our consciousness, beliefs and definitions of “self”, “other”, “right”, “wrong”, “man”, “woman”, etc.

I started by asking the 10 women if they could relate to my experience as a teacher – that the women are usually very, very strong in class…noticeably so; they usually take to doing characters and getting really emotionally connected to each other very quickly…but then when the pressure is on during a performance, my experience time and time again is, “where did the women go???” They usually shrink, support the men but rarely lead a scene off, are tentative and play more passive characters.

This kicked off an incredible discussion…the women, one by one, chiming in about their own confusion and frustration in improv classes and shows. Knowing they were capable of more but not fully understanding why they preferred to play it safe, and how that just felt right….that is, until after the show when they felt pretty bad about the job they’d done. We also discussed our need to do everything right and perfect…and what is most ironic about that is in improvisation, it is much more obvious that there is no such thing as doing it ‘perfect’ because the scene is created on the spot, spontaneously, and is a product of the collective creating it. So this notion of getting it right is even more crazy — there is no ‘right’ to be striving for!…what is ‘right’ is what you are already doing. And yet, because needing to be perfect in every scene and exercise is so deeply important to us, it puts you in a schizophrenic state…being in the scene, pretending to be the saleswoman at Macy’s or whatever the scenario is…but also watching it from the outside and watching others’ responses as an indicator of how they’re doing. And you can see it happening in an all-female class much more than a mixed class…you can see when a woman leaves her own ‘self’ and starts grasping at what she ‘thinks’ she’s supposed to say.

And then it hit me…”Good Girls Don’t Improvise.” They can’t. It’s antithetical. At a certain point the only way to really improvise, to be free and spontaneous and in the moment is to not care, to not be attached to any outcome, and not be concerned one iota about one’s self-image. It is like kryptonite for Superman…it will not fly. I thought about this room of women, all caught between wanting to do it right, get the A+, figure it all out beforehand and be the best AND the part of them that made them want to take improv in the first place. No one who really wants to be perfect at everything would be attracted to improv. Improv demands you take risks, look like a fool, care about everything BUT yourself, and disappear in the moment without the controlling ‘do-gooder’ holding the puppet strings. So here we all were…attracted to that dynamic freedom and autonomous creativity AND plagued by the voices of “the Good Woman” in us that refused to look stupid and get it wrong, that preferred to support the strongest person, convinced that was the safest place to be. But based on the recent research that I and a group of women I know through EnlightenNext have been uncovering, this structure of the “Good Woman” is traceable and understandable. She comes from a very specific set of circumstances in our cultural heritage and therefore we can learn about her, uncover her motives and start to discern her voice from our own. Even if it’s a flicker, it’s our own. And that’s the same voice that compelled each and every one of us to this class, drew us to improv. Because it is in the freedom of improv that our true voice can begin to guide us, begin to have space and confidence to start shouting.

We can start blowing this open together, seeing the impersonality of it all, and see that it is not “those men” that are keeping us from our power…it is ourselves. Or more so, a structure within us that is more interested in being safe, right, perfect, and secure than taking risks, being free and uninhibited, being leaders and being full team players taking all the hits just like the guys do. And we can. So we will.

Without writing more now, I’d like to ongoingly report on how the class is going and what insights come up. I’m also hoping that the 10 women from the class comment here to give their experiences and insights as well.
Onward and upward!!