‘Break a leg!’ Not literally – but give it a convincing try!

In improv comedy – one of the critical elements of a good scene is ‘physicality,’ the ability of the players to use gestures, body language and pantomiming to communicate more about the context of the scene – where they are, who they are and how they feel (in general & about each other).

‘Physicality’ is critically important but often hard to teach. It’s important because without it – the audience has far less to go on; those watching the scene get something far less rich (and typically far less funny). Two people standing still talking at one another isn’t funny – but if one of them is a cantankerous old man trying to get a naive young idealist to see his point of view, all while they wait in line at the post office… there’s something far more to dig into. It’s hard to teach (or do) because we fill in the gaps when we think about creating such a scene. We think of the words we want to say, but don’t “concieve” of the body language, physicality or other elements because those are things we remember subconsciously. Think of someone famous with a very distinctive accent or gait – you probably recognize it instantaneously – but can you pull off a good impression?

By being incredibly physical – we ‘force’ ourselves to explore all the elements of a scene – we don’t gloss over things unconsciously by ‘filling in the gaps’ with our brain.

Design & Creativity are the same way – we need to ‘go through the motions’ to ensure our brain isn’t filling in gaps in our design.

When you brainstorm a new game design or some other creative venture – it can be exciting to think up all the elements, rules, etc. Our brains can run very, very fast – jumping from one idea to the next and exploring far faster than we can keep up with. This is great, but if we simply think a lot, when we go to actually turn our ideas into reality they always fall short. This is because – in jumping around with ideas – our brains “filled in the gaps.” We gloss over uncomfortable gaps or flaws in our ideas because they are not fun to think about. Much physicality in improv brings more realism to a scene, the way you overcome gaps/flaws in your creative thinking is by getting “physical” in the concrete sense. In other words – do!

I’ve mentioned the importance of hard work and never giving up by working iteratively on something, but physicality offers another unique aspect to creativity. It forces your ideas to be stronger. When you prep things or simply do them – it forces your imperfections to come to the surface, to become real. Then you can learn from them, get better and have stronger ideas.

There’s a common ‘urban legend’ that traverses the internet dealing with this subject- about a pottery teacher who conducted an experiment with his class:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

A lot of blogs use this as an example of the whole ‘quantity’ over ‘quality’ argument to developing expertise – and that’s not a bad lesson. However, there’s an even more important lesson: it’s not just quantity – it’s proper quantity. In other words, practice doesn’t make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect. The quality pottery students could have written 100 page long dissertations and it wouldn’t have mattered. The reason the quantity students did better was because they spent time physically creating the work they needed to improve.

If you’re a board game designer – spend time making games. If you’re a painter – paint. If you’re an improv comedian – get ‘physical.’