I’d like to take a crack at defining a term that is used to describe aspects of improv at a certain skill level: “precious.”

For an improviser of sufficient skill, it is possible to carve out a spot for, and communicate clearly, an idea to the audience. This is no small feat, and everyone deserves credit for having done so. If you’ve convinced a room full of strangers that you have a porcelain menagerie arrayed on a credenza, then your skill and effort are not in question.

However…

Once an artist gives priority to the practice and the practicalities of the medium instead of the message they set out to communicate, they’ve made something precious.

I… cannot paint. If I (by chance or after some practice) painted something I liked, I would have to stop painting out of fear of ruining it. Maybe I could paint right up next to my favorite part without touching it…

It’s easy to see that better painters would never have to worry about this, as they could simply whip up another favorite. They could paint everything else and then drop the part they loved at the end. They could make the whole canvas out of favorite parts.

(The Prado Museum saw fit to provide a file with 1000x the resolution displayed herein…)

Preciousness is an important milestone. You have enough skill and knowledge to make something, recognize it has value, and protect it from the exigencies of the art. You’re making strides and gaining competence in a difficult, challenging, and popularly misunderstood art-form.

As a milestone, the ability to make something precious is hugely important. It represents an enormous stride in the medium you’ve chosen for your message. Your motor control is growing finer. Your perceptions are expanding. You have your own tastes, and you can tell if what you’re doing fits your taste.

Preciousness as a destination, well… If you don’t get past the milestone of what you’ve made precious, then you’ll be restricted by it.

What if Bach had stopped with chorales because they were so precious? If Mozart had stopped with Bach because his work was so clearly a momentous milestone? And Mendelssohn, having rediscovered Bach…

If you’re an improviser, preciousness can completely stop your work. Everyone has been to a jam and seen the person who just won’t budge until they’re completely convinced that what they want to have happen is happening. We’ve watched the experienced scene partner quickly recognize the phenomenon and give them carte blanche to dictate the scene… And the dictator freezes. Having put so much effort into making sure their precious idea happens, they are now stuck. They’ve become a gyroscope, with so much energy centered around one point that they can’t move.

Preciousness isn’t a single milestone; it appears many times along the artist’s journey. In the above example, the Dictator is apparent to an improviser with a few months training. Harder to spot is when a more skilled player is doing the same thing with more advanced and subtle skills.

Anything, at any point in your education, can become precious.

The detailed dialects you cherish so much, (“It hit so hard in past shows!”) that you now shoe-horn into every group game. Strong object-work (with weight, volume and effects on the character!), even poor object-work (!) can begin to have more inertia than the message.

I mean, which is more important: that this man feels out of place in the modern world; or that his teenage kid “walked through the ottoman”?

Even piece-work can become precious. Forcing a callback, connection, third beat; watching from the sidelines as a scene slowly dies because the form asked for a certain amount of two-person scenes and they haven’t hit the game a third time; the piece-work preciousness list is as populous as the constraints that define the various forms.

Note: In the context of a class, we can often dispense with the piece-work concern. The last thing I want is some stressed-out teacher having a student produce this blog post in order to avoid having to learn how to connect scenes. This blog post was free; you paid that teacher to guide you.

Let’s return to what happened to our Scene Dictator from the jam. The other player gave them room to declare by fiat what would happen… and they couldn’t pull it off. They had too much energy rotating around one point, and now the effort to move to something else was too great. Scale this up with me. What happens when it isn’t just the initiation that you’ve locked onto? What if the thing you’ve made precious can sail through scenes just fine? What happens to your growth if you protect a style of play that can knock an audience on its ass?

What happens to our art when enough of us can crush the Harold?

Now what?

There is good news and bad news for the improviser that wants to identify what they’ve made precious. The good news is that the things you’re protecting are the things that work for you and that you are good at. The bad news is that your precious things may take conscious, in-your-head effort to change.

Take stock of what you do right before entering a scene (or before a show). Figure out what you’re spinning up. What springs are being compressed? What part of your brain are you using to make sure you don’t burden your scene-mate? I know that I make sure to step out as someone other than myself, that the location is apparent in my posture, and that I’m ready to throw a curve into the grounded or quickly ground the curve. These things became precious to me because they always work for me.

Once you’ve identified something that you use, try relaxing it a bit. The work may become touch-and-go, but you can always spin that wheel back up. Remember, the thing you’re stepping back from is something you’re good at!

As you change the momentum on the things you’ve always been doing, you’ll be surprised at how nimbly you can move.