TIME AND SPACE AND IMPROV - Saturday, March 21, 2009
Spent a lot of time this past week driving around Los Angeles. Listened to two audio books – Walter Isaacson’s biography “Einstein: His Life and Universe,” and Alan Lightman’s
“Einstein’s Dreams,” a poetic rumination on the dreams Einstein might have had while experiencing the burst of genius which led to his Theory of Relativity.
Anyway, I had a really exhausting week last week -- too much to do, too little time to do it. Sound familiar? Not enough time to think, to ponder, to let the creative juices flow of their own accord to some new insight. NOT ENOUGH TIME!! That’s when a new insight hit. It’s not that I don’t have enough time. I DON’T HAVE ENOUGH SPACE!
That’s a great way to look at it. Space is more generous than time. Time is unrelenting. It marches forward. I have no control over time. But space – space is available. I can pay attention at any instant, be in the space that I’m in and honor it. Supported by the space inside me and the space around me, trusting in the space to reward me for my attention, I can open up to my own intuition. Confident that when I return to it, time will have moved forward and I will be more “here” than I was before, when I thought that I was a victim of time, rather than a participant in space. The old cliché in comedy is that "timing is everything.” But think about it. Comedy timing is as much about space as it is about time. An improviser, in order to find the right “timing,” is really being informed by the interplay in the space between him/her and the other players and, to a very large degree, between performer and audience. In
that space is the intuition regarding how to “time something.” By “playing” the space, the great comic actor gets his “timing.
Spent a lot of time this past week driving around Los Angeles. Listened to two audio books – Walter Isaacson’s biography “Einstein: His Life and Universe,” and Alan Lightman’s
“Einstein’s Dreams,” a poetic rumination on the dreams Einstein might have had while experiencing the burst of genius which led to his Theory of Relativity.
Anyway, I had a really exhausting week last week -- too much to do, too little time to do it. Sound familiar? Not enough time to think, to ponder, to let the creative juices flow of their own accord to some new insight. NOT ENOUGH TIME!! That’s when a new insight hit. It’s not that I don’t have enough time. I DON’T HAVE ENOUGH SPACE!
That’s a great way to look at it. Space is more generous than time. Time is unrelenting. It marches forward. I have no control over time. But space – space is available. I can pay attention at any instant, be in the space that I’m in and honor it. Supported by the space inside me and the space around me, trusting in the space to reward me for my attention, I can open up to my own intuition. Confident that when I return to it, time will have moved forward and I will be more “here” than I was before, when I thought that I was a victim of time, rather than a participant in space. The old cliché in comedy is that "timing is everything.” But think about it. Comedy timing is as much about space as it is about time. An improviser, in order to find the right “timing,” is really being informed by the interplay in the space between him/her and the other players and, to a very large degree, between performer and audience. In
that space is the intuition regarding how to “time something.” By “playing” the space, the great comic actor gets his “timing.
