Josh was my first improv teacher back in 2007 at Washington Improv Theater. On the first day of class I could not have been more scared about what I was about to do. After class I remember Josh talking about a festival he had just gone to with his team, Jinx. He was critiquing the show and compared it to other festivals he had gone to. Listening to him talk, I remember thinking, “Wow, people take this seriously.”

joshpatten:

(I normally don’t say things like this while coaching improv, but I loosely said the following to a group I coached today (Dos Mimosas, a young and extremely talented group—they have a show at Triple Crown this Sunday at 8PM—go to it!) and it strikes me as true and I needed to jot it down before…

Why are we here?  Why are we doing improv? Why? I know there are a bunch of different reasons we give when we are asked that question in a social setting, but I think every single one of those reasons boils down to one thing.

For most of our lives, when we’re going about our day, whether at work, or school, on a date or with friends, we spend so much time thinking about what we should do—we should do X at work in order to survive, we should do Y in our relationship to have it succeed, and the world gets us so caught up in thinking about what we should do that we often forget to even imagine what we can do.  And so we come here.

When we’re on an improv stage, we absolutely can do anything. We can create whatever we want and we can do it with the absolute greatest thing that exists in this world: each other. But what happens, so often? That fucking “should” creeps back into our heads. We think we should do X in order to survive this scene, we should do Y in this scene to make it succeed, and it just gets incredibly hard and frustrating. It becomes like everything else out there, unless we choose to see differently, unless we say screw everything else, this is our stage, this is our time and we can do anything.  Think back to every great improv scene you have ever been in—hell, think about those great moments in your life—and I bet none of them were done while we were thinking about what we should be doing.  They were about what we can be doing.  It’s the difference between completing an improv scene and creating an improv scene, the difference between surviving life and living it.

So for this next set, let’s all look each other in the eye, and think about everything we can do out there together.

Because why the fuck not?