Secret Rules: Improv and Neurodiversity w/ James Strahan
“I was taught the rules I would use to completely transform my attitude towards the social situations I had always dreaded”
James is a freelance writer and comedian based in Edinburgh. He studied improv with The Improverts and is looking forward to getting back on stage in any capacity as soon as all this nonsense is over.
Growing up on the autistic spectrum, though undiagnosed at the time, my most distinct memories are of sitting in the back of the car with my sisters on long journeys and keeping myself entertained by playing characters. The earliest one I remember was Farmboy. I would affect a broad Northern accent (I grew up in Lancashire so it’s fine I reckon) and witter on about the day to day running of my farm, often focusing on the details of which fields I was leaving fallow this season, an idea that particularly amused me for reasons I cannot fully explain. My family always seemed to enjoy it, if only for the first five minutes of what they would have to tolerate for a further hour.
I’d like to say this wasn’t my finest material ever, but it’s entirely possible that it was. The important thing is that I have always been at my most comfortable playing characters, and at my least comfortable trying to act ‘normal’. Sometimes though, acting normal is necessary. This is why meeting new people has always made me anxious. I’m fine with people I know well enough, I am perfectly comfortable among close friends and family, but I cannot count the number of parties filled with new people I have spent hiding in a corner with friends before leaving early. As cringeworthy as it may seem, learning improv skills has helped me with this more than anything else.
Edinburgh was where I learned these skills. Having moved here for university, I was immediately sucked into the improv world within a week. I attended the first show of term for the university’s resident improv troupe ‘The Improverts’ and attended one of their free workshops. After a few weeks I was asked by the director if I would be interested in attending the team’s private workshops twice a week, to be given the training that would eventually lead to me joining the show fully. It was in these workshops that I was taught the rules I would use to completely transform my attitude towards the social situations I had always dreaded.
The truth is, I feel most comfortable when given parameters to work with. A set of rules is a starting point, whether for a social situation or an improvised scene onstage, rules provide a framework to play within or to subvert. Being taught these rules by other improvisers, and reading books on improv felt like unlocking the highly guarded (at least to me) secrets of how to talk to people you don’t already know well. Rules quelled the anxiety, so that I could simply engage in the moment like the people around me had seemingly been doing their entire lives.
The most important one of these rules is the foundation of all improv, and deceptively simple: ‘Yes, and…’. It seems obvious to say this, but for me, the idea that all conversations essentially consist of just taking what the last person has said and then building on it, was genuinely revolutionary. My previous approach of registering something long after the conversation has moved on, and responding with what had now become a bizarre non-sequitur was a result of anxiety causing me to overthink, jamming up my brain with various permutations of possible responses until one finally came out far too late. What I was now learning was to simply stay in the moment, and to throw in another basic improv rule: ‘Don’t think twice’.
There are many, far more niche and specific lessons I learned through improv. We would dedicate full workshops to these kinds of things, and while everyone else was learning to sharpen their scene-work, I was also secretly learning the basics of social interaction on the side. For fear of playing into every stereotype about neurodiverse people, I won't say that it felt like that bit in the Matrix where everything turns to code, but it did, it did feel like that bit in the Matrix, sorry everyone. Many of the things we were focusing on - stuff like the hierarchy of status in a conversation, or the importance of maintaining eye-contact with a scene partner - were things that come completely naturally to neurotypical people outside of improv, but for me they demystified the art of social interaction, distilling vague ideas about social cues into a set of solidly regimented rules. And rules were something I could work with.
All of this is, of course, my own subjective, personal experience with autism and improv, but if you are reading this as someone else struggling with anything I have described, I can wholeheartedly recommend attending any local workshops you can find and/or reading Keith Johnstone’s books on improvising, in which all of these rules are explained in great depth. It would be disingenuous of me to claim that these things have rid me of social anxiety completely - I'm still fairly unlikely to be the person staying until the very end of a large party - but they have helped in a huge way, and I will always take comfort in the fact that whether I'm playing a farmer deciding which fields should lie fallow, or playing myself in a circle of strangers at a party - the rules are the same.
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