A Brief Intermission: I Wrote a Book
Yes, But: Essays on Improvisiation
Welcome to Measuring the Immeasurable, a newsletter (usually) about helping arts and culture leaders understand the language of public value. Today is a somewhat unusual post announcing that I’ve published a book, and some reflections on the importance of having skin in the game as an arts consultant.
This week I published Yes, But: Essays on Improvisation, an exploration of the history and future of improvised theatre. The book began as a modest effort to articulate a series of impulses I had about improvised theatre, more commonly called ‘improv,’ or ‘improv comedy.’ Chiefly, I argue that improvised theatre is an “art that does not yet recognise itself as such.” The rest of the book then considers what the pathways to legitimacy might be, and what might ground that legitimacy.
My interest in this isn’t just academic. I have been performing and teaching improvised theatre for over a decade, studied in the U.S., and have founded and now run my own community theatre company, Only the Human.
I started the company because I sensed that improvisation was valuable. This sense was partly a product of my own experience and partly a feeling that there was more to be uncovered. This is a familiar pattern to any artist. The sense that something has value is not deduced from a data set or a theory of change, as if it were unknown until we were told. Evaluation always happens after the fact. The initial sense of possible value always arrives intuitively, sometimes slowly and sometimes all-at-once, but always in a space beyond articulation, expressed with gesticulation, stomping and sighing.
Yes, But is a child of those inchoate frustrations. It is an attempt to sketch out what it is that makes improvised theatre valuable, derived from a decade of experience as a practitioner and five years’ experience as a manager. It is a marginal art with near-zero public funding support in Australia1. In the United States, it is something “up-and-coming comic actors use to find their voice… only to dismiss it once they get a break” in the words of one commentator2. During COVID-19, the three major improvisation theatres, collectively responsible for the diaspora of alumni who seeded the art globally, all collapsed due to a lack of private and institutional support.
There is something ironic and lovely about the fact that my work typically deals with, in some form or another, the question of how to articulate and make visible the value provided by the arts, and yet I have found myself at such a loss when trying to articulate the value of the artform closest to my heart. Performing, establishing, and scaling improvised theatre is an exercise in being marginal and undervalued par excellence. The benefit is that I have rich, experiential insight in what it means to live in the space between what you know (“this is valuable and worthwhile!”) and what you can convince other people to know. This gives me some skin in the game, and it means that as an evaluator, I have spent time on both sides of the equation.
Most importantly, writing Yes, But has reminded me that there are serious and quite profound limits to what we can say about the arts. It also reminds me that the sense of value arrives first and its articulation comes much later. The artist sees the sculpture in the stone. The evaluator only describes what has already appeared. Yes, But is not about evaluation as such, but all the challenging work that provides us with something that can be evaluated in the first place.
Next fortnight we’ll return to our usual programming with a piece that has been on the boil for a while. I want to get right to the heart of the political economy of arts evaluation in Australia and consider what kinds of systemic interventions are required.
Thanks for your time and attention.
Improv Theatre Sydney, I believe, may be the only exception to this: venue partnerships and local government grants partly sustain their work.
See What if Improv Were Good? by Jesse David Fox.