Last month I went to see Lygia Pape in SoHo at Hauser&Wirth. The whole exhibition consisted of but two installations, a video and a handful of drawings. It was refreshing. The headline work, Ttéia 1C, stood out in our minds stark and unobstructed. Indeed, my friend remarked, it is a remarkable curatorial talent to be so intelligently selective. To know what to leave aside.
Our acting instructor said it another way: if you try to do too much, the audience will get sea sick. If there is too much going on, people won't know where to look. They will feel overwhelmed. Improvisation theatre is to make choices. Be decisive. Do one thing. Be consistent.
Consistency is another key aspect of improvisation. On stage you must be consistent otherwise your fellow actors will have no idea how to interact with you, there will be too much happening and audiences will get sea sick. Note - consistency not predictability. You need not be rigid, only clear. Steady rather than chaotic, even as you change. Call it a personal brand.
Design too provides ready examples.
Simplicity is clarity. Clarity - the intelligence to distinguish signal from noise. Urgent from trivial. Relevant from inconsequential. It requires a certain neatness of understanding and an imperative economy of thought.
This is hard.
I for instance have poor curatorial skills. My mind is like the contents of a miscellaneous drawer. Only this morning I wanted simultaneously to write about: relativism and the grounds for making moral claims; originality and opinion as an organising principle; focus and the creative process; intrinsic motivation; enacting change in a bureaucratic society; Tolstoy, war and freedom - how settled societies are also more regimented ones; Kurt Vonnegut on why happiness is to want the inevitable; Sartre's No Exit and people as mirrors; and finally of role models and Renaissance Men based on a book by Studs Terkel I finished last month. What an incongruous mess.
Simplicity. Clarity. Consistency. A personal brand.
Yet choosing is hard. Doing so rapidly and decisively - harder still. This is because the choice between what to keep and what to leave aside is an act of definition. According to Oxford Dictionaries, the word comes from the Latin definire which means to limit, determine, explain. It is a fusion of de- (expressing completion) and finire (expressing boundary or end). To define is to cut an identity out of the indeterminate fabric of existence. To choose is to bring into being.
Herein lies the difficulty. Any time you decide what book to read, what job to take, what event to attend, what friendship to pursue, what hobby to practice - at the expense of every other - any time you choose what to keep and what to leave aside, some doors will get closed forever. This is terrifying because who to be is just another way of asking where can I belong since people don't just want to be, in a vacuum. If nobody goes to see Lygia Pape, who cares? There will be other exhibitions. You, on the other hand, only get to live once.
Then again, perhaps choice is an illusion, and we should all grow to fill the space allotted to us by nature, nurture, culture and sheer chance. You are who you are. You choose a book from the few that happen to come your way. You take the job you get. You belong simply where you happen to be.
Freedom is a blessing and a curse.
