Yes! And...

It took me a ridiculously long time to understand the point of "Yes, And..."

I didn't get it at all when I was in school and my drama teacher was trying to get us to learn improv skills.

I didn't really get it at university, where I was studying to be a drama teacher (gods save us).

I barely got it when I was a drama teacher, and certainly didn't understand it well enough to teach it to my students (one of many reasons why I'm not a drama teacher today).

It wasn't until after I became a librarian and found a book on Improv Skills in the library I was working in that it all clicked into place. And, like many things that should be self evident, it was both a life-changing revelation and an embarrassing "well, duh!" moment.

"Yes, And...", for those of you who haven't been introduced to the joys of Improv, is an improvisational technique, but also the name of a Theatre Sports "game" that is designed to teach that technique. 

In this game, whenever anyone says anything, the other person is supposed to reply with "Yes, and..." and then say something that builds on what the other person said:

"Isn't it a lovely day today?"
"Yes, and the whether forecast is looking very promising for the weekend."
"Yes, and I'm really looking forward to seeing the football match."

"That person just shot a gorilla!"
"Yes, and not before time – that escaped gorilla was about to climb the Empire State building."
"Yes, and it would be dreadful to have to get the biplanes in."

"I really wish I hadn't watched that horror film straight after eating all that weird street food."
"Yes, and I really wish I wasn't sitting next to you at the time."

That's the game. In Improve, the principle of  "Yes, And..." is essentially the same, but you don't actually have to say the words "Yes, and..." You just have to keep going in the spirit of what has gone before:

"My goodness, Jack, you look like you've been dragged backwards through a hedge!"
"I was! A Hawthorn! By a Sasquatch!"
"Oh, no, don't tell me Benny's back in town?"

The fundamental idea of "Yes, And..." is that you just accept whatever reality has been offered to you and riff on it without hesitation – and offer the other players in the improv something to build on and riff with in return. It requires a complete lack of defensiveness and an open-handed generosity, with the understanding that your pride isn't at all important, but the flow of the story is.

Whatever the other person says to you, you're all in. Whatever character is suggested to you, that's who you are – no questions asked. Whatever offer is made, you accept whole-heartedly, without any ego.

Which is, of course, why high school students struggle with it so much. All teenagers instinctively feel very embarrassed at all times, and they want to try to protect themselves from anything that might threaten the appearance they want to present to the world. Teenagers and youths instinctively want to control the narrative, so they can control how people see them. 

In addition to this, conversations amongst teens and youths have a tendency to become combative. In a good Improv, the conversation is a volley and the aim is to keep it going for as long as possible while making it interesting for the audience. But most kids can't engage in a conversation as a game without trying to "win" by scoring points off your "opponents".

A good improve is supportive. You carry the rest of your team through it because you want everyone to be able to shine. Sometimes, for the sake of an amusing performance, this involves making at least one person an unfortunate clown. But this should never be done out of malice – only for the sake of the story. If everyone knows that they are safe, then they can play the clown happily without feeling like they are being attacked.

Because that's the point of "Yes, And...": to know that you are all part of the same team, and whatever ball you throw, you are throwing to a member of your team, and whatever ball is thrown in your direction is something you should catch and play, for the good of the team. And because we all have each other's back, we know to throw the balls in good faith, and to catch them with good grace.

Which is one of many reasons why I'm ashamed that it took me so long to understand the point of "Yes, And..." It's a principle I try to live by, these days – to varying degrees of success, it must be said, but I'm working on it.

Role plays are always terrible

I studied Speech and Drama for about twelve years, and then I taught both Drama and English for two years.

I have, on more than one occasion, flirted with the idea of undertaking a thesis on the confluence between performance and language learning by examining whether drama class activities designed to improve performance can be successfully used in a language classroom to improve oral language skills.

It is my considered opinion that role-play activities suck.

They just do.

It's like there's something in the genre that is inherently terrible.

You know what I'm talking about.  You have to pretend to be Harold, who has something terribly ordinary or mundane to do.  Your partner plays Mildred, who wants to talk to Harold about something equally mundane but clashing with Harold's mundane plans.  You must pretend you care about these mundane things and try to negotiate some sort of conversation or compromise.

Blah.

Scripted drama/sketches have the benefit of actual thought.  Improvisations (proper improvisations - like those found in theatre sports) are kept aloft by the participants entering into the spirit of the game and have an air of anything-can-happen danger.  Role-play activities lack both the game and the thought, and always seem to trudge along like a lame duck caught in an oil slick.

Role plays in classroom situations can have some limited benefit, in that they get the participants to start thinking about ideas from different perspectives, and they prompt the use of conversational skills like listening and turn-taking - but they're almost always boring and horrid.

Turn a role-playing activity into an assessment item, and then they become boring, horrid and terrifying.  Not a good combination.  Role plays can, possibly, be used as a spot of scaffolding on the way to a less horrible assessment item, but I would really recommend something else.

Anything else, really.

Might I suggest: a proper script, a proper improvisation or a decent vox-pop?  These are all good alternative to role plays.

Pamela, Or, Virtue Rewarded

I can't remember which exam was focused on 18th Century Literature. I think it might have been the Associate Diploma, but it could have been Grade Seven.

Anyway, it kind of caught me napping because I'd never read an 18th Century novel, and suddenly I had to use one for a rather central part of an exam. I'd have to memorise a passage, read some of the book on sight at the whim of the examiner, and answer whatever questions the examiner might ask concerning the book.

Previously, I'd almost managed to get past the third chapter of Robinson Crusoe two or three times, but quite frankly the book refuses to be read. Have you ever tried reading Robinson Crusoe? The first few chapters are ridiculously boring. I mean, more boring than Island of the Blue Dolphin, which bored the pants off be both times I read it, but I still managed to finish the book (once when I was in High School, and once when I had to teach it for a class).

Anyway, since I didn't have the time to read several novels in order to have the luxury of choosing one, I just picked a title at random and decided to roll with it. My one criteria was that it not be Robinson Crusoe, so that left the field pretty open.

I ended up grabbing Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded off the shelf for one reason and one reason only - I knew Richardson would give me something to talk about, and it seemed to be the only thing he had written that was less than sixty-seven volumes long. Okay, I'm exaggerating slightly, but have you seen how much space Clarissa takes up on a shelf?

Pamela, then became the first book I ever had to read for assessment purposes which I didn't finish. It wasn't from laziness - I just couldn't take it any more.

To give it its due, the book isn't boring. It's just very, very, very annoying.

I present a synopsis, but cannot guarantee my memory of events:

We have a sixteen year old girl, Pamela, who is employed by "Mr B.", a jerk she calls "my Master" throughout the entire book. I have no idea how old Jerkboy is, but he is probably at least ten years older than she is. Maybe much more. Jerkboy comes onto her in the garden (because a servant is little more than a whore, right?), and she refuses him. At this, she worries that she might loose her job. She writes to her parents who write back to say they're more worried she might loose her virginity, and she should probably chuck the job and come home.

At this point, she nobly chooses to stay working for Jerkboy so she can send money home to the folks, even though they clearly regard her "virtue" to be more important. Jerkboy comes onto her again, and again she refuses. He takes the next logical step and abducts her.

Having shoved her into some form of conveyance against her will, he whisks her away to his house in some unidentifiable locality where no-one will know where she is in order to rescue her. The next few chapters consist of her trying to escape and him trying to either seduce her or rape her. As his methods of seduction leave a little to be desired (somewhat closer to "you, pants off, now" than anything, well, appealing), there's a very fine line between the seduction attempts and the rape attempts. She bravely wards off the seduction (yeah, like that was hard), and manages to avoid the rape by fainting - which, I guess, takes all the fun out of it for Jerkboy.

Pamela is hampered in her attempts to escape by a) the fact that she is COMPLETELY USELESS, and b) Jerkboy's housekeeper, who seems to believe it is one of her duties to help Jerkboy deflower unwilling sixteen-year-old girls.

Meanwhile, the novel progresses as she writes letters to her parents, which she despairs of ever being able to send. At one point, she thinks she finally has managed to get word out of her predicament, but it turns out that Jerkboy manages to intercept the letters and read them.

Now, all this time, Pamela is still referring to him as "my Master", when I think any female character who wasn't written by an obnoxious fifty-one-year-old bloke (who thinks he's doing womankind a favour by giving them a good example to follow) would probably be calling him something like, say, "Jerkboy".

Oh, but wait - did I mention this was a Romance?

That's right, after abducting her, keeping her prisoner, intercepting her letters to her parents and repeatedly attempting to rape her, Jerkboy decides he can't live without her and she has proven herself to be virtuous enough to be his wife, so he proposes. She at first sees this as another plot to get into her pants, then takes all of five minutes to accept. The book then changes tack to talk about how wonderful Jerkboy is and how lucky she feels to have won him - and all along she still calls him "my Master".

It was at this point that I threw the book across the room and refused to read any more. I made sure the passages I had to cover for my exam came from the two thirds of the book I had actually read, and I found a synopsis of the damn thing so I could answer questions about the rest of the story without having to actually put up with one more sentence of Richardson's dross.

Turns out that, after deciding to spend the rest of her life with her beloved Jerkboy, Pamela discovered he had a child by another woman. So, as any good, dutiful wife would, she insisted on meeting this other woman, and TAKING HER CHILD to raise as her own - after all, who better to raise her husband's child than a virtuous, married woman, as opposed to some poor, wretched slut who didn't have the good sense to faint every time he tried to climb into her bed...?

Yeah, Pamela is never going to make it into my list of favourite books. I have to say I'm more likely to read chapter five of Robinson Crusoe than ever finishing Pamela.

But, hey, the story has a great moral, right? If you put up with someone unconscionably obnoxious for long enough, you may get to put up with them for the rest of your life! Yay!?