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I’m guessing that many of you may have read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. One of the central ideas of that book is the enormous amount of work that goes into becoming great at something. If you listen to Radiolab, you may have heard this podcast with Gladwellwhere he talks about the fallacy of giftedness.
If you want to know more about it, I would suggest reading Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin next. In it he writes about how often the greatest people in any field got there through deliberate practice. It turns out deliberate practice is quite specific. It’s not simply doing something a lot. Playing guitar everyday may make you a decent guitar player, but just playing won’t make you great. Deliberate practice is different:
- It is activity designed specifically to improve performance.
- It can be repeated many many times.
- Feedback on results is continuously available.
- It’s highly demanding mentally.
- It isn’t much fun.
It has got me thinking a lot about improv training and rehearsing and coaching. How often do your rehearsals meet this criteria? How often are you asked to do an exercise once in a class and then never again? How often do you get clear feedback on your performance in rehearsal? Are you doing exercises that are specifically designed to improve one aspect of your performance or do you just get up and do scenes? Do these exercises demand the kind of focus and concentration that makes your head hurt and that aren’t much fun to do?
This last point really intrigues me. Improv is supposed to be fun isn’t it? Performing improv is one of the most joyous things I’ve ever experienced. Shouldn’t rehearsals also be fun? I’m beginning to wonder.
I sat in with Decoster last time I was in NYC, and the rehearsal we had before the show was one of the toughest rehearsals I’ve ever participated in. Rebecca Drysdale made every exercise tough to do. They worked very specific muscles. She requires you to be very focused in rehearsal and in the warmups before a show. I don’t think the rehearsal was fun, nor were the warmups, but the show was fun, it was a lot of fun.
There are two last points about deliberate practice that are important:
- It’s usually done alone.
- World class performers practice 3-4 hours a day.
Can you improvise alone? Well, you can design some exercises to be done alone and do them. I’ve tried some, but haven’t done any regularly. I think for improv it suggests that the paradigm of spending most of your time in rehearsal sitting and watching others rehearse is far from efficient. Perhaps, the optimal rehearsal is 2-3 players and a coach.
Lastly, I’ve never heard of anyone sustaining 3 hours a day for more than a few weeks. It makes me think that we haven’t even scratched the surface of how great improvisation could be.
What is your experience like? What exercises have you done that fit the definition of deliberate practice? Do you feel mentally exhausted when you walk out of rehearsal?Cross posted at improvresourcecenter.com.
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