MetaJess

‘At school any spontaneous act was likely to get me into trouble. I learned never to act on impulse, and that whatever came into my mind first should be rejected in favour of better ideas. I learned that my imagination wasn’t ‘good’ enough.’

‘One day, when I was 18, I was reading a book and I began to weep. I was astounded. I’d had no idea that literature could affect me in such a way. If I’d wept over a poem in class the teacher would have been appalled. I realised that my school had been teaching me not to respond.

‘I tried to resist my schooling, but I accepted the idea that my intelligence was the most important part of me. I tried to be clever in everything I did. I forgot that inspiration isn’t intellectual, that you don’t have to be perfect.'

‘We suppress our spontaneous impulses, we censor our imaginations, we learn to present ourselves as ‘ordinary’, and we destroy out talent – then no one laughs at us.’

‘When I began teaching, it was very natural to me to reverse everything my own teachers had done. Ina normal education everything is designed to suppress spontaneity, but I wanted to develop it.’

1/2: '... with the man dancing alone in clouds of dust something unlocked in me. In one moment I knew that valuing men for their intelligence is crazy, that the peasants watching the night sky might feel more than I feel... '

2/2: '... that the man who dances might be superior to myself– word-bound and unable to dance… I began to value people for their actions, rather than their thoughts.’

‘If I hadn’t thrown away everything that my teachers taught me, I could never have written [my play]. These teachers, who were so sure of the rules, didn’t produce anything themselves at all.’

Imagination is as effortless as perception, unless we think it might be ‘wrong’, which is what our education encourages us to believe.Then we experience ourselves as ‘thinking up an idea’, but what we’re really doing is faking up the sort of imagination we think we ought to have.

'If I tell a student ‘say a word’ he’ll probably gawp. He wants a context in which his answer will be ‘right’. He wants his answer to bring credit to him, that’s what he’s been taught answers are for.'

‘My feeling is that sanity is actually a pretence, a way we learn to behave. We keep this pretence because we don’t want to be rejected by other people –and being classified insane is to be shut out of the group in a very complete way’

‘We all know instinctively what ‘mad’ thought is: mad thoughts are those which people find unacceptable, and train us not to talk about, but which we go to the theatre to see expressed.’

1/3: ‘I once read about a man who believed himself to have a fish in his jaw. This fish moved about, and caused him a lot of discomfort. When he tried to tell people about the fish, they thought him ‘crazy’, which led to violent arguments. After he’d been hospitalised...

2/3: ... several times –with not effect on the fish– it was suggested that perhaps he shouldn’t tell anyone. After all it was the quarrels which were getting him put away, rather than the delusion.

3/3: Once he’d agreed to keep his problem secret, he was able to lead a normal life. His sanity is like our sanity. We may not all have a fish in our jaw, but we all have its equivalent.'

‘When I explain that sanity is a matter of interaction, rather than one’s mental processes… the students agree that for years they have been suppressing all sorts of thinking because they classified it as insane.’

‘The truth is that the best ideas are often psychotic, obscene and unoriginal.’

'When you act or speak spontaneously, you reveal your real self, as opposed to the self you’ve been trained to present.'

'The brain constructs the universe for us, so how is it possible to be ‘stuck’ for an idea? The student hesitates not because he doesn’t have an idea, but to conceal the inappropriate ones that arrive uninvited.'

‘Reading about spontaneity won’t make you more spontaneous, but it may at least stop you heading off in the wrong direction; and if you play the exercises with your friends in a good spirit, then soon all your thinking will be transformed.’

1/2: ‘The improviser has to understand that his first skill lies in releasing his partner’s imagination. What happens in my classes, if the actors stay with me long enough, is that they learn how their ‘normal’ procedures destroy other people’s talent.

2/2: Then one day they have a flash of satori – they suddenly understand that all the weapons they were using against other people they also use inwardly, against themselves.’

“We don’t know much about Masks in our culture ... because [it] is usually hostile to trance states. We distrust spontaneity and try to replace it by reason.”

“…we don’t realise how much of our lives is spent in some form of trance, i.e. absorbed. What we assume to be ‘normal consciousness’ is comparatively rare, it’s like the light in the refrigerator: when you look in, there you are ON, but what’s happening when you don’t look in?”