20-Jul-2025: Improv is not for me

Yesterday I attended a free improv workshop jointly held by an improv club and a slam poetry club. I thought, huh, improv poetry? Sign me up! It was only a kilometer's walk away from the nearest train station so I got the confirmation e-mail and hauled my ass there. The workshop was held in one of the buildings inside of this gallery complex. You had buildings for dance classes and studios connected via garden bridges to exhibition rooms connected to a cafe. Basically it's a haven for theater and arts kids.

The workshop was more than what I had expected, which is a good thing, but fundamentally I just did not vibe with the concept of improv nor the instructor for that class. The lessons being taught about improv were good but to me the concept of improv itself is not appealing. If i were a different person, a theater kid in a different life, I would have had a blast there. Alas, I am who I am, and I have broken down the reasons why this improv acting class was not for me.

1. Creative Control, Relinquishing it.
Improv involves the player actors and the audience engaging in a story-telling conversation. Your intentions are only kept to yourself. You riff off your fellow actors. Everything is spontaneous and you have to constantly be on your feet (literally and figuratively) to make the story work.

I have an issue with spontaneity and the fast-paced-ness of it all. Sure, the instructor said we can take more deliberate, longer, slower actions to communicate better, but she did press on the fact that we have to make up our mind fast and go with the flow. As much as I love going with the flow wrt mall-hopping and trying out new boba shops, storytelling is not one of the things I want to risk with spontaneous combustion.

Throughout the 4 hours the workshop lasted, I felt irked by the suggestions the audience were throwing out, as it made for a bad story (but I mostly kept my mouth shut). However, the actors had to go with these direction changes because those are the rules for the improv set that day. It made me reckon with the fact that for all of my creative endeavors, I am a stickler for my own creative vision that (besides editors and beta readers whom I can debate with), improv audiences are merely an obstacle in my way. I do not like this aspect of improv or storytelling.

In a tabletop RPG, which is what I compare to improv, the game is about building a storyline with your fellow party members and dungeonmaster. The difference is that you tend to play with your friends, nobody is watching (unless you're a freak that broadcasts your TTRPG games), and generally it's a low-stakes, tight-knit environment where you're not on a stage. My introduction to improv happened with complete strangers, whom I did not feel comfortable at all riffing off of. I have trouble riffing off my close friends, nevermind complete strangers.

My next point also has something to do with TTRPG lingo, and that is:

2. Bleed, Suspension of Disbelief
Bleed is the phenomenon where the lines between you and your character blur, either in one way or the other. This means you let your personal life dictate your character or the plot of the story dictate your feelings towards your friends.

I've struggled with bleed ever since my friend roped me into my first Dungeons and Dragons campaign, and I didn't know there was a word for it until someone brought it up in an online conversation.

I cannot separate myself from the character I am playing, nor can I separate a real, breathing person in front of me from the character they are playing. To me, they are one person. The character;s actions are that person's actions. My suspension of disbelief is fully gone when I need to step into any "role."

I can write about other people and write in the voices of characters, but I'm not acting any of that out. I can write fiction in the voice of my narrator, Jo and Venus, and that suspension of disbelief is there. However, that does not apply when I become the character.

Some people chalk bad bleed to having poor abilities to separate fact from fiction, but I have another hypothesis:

3. Masking, Physicality
I don't want to act. I've been acting my whole life. I've been acting to be accepted by my peers, by my family, by the public. Everything I do in my day-to-day already feels calculated and optimized and you want me to do it in my off-time? Where the rules of the universe supposedly don't apply?! In a world where anything is possible, why would I want to be anything but myself when all I've known since growing up is to conceal myself?

This is the crux of the issue, I've discovered. I have a strong sense of self that's been hindered for so long that I have a strong aversion towards acting and roleplaying as a whole. I don't find it empowering becoming someone else. I don't find it empowering to be able to manipulate my physicality into someone else's, because I've been doing that my entire life!

I know how to manipulate my physicality to mask my autistic symptoms, and it is tiring trying to adhere to neurotypicals' concept of "body language." 'Oh this is how shy people gesture,' 'that is how an honest friend would act,' 'that's what a liar's hands would do.' To me it's just another flavor of masking! You're asking me to speak a language I fundamentally go against! It's against my nature!

The instructor made a lot of talk about how both improv and acting "makes you open up" when it came to your body language. Implying that being content with oneself involves the heuristics of "being open," arms spread apart and flailing. I fundamentally disagree with this assessment for personal reasons.

She made it sound like to be truly comfortable in your skin you must have a certain level of physicality, but her reference is, well, actors. She gives an example of "knowing" how to differentiate an introvert to an extrovert "to better know how to approach them." I find it incompatible with how I approach things, which is not taking people's body language at face value and instead engaging in conversation earnestly to get to know someone.

My 'body language' is pretty closed off not because of hostility, but purely happenstance. I don't make a concerted effort to "make myself big" so I could "feel" "confident." I'm already confident! I just keep my hands to myself! This faux-reading of physicality was the final nail in the coffin on any of my future acting endeavors and any future improv workshop.

Did we get to do any proper storywriting? Well. About that. The instructor did not lay down any basics of improv up until 2 hours into the workshop. Meaning the room, which were mostly rookies, were making basic storytelling mistakes in giving prompts and corrections. I find this approach to be problematic. She dives right into improv straight off the bat and has to exert effort "correcting" basic misbehaviours that could have been prevented if she laid groundwork and consent first thing in the afternoon.

Besides that she gives pretty solid storytelling advice, if only it weren't three hours into the workshop! I'm still miffed about that.

Closing thoughts
So, I buried the lede here a bit but I did have an anxiety attack 3/4 of the way through the workshop (not really their fault). I hadn't gotten an anxiety attack in MONTHS, so it was perplexing to me (I thought, as tears streamed down my face irrationally). I was zoning out at least halfway through the class and feeling myself becoming ungrounded. It was the onset of an anxiety attack that I was familiar with many years ago.

After writing this post I've gathered that the entire anti-acting sentiment stemming from my autism was the root cause of my anxiety attack. Seeing people who are more compatible with improv doing better than me sucks and they're all first-timers as well! They can roleplay and act much better than I ever could because of the aforementioned baggage I have with acting. The baggage ultimately dealt the final blow as I locked myself in a bathroom to ground myself and left the venue for a good 20 minutes until the session was almost over.

The good news is I made it home safe and sound and did not crash out any further. Well, I did cry a bit writing this but it's a good cathartic feeling instead of a bad one. I had some good takeaways from it and I'm going to swear off any acting and improv in the future. I'll stick to learning HTML alone in my room, thanks.