17F. Text-Maker and Colorer

• Sit down in trios. You'll collaborate on building a language composition.

• One of you is Text-Maker and the others are Colorers. The Text-Maker provides the language, the narration, story and images. The Colorers can only use the language that the Text-Maker has provided.

• Text-Maker, even though you're providing the language and content of the narration, you're continually listening to your Colorers. Give them room. You may even join them on some little play of words, the three of you riffing together. Don't go on and on, feeling responsible for the whole thing. You are also coloring the language as you speak it. Don't hurry. Take time and give your language play. This exercise is about the three of you co-creating with sound, language and feeling together.

• Colorers, your job is to support, add depth, feeling, atmosphere, and subtextual quality to the text. You can't introduce any new language, no new words. You may only use the words of the Text-Maker. You may, however, change the timing and ordering of phrases and words. You may repeat or retrieve things. You may redesign the expression of the lines as long as you stay within the intention of the Text-Maker. Even if you add other subtextual intonations, don't counter theText-Maker. Your material must always support his or hers.

• Continue until I say stop. After you've stopped, have a little chat about the composition, what you liked or didn't, what worked for you or didn't, what you would like from each other, if anything, and what you can do in your next round to make the composition more of whatever you want. Then, you'll reverse roles.

"I couldn't find room to come in. Your voice was filling up all of the space."

If you think there's no room to come in, come in anyway. Or don't. Relax. "No room" is an idea that blocks your energy and that doesn't feel good. Send your voice out over your partners. Or under. Or mirror. What­ever sounds good. Or bad. Try out bad. That might change things. Always work with what's going on. It's perfect.

"It felt wonderful, as if we were one voice."

Several or many voices can always be heard as one collective voice. The ear expands, sensing, all that it hears as an ongoing stream of sound which becomes single voice. Preferences and judgments create the idea of separation. We usually feel separated from others because we're so involved in our own preferences and judgments, but we could regard everyone's voice as a single stream of voice.

"We repeated too much. I would have liked more new material to play with."

If repeating is what's going on, take on repeating. Repeat like mad. Enjoy it. Eveiy improvisation is different. This one might be "The Repeat­ing Improvisation."

"I think we can expand our range together. I didn 't want to override you."

Why not? To override someone is an idea. Listen to the sound of the improvisation. What does it want? Fulfill it. Your job is not to protect, or perfect, your partner: thinking of expanding your partner's or the improvisation s range, takes you av/ay from responding to what is going on right then, right there.

Each and every improvisation is happening just as it is. Participants only need to follow the arrows, the cues, the stones that are set down and are continually being placed to reveal it. If participants have the capacity for this to happen, without imposing ideas or preferences from thoughts that have nothing to do with the present moment of experience (sensation), each improvisation will have its own exceptional identity and be unpredictable.

Ifeach improvisation is perfectly what it is, then why bother having discussions afterwards? Because the discussions are for participants to tell each other what they noticed. They describe the elements that molded the improvisation in a particular way. For example, they may notice that a particular improvisation was vocally small, full of whispers and sighs, pauses, even, at times, monotonous, single-toned. By noticing certain aspects, students automatically imply that other characteristics were not present. (If it was this, then it must not have been that.) Pointing out details in an improvisation helps to open up possibilities. Next time, the improvisation may be of greater range. Next time, it might address altogether different aspects.

Now, let's merge the different roles of Text-Maker and Colorer into one role.