Interesting martial arts parallel

[clfmak]

I recently finished reading the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, and a tangent about training for improv comedy parallels martial arts on several levels. Its interesting, because the book has nothing to do with martial arts. Here’s two paragraphs that I liked:
\”Improvisation comedy is a wonderful example of the kind of thing that Blink is all about. It involves people making very sophisticated decisions on the spur of the moment, without the benefit of any kind of script or plot. That’s what makes it so compelling and – to be frank – terrifying. If I were to ask you to perform in a play that I’d written, before a live audience with a month of rehearsal, I suspect that most of you would say no. What if you got stage fright? What if you forgot your lines? What if the audience booed? But at least a conventional play has structure. Every word and movement has been scripted. Every performer gets to rehearse. There’s a director in charge, telling everyone what to do. Now suppose that I were to ask you to perform again before a live audience, only this time without a script, without any clue as to what part you were playing or what you were supposed to say, and with the added requirement that you were expected to be funny. I’m quite sure you’d rather walk on hot coals. What is terrifying about improv is the fact that it appears utterly random and chaotic. It seems as though you have to get up onstage and make everything up, right there on the spot.
But the truth is that improv isn’t random and chaotic at all. If you were to sit down with the cast of Mother (note: this is the improv group talked about) for instance, and talk to them at length, you’d quickly find out that they aren’t all the sort of zany, impulsive, free spirited comedians that you might imagine them to be. Some are quite serious, even nerdy. Every week they get together for a lengthy rehearsal. After each show they gather backstage and critique each other performance soberly. Why do they practice so much? Because improv is an art form governed by a series of rules, and they want to make sure that when they’re up onstage, everyone abides by those rules. ‘we think of what we’re doing as a lot like basketball,’ one of the Mother players said, and thats an apt analogy. Basketballl is an intricate, high speed game filled with split second, spontaneous decisions. But that spontaneity is possible only when everyone first engages in hours of highly repetitive and structured practice- perfecting their shooting, dribbling, and passing and running plays over and over again- and agrees to play a carefully defined role on the court. This is the critical lesson of improv, too, and it is also a key to understanding the puzzle of the Millenium Challenge (note: a US military wargame): spontaneity isn’t random… How good people’s decisions are under the fast moving, high stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal.\”

[anonymous]

Hmmm, that’s interesting. You are right, almost the same thing could have been written about performing under stress in a self-defense situation. You’d have to adapt to the specific situation, so you would have to be spontaneous, yet it would all be based on intricate moves you have rehearsed before and situations you envisioned while still in the gym.

_________________
Giantkiller

[unstpabl1]

Your on a real good mental path with this Mr. C 🙂 The MA’s are an attempt to organize Chaos. Chaos by its very nature cannot be organized. If it was organized, it wouldn’t be chaotic. It can however be prepared for. Their are rules that humans have learned through trail and error which can help.

Viola Spolin who basically wrote the book on improvisation( acting), wrote that we learn by expirience, expiriences and expiriencing.( paraphrased) We learn by doing. Most of us think we learn by watching/reading, but until we have to get up and physically make it work can we internalize the lesson. Until its internalised, we can’t apply it. Thern we have to learn how to apply it under stress. Its taken me a long time to understand this 😥

I believe life is all improvisation. However, until you internalise the fundamentals of a thing, you can’t riff with it. You can’t play Jazz w/o internalizing the instrument and the foundations of jazz. same thing with fighting.
Nice post buddy
mike

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