Jason Young is the founder of the Vintage Theatre Company based in Clarksburg, WV. The group offers entertainment and education in a variety of formats, from operatic and a cappella performances to improvisational and sketch comedy. Jason partnered with the team at The Hub to travel to Cowen and Moorefield to demonstrate how the core components of improv can support effective community engagement.
“Community development work requires collaboration,” Jason says. “It requires people of different backgrounds to work together and try to accomplish a goal – to create something out of nothing. What I’m really teaching is collaboration, which is paramount to this culture-based programming. That’s where improv comes in.”
Jason’s Improv(e) Your Community exercise gives communities and groups a fun format in which to learn tools for effective collaboration.
The first rule of collaboration, Jason says, is hearing:
“The reason we focus on hearing first is that hearing is a way to edify another human being. A lot of times in collaborative work, there are people who feel like they’re not being heard or they don’t have a voice. You have people who emerge as leaders and people who emerge as followers. In improv, there are no leaders and followers. You want everyone to be heard. You want people to feel that they’re a part of the creation of something rather than just the execution of something. That’s how people feel that they’re truly a part of a project. Hearing is the foundation – it’s hard to go anywhere unless you’re really clear on where you’re starting.”
While hearing is the first rule of this work, Jason points out that the second (and just as important) rule is acceptance:
“Acceptance is the improv rule of YES. Acceptance is how collaboration begins, while denial is the thing that ends all collaboration. In improv, you work with yes with the understanding that things are going to change and morph and grow in different and unexpected ways; but you have to start by agreeing to start somewhere. In this work, communities will have to do a lot of brainstorming and solve a lot of problems. So when people put forward an idea, this becomes a jumping off point. The first idea is not what will end up happening, but you have to accept it so that you can build off it.”
The rule of YES means that when someone puts an idea on the table, responses to that idea must begin with yes. Specifically, the response has to start with yes, and…
“People want to be heard so that they can be a part of the building process,” Jason says. “When someone puts an idea on the table and that idea is met with ‘No,’ or ‘That will never work because we don’t have the money,’ or what have you, you’ve just lost that brain from the table because that person likely won’t participate anymore. Collaboration begins with acceptance.”