Letting Go of The Plan

Image by Richard Haughton

Improvisation. Impro. Improv. Whatever you call it, it still makes most people think of ‘Whose Line is it Anyway?’ Thinking fast on your feet. Being funny, even flippant – making a series of throwaway quips. Because how can it be otherwise, if no serious thought has gone into it beforehand and it will never be repeated again? The words, scenes, images come and gone in an instant.

And yet inside this fast, funny, flippant practice I find something profound. A little like, if you go far enough inside the art of motorcycle maintenance, apparently, you find Zen wisdom. Maybe if you go far enough inside anything, in a fractal kind of way, you find the answer to everything. Motorcycles aren’t my bag. For me, impro is the thing – the portal - even though when it comes to the fast and funny variety, I’m not actually very good at it. Still, it continues to fascinate me, partly because I can’t do it. Which is why I joined Improbable sixteen years ago, and why I am still committed to the company, and why my role and focus in recent years has been to help us find a home, a base from which we can deepen, research and share our practice of improvisation – both as a fast-on-your-feet form, and as portal to profundity.

When we began this home-finding project in earnest, back in 2021, we gave it a name- The Gathering - and framed it as – guess what? – an improvisation. It took some courage to do this. You might think the point at which our 29yr old company decides to get a permanent home, is the point at which we finally grow up, get real, acquire a mortgage, settle down, make a proper plan. But, contrary to popular opinion, we do not find this the most efficient way of doing things, so even though the dream was now one of buildings, of bricks and mortar – things that last a good deal longer than throwaway lines – we still wanted it to be a process we could unfold, follow. We did not want to be led by a script, a prescriptive plan. Plans would come into it along the way – improvising is never a process of not planning anything. You make plans all the time – it’s impossible not to do so. Rather, impro involves growing comfortable with letting your plan go, again and again. So, our guiding principles in The Gathering would be the same. We sent out an invitation to the world stating our intention, to set out, consciously, into the unknown, on a quest for home. Usually, home is the known place to which you return after the adventure. For us, finding a home, would be the adventure.

I am so glad we framed it like this.

I am glad for two reasons. First, it made stuff happen fast. In the last three years we have: found a potential site – the beautiful Bore Place in Kent - run two summer schools there, four Open Space events, one winter retreat, a year of an Arts Award scheme, built regional relationships and employed the wonderful Rachel Grunwald as our ‘Strategic Lead on The Gathering.’ As part of all this activity, we have made plans – business plans, architectural plans, funding plans, even pre-planning plans - but the second reason I am glad we framed our quest for home as another impro, is that when the plans fall apart, as they do, as they will, we can stay, more or less, happy about it. Curious, at least, not only horrified.

I want to tell you a story from the last year about things not going to plan, and how – thanks to Improbable – I was able to stay, relatively, happy about it.

It’s a personal story. This is another aspect of our improvisational practice that I value - if you haven’t got a script, you only have yourself, so you – the whole of you – has to show up. You can’t leave the personal at the door, in the name of professionalism. You, the person, is all you have and all the audience want to see. And within the apparently irrelevant – the stuff you would rather ignore or dismiss - the most interesting stories reside.

So, there I was, this time last year, with a big, grand, hopeful plan.

Phelim and I had just moved house, into Kent, to make a home for our family near to where we were working on our ideas for the company’s home. 2023 had been a stressful year, betwixt and between houses, and I was feeling worn out, but we had at last arrived. After a year of uncertainty, after twelve years writing a novel before that, after fifteen years since I gave up my circus work, I was aiming to start training again. I was going to rig my old rope off the beams in the large barn at Bore Place. I might even perform Lifeline again – the aerial act I had made aged twenty-five. And at the end of April, I was turning fifty. I invited fifty people from the many different chapters of my life to date to send me a candle, so I could make an installation of them in the hearth we had just laid in our living room – the old lighting the way for the new. A new life chapter, in a new place. A new decade. Here we go….

Image by Richard Haughton

First thing Monday morning, right after my big birthday weekend of candles, I went for a routine blood test. The nurse said I should get the results towards the end of the week. I went back home, got the children up and dressed, and then took my son to an art class. While there, I received a call from the doctor, asking me to go to A&E right away – she had the results already and there was something wonky enough about them that she wanted me to go at once. Phelim was away, directing an opera in New York, but luckily my mother was staying with us, so I was able to drop my son back home, leave both children with her, and take myself off to A&E, thinking to be back in a couple of hours.

I didn’t come back for seven weeks.

That day I received a diagnosis of Acute Myeloid Leukaemia.

AML, as it is known, is a blood cancer which begins in the bone marrow, where our white blood cells are made. It is a life-threatening condition, but they treat it with the aim of curing it, so I was told by Elvis, the tall young doctor in A&E who broke the news to me.

During those first seven weeks in hospital, and the four rounds of intensive chemotherapy that I underwent between then and November, alongside the incredible care of the NHS nurses and doctors, of my family and friends, it was my creative practice – specifically our Improbable practice- that saw me through.

The language of warfare most often frames our relationship to illness, but my white blood cells - those cells that are described as soldiers, fighting infection - were themselves the site of my leukaemia and I did not want to battle them. I found it infinitely more helpful to think of the leukaemia as an ally, not an enemy - to improvise with my illness, in other words. It’s impro 101, the fundamental principle: accept what comes at you. You get an offer you weren’t expecting, be it from another player, the audience, the environment, and in response you say ‘Yes, and….’. Not ‘No, I have a better idea.’ Not ‘Yes, but how about this instead…’. The practice is a wholehearted ‘Yes, and…’. The ‘and’ has been as important to me as the ‘yes.’ It’s not a passive acceptance. It’s an unfolding scene, in which I am a key player. This is not to say that ‘no’ doesn’t have a place in life, or theatre. It does. But in the moment in which I was told I had blood cancer, I knew there was nothing to be gained from saying ‘no.’ I did not feel supported by wishing it away or seeing it as an awful disease that shouldn’t be happening to me. Whereas when I saw it as an offer – not just any old offer, but what in impro terms might be called a ‘tilt,’ a spectacular, unexpected tipping of the story – I did not feel so afraid, but bizarrely adrenalized, even interested, almost excited.

Of course I sobbed. Of course I was scared. But I knew I had to say ‘yes’ to the tears and the terror too. As I lay in my hospital bed, I thought of Phelim and Lee in impro workshops saying, “Yes, that’s right; yes, believe in the experience you are having.” So, I did.

Another aspect of our Improbable practice, and my circus practice, that I drew on through this year, was the paradox of being utterly convinced, even as you step out into the complete unknown. This is also a part of ‘saying yes.’ You say ‘yes’ as if you knew, when you don’t. As if you were in love and this was a proposal from your beloved. You know this is your destiny, you know you are meant to be together forever, and you have absolutely no idea how it is going to pan out. This is also how I would perform on my circus rope ten metres in the air - knowing I was not going to fall, while also knowing the whole point of the performance rested on the fact that I might. This year, I was certain I was going to make it through, while also knowing, with equal certainty, that my life was on the line. A remounting of Lifeline after all, but not the one I had planned. Something else I could never have imagined.

Because that is yet another thing I love about impro – you can’t do it alone, and what emerges from the conversation between you and your collaborators (and your collaborators are multifarious- another performer, a fly buzzing across the stage, the sound of a siren in the distance….) is always more complex, more sophisticated, more meaningful than anything you could have come up with by yourself. I do not care whether it is true or not that my illness was meaningful– when I believe it was then pattern emerges – incredible patterns, astonishing maps of the unknown. I also know that shit can happen to people, to the world, that feels only awful, only pointless. There are times when the stories, and all the clocks, must stop. But for me, this year, pattern and story have helped me heal.

Since we issued our initial invitation in ’21, asking for help in finding a home, we have received many offers, gifts and clues. We have been saying ‘yes’ and following them. They have led us to Kent, the county in which the amazing novel Riddley Walker is set in a post-apocalyptic future – the book after which Phelim and I named our son. We bought a house that was first inhabited by an eminent bone doctor. We were able to buy it thanks to the success of the show Phelim had just directed: My Neighbour Totoro – the story of a father who must move to a new house in the country, and look after his two children alone, while their mother is in hospital. That film was inspired by Hayao Miyazaki’s experience of his mother having leukaemia. A few months after moving to our new house, I fell ill with leukaemia. Patterns and stories aplenty….

I am now in remission, with biopsies of my bone marrow scheduled every three months for the next two years. And I am choosing to see my illness, not (only) as a calamity that messed up the plan, but as another offer, supporting the process. So, as I ready myself to step back into life, to continue to work on The Gathering, I am asking myself this: What has this experience of blood cancer got to contribute to the quest? What does it bring?

First off, I don’t know. I am still waiting to find out. But here is what I have found so far: I already knew, and had even written and spoken about how death, grief, and loss were a part of the new beginning we were dreaming up. I already knew that eldership was part of the story. But I did not have an embodied experience of what this meant. Now I do. While working on this blog, I have been struggling to name what this is. Today I went for a swim – only my second ever since being in remission. Throughout my treatment I was either too unwell to swim or I had a PICC line in my arm – the tube through which I received my chemo - which made immersion in water impossible. On looking at the pool’s timetable I was amused and delighted to discover that I am now allowed to attend Senior Swim Sessions: ‘a quieter time for those who are 50 years or older to swim and socialise’ – is what it says on the website. Accordingly, I went to the pool at 9.30am today, after the early morning ‘junior’ rush of swimmers had been and gone. I did my lengths. There was just me and one other senior lady in the lane. I was catching my breath in the shallow end when she arrived there and stopped. She stood up in the water and gestured to me, as you might when allowing someone to go through a doorway before you. She said,

“Do you want to go first? You’re a bit faster than me.”

This simple offer made me cry. Luckily, as we were in a pool and my face was already wet, I don’t think it was too noticeable. What touched me was the way the woman’s question was completely free of judgement. There was no implication that I was better than her because I could go a bit faster. It was a purely practical matter, a question of what would enable us both to have the most pleasurable and relaxing swim. None of the quiet competitiveness I associate with swimming in the fast lane of the pool, of anxiously tracking the distance between me and the person in front, the person behind. I told the lady I was going to do breaststroke next, so I would be slower than when I was doing front crawl and she could go ahead. As I set off, behind her, I thought, ‘This is it – this is eldership: it’s the end of striving.’

I have been striving all of my life. Maybe it’s growing up as the daughter of Oxford academics, but deep down, until now, I have carried an idea that there is no point in doing something unless you are going to be the absolute best at it, or at least something approaching Olympic standards, or at the very least trying to get on the team. When I read back, I realise the comment I made above that I am ‘not very good’ at a certain kind of fast and funny impro, came from this place. Yet when I break through into a place of eldership, such a comment seems utterly beside the point and slightly ridiculous. In a way, it is simply a deepening of the impro practice of letting go of the plan. The great plan to get somewhere terrific and achieve something monumental. You know the one. That insidious plan. This doesn’t mean the end of desire, or of dreaming. It means I haven’t got the time or the energy to waste on striving anymore. What a f*cking relief.  

In terms of The Gathering this means, we have done it. We have already moved. Improbable – postcode and all – now live in Kent. There is nowhere else to reach. We are here. We cannot wait for a building to be completed – either at Bore Place or anywhere else - before we can declare ourselves at home, before we can start work. We are gathering, now.

This year, we are probably, improbably, going to have to make some big decisions, to act fast, in relation to the question of buildings. Different, surprising offers and possibilities are emerging. I want to make these decisions with the quality of a senior swimmer, knowing there is nowhere to strive towards. Only a simple, practical question of joy, of pleasure, along the way. Only a process to follow. An impro practice to keep practicing – fast and funny, slow and serious. Arriving home is, after all, the point at which we finally grow up. Get senior. And yet growing up, it turns out, means committing even more deeply to the business of play.

 Just imagine how much we can achieve when we stop striving….