The Chairs Are Where the People Go Read online

  Some of the tips that apply to charades are the same tips you would apply to any improvisation: Be precise in your gestures. Be wholehearted. Don’t forget to bring emotional content to what you do. These things help a lot.

  When you’re guessing, assume that every detail is important. If someone is drinking a beverage, you might say drink or water. But if they’re drinking a beverage in a dainty manner with their pinkie extended, assume that’s part of the clue—that there is a reason for that. The word that they’re trying to connote cannot be drink, because no one would try to connote the word drink by drinking in this very specific manner. The word might be tea or English.

  The most important thing to remember for everyone involved is that it’s a dialogue. That is, it’s your job to respond to each other. So, as the guesser, throw lots of guesses at the person acting out the clue, because this allows them to change what they are doing, or lets you know if you’re on the right or wrong track. If you just sit and watch, waiting until you know for sure, you’ll never get it right. Similarly, as the person acting out the clue, if you just take the approach that you want to take, while ignoring what is or isn’t getting through to the people you’re acting for, it’s going to take a very long time.

  Playing charades is specifically about the difficulty of communication. Without the difficulty, there is no game. With practice you could get better at communicating through the obstacles that charades presents you, but that’s not really the point. It’s a game, so the point is not the elimination of obstacles—it’s enjoying yourself. To learn to play charades, you have to learn to enjoy yourself while trying to communicate with people who don’t understand you and don’t know what you know.

  6. Don’t Pretend There Is No Leader

  People are very uncomfortable with roles. They like to pretend they’re not in charge when they are in charge. They like to pretend someone else who is in charge is not in charge. They don’t understand that it can be great to be in charge and it can be great to have someone else in charge—that there can be pleasure in these different roles.

  I think a thing that happens a lot in certain kinds of creative groups and certain kinds of activist groups is a pretense that everything is collaborative and nonhierarchical, when in truth someone is the leader. Often that person is the person who started the group.

  There are several reasons people pretend they’re not the leader. One reason is a simple mistake. The mistake is that they think it’s mean to tell people what to do, and they want to be nice. They think that being bossy isn’t nice, or having power over people isn’t nice. But that’s silly! Of course it’s oppressive to be someone’s leader if you give them no choice—if you force them to have you as a leader—but a lot of the time people want someone to be their leader, especially if they’ve joined your group.

  So in exactly the same way that the rules of a game aren’t oppressive but let you play the game and are where the fun of the game lies, leadership can be useful. It’s what lets you do things. And it’s not cruel.

  In some cases, people who feel nervous about leading might be taking their leadership too seriously—thinking it’s so powerful they have to temper it. Or they might just be scared. It’s scary to be in charge, and it’s nice to imagine that decisions are someone else’s responsibility. Also, they may not realize that people who aren’t leaders typically don’t want to make all the decisions. They don’t want to impose their vision. What they specifically appreciate about the leader is that the leader can provide a vision and make decisions. If you started the group, it can be hard to imagine that someone might want to be in your group and not be in charge of it, because it’s so exciting for you to be in charge of it. That creates a situation where leaders are often disappointed with people in their group, because the leader gives over some power, and the people in the group don’t take as much initiative as the leader imagined they would. So the leader is trying to give them something that they think the people in the group desperately and jealously want, but which they actually don’t want at all.

  I think this happens with bands all the time, and in social justice activism. In these realms, it can be hard because there’s often an ideological opposition to the idea of leadership.

  So here’s the sort of thing that I think happens all the time, and I saw it recently in Toronto. This guy started a band. And he pretty much took most of the responsibility and wrote all the songs and stuff. Then he invited a bunch of friends to join the band, who were really in no way there as equal partners, but nobody acknowledged this. In fact, the official policy was that the band was a collaboration between everyone. Which was a lie—a lie that I think was evident to anybody looking at the situation, but a lie that everyone in the situation had a stake in perpetuating.

  What happened eventually is that the consequences of that lie—it’s not even a lie, it’s willful self-deception—began to make themselves known. The band went on tour and some people got to go and some people didn’t, and the people who didn’t get to go became angry. Then the band started to make money and the person who started the band wanted to take more of the money than everyone else, and the others got upset. None of that would have happened if people actually knew what their roles were, if they acknowledged them. They would still have had fights, but the fights would have been a lot easier to resolve if the roles had been honest and clear.

  It’s important to understand that even though someone might be in charge, there’s still room for objection. This person can be a complete dictator and there’s still room for objection. But at least you know who to direct your objection to. So the person who started the band can say, We’re going to do it this way. And if you think it’s a terrible idea and you know he’s in charge, you can express that. Maybe it’ll change his mind, maybe it won’t, but at least you’ll understand what’s happening. Otherwise, decisions get made that you don’t like and you don’t even understand why it is, or you don’t understand why this person—who is an equal collaborator and not the leader—is being so bossy. And that’s no good. It doesn’t work. And it is all born out of a bad politeness.

  * * *

  It’s true in a lot of things that if you don’t say the difficult thing early, it really fucks you up later on. You might think it hurts people to say to them, early on, This is my band and I’m in charge, or My creative input in this band matters more than yours does, but saying it early hurts a lot less than dealing with the consequences of not saying it at all.

  In many situations there is a leader. And that’s great. It’s a real service to have a leader, most of the time. Leaders do things that other people don’t want to do, and which leaders do want to do. They make the decisions. They’re accountable for those decisions. They take the blame when things go wrong. They do a lot more of the work. And, in creative things, they often do things you’re not able to do.

  They write good songs for the band, for example.

  7. The Chairs Are Where the People Go

  There’s a thoughtlessness in how people consider their audience that’s reflected in how they set up chairs. You can see that thoughtlessness immediately.

  An example: There’s a literary reading in a large room, and they have a few tables spaced out far from each other near the stage with chairs arranged around them. Behind that they have a couple of rows of chairs, theater-style, then behind that there’s space for people to stand. Now, this is terrible, and what it reflects is the degree to which the organizers haven’t thought about their audience.

  Leaving space for people to stand in the back at a reading is ridiculous. Who wants to stand through a reading? You’re pretty much intentionally designing things so that a lot of people will find the reading boring, because it’s incredibly hard not to be bored when you’re watching someone read from far away and you’re standing. Those people at the back will talk to each other. So not only will they have a bad time, but their bad time will make it worse for everyone else.

  By putting those t
ables and chairs spaced out in front of the stage, you’ve wasted all this space up front, so you’ve ensured that the vast majority of the people at the show will be far from the performance. Why do you want that? Everything is better when you’re closer to the stage! I’ve put together a lot of shows, and if you talk to people after, you can always draw a pretty direct correlation between how much people liked the show and how close they sat to the stage.

  You have to think about where you put your chairs. For some events, it’s good to have few, if any, chairs. At a cocktail party, you want people to mingle, and if you put down a lot of chairs, people won’t move around at all. For a music show or something that people can talk through, the same thing applies. Standing during music is fun because you can dance or talk or move around.

  For a play, it’s okay to put people fairly close together on raked seating so they can see the stage. It’s okay to have them in the dark because they don’t need to see each other and the performers don’t need to see them.

  For a show where the audience’s interaction with the performers or with each other is important, it has to be different. As always, you want as many people as possible as close to the stage as possible. You can pack people in tighter than you might think, and they won’t mind. If people are drinking, you can scatter a few tables around where they can put their drinks, but you don’t need as many as you might think, because every table takes up space where someone might be sitting. You also want to make sure that there’s some light on the audience, and if you can, it’s great to set things up so the audience can see each other a bit. If you can get them into a quarter-circle around an area that extends from the stage, then the people in the audience can see that they’re not alone watching the show.

  At a conference, if you want to create a discussion group, you can set up chairs in a circle, and you don’t need a table.

  If you’re going to brunch with a big group of friends, it’s better to sit in a circle or something like a circle than to sit at a long table, because then everyone can talk to each other. I hate when you have to sit at a long table, because it means you have to talk to the same five people throughout the whole meal.

  Setting up chairs takes a lot of time, but anyone can do it. If you’re running a project and you want to get people involved, ask them to set up chairs. People like to set up chairs, and it’s easy work to delegate. It’s even easier to get people to put chairs away.

  Everyone should know these things.

  8. How to Teach Charades

  When I taught the charades class, I didn’t let people play a real game of charades until our second or third meeting, on the assumption that it was important to learn the component skills first, and that it would be irresponsible to cast people into the game without training or warm-ups. Instead we did drills and exercises. Here is a selection:

  QUICK SINGLE WORDS IN PAIRS

  Before this exercise, give out a million slips of paper to everyone in the class and have them write down individual words. This is a really good thing to have people do before class, while you wait for the stragglers to show up. Then put all of those clues in a bag. Now put the people in pairs and have them take turns acting out these one-word clues for each other. You can tell them that if they find a word too hard, they can skip it and do another one. Have the group do this for three or four minutes. Then have them switch partners and play some more, then switch partners and play some more.

  If you do this drill at the beginning of a series, it has a lot of good functions. Everybody gets to play with a lot of other people, so you create a lot of one-to-one camaraderie pretty quickly. And playing in pairs, there’s a lot less pressure. Shy people who might otherwise hang back are forced to play.

  I’m not sure if I should say this, but the premise that doing one-word clues is easier is false. It’s actually harder, because if you have a whole title, you can pick the easy words and do those first, and people will eventually guess the other words if the title is familiar.

  Still, I think it’s fair. A drill can, in some ways, be harder than a game, in the same way that you might lift weights to prepare to play a sport.

  ACTING PRACTICE

  Charades is divided into acting skills and guessing skills. Among the acting skills, there’s the ability to come up with ideas for gestures, and then there’s the ability to communicate those ideas with your body, which is partly about comfort. One thing you can do to train people in comfort is to have the whole group, at once, act out a bunch of words. Take that bag of single words—and it’s probably best in this exercise for the class to be the thing, rather than indicate the thing—and say, Everybody be a telephone. This could help people.

  CHARADES INSTRUCTION CIRCLE

  This drill is played with regular charades clues, not one-word clues. All the participants stand in a circle. One participant takes a clue from the bag and acts it out for the person to their right, who guesses. They’re given only thirty seconds to try to complete it. If they fail, the clue gets passed on. Everyone watches.

  What’s nice about the charades circle is that after each charade is completed, we take a bit of time in the group to talk about what worked and what didn’t, and how each person’s strategy went.

  SPEED DRILLS

  Speed is obviously a really important part of charades, so we do speed drills in class. I think that practicing doing charades fast can help get you out of your head, so rather than sort of sitting around trying to think about the best way to go about something, the speed game forces you to go ahead and do it. I think people are more likely to find themselves doing something surprising with their body in a speed game, rather than in a regular game.

  You put people in pairs and give them full clues, and give them two minutes during which one person is exclusively the actor and the other person is exclusively the guesser. Tell them their goal is to get as many successful clues as they can during those two minutes, and allow them up to, say, three passes. After each round, have them report back how many clues they were able to guess. This introduces a feeling of competition. Maybe in the first round there are a couple of people who can do five clues in two minutes. Challenge the group to see if anybody can do seven clues in two minutes.

  9. Miscommunication Is Nice

  I’m very interested in miscommunication. I may have an idea, or a set of ideas, about what an exercise in one of my classes is about, and usually I won’t tell the people in class—not because I’m trying to be cryptic, but because my hope is that the exercise is rich enough and complicated enough that they might get something different from it than what I intended.

  I think that’s what art is: art is communication made in the hope that interesting miscommunications will arise. I tend not to like art when its intention is straightforward, unambiguous communication between the artist and the audience, as in Hollywood movies, for instance, where there’s a message, or in a lot of political art. Some of those messages I think would be better served through other means. If you have a clear point you want to make, I think a nonfiction book or an editorial might be the best way to make it. If your goal is to literally educate people, there might be better mechanisms than art for doing that.

  I’m interested in a mix of communication and miscommunication within a lot of the games, too, like in the gibberish game. When people get practiced at it, communication and miscommunication become richer and more interesting. So rather than hoping the other person will translate your gibberish perfectly, or being surprised that the other person translated it into something other than what you’d intended, there’s a third state, which is to feel that the other person said exactly what you intended, but that you didn’t know it until you heard it.

  10. The Gibberish Game

  I think this game comes from Keith Johnstone, who’s the inventor of improv as I learned it. I like to play it in my theater classes. The game involves actors speaking in gibberish while other people translate their words for them. This game does a bunch of real
ly wonderful things. Mainly, it makes it impossible for anybody to really be in control.

  The general notes I give to the actors who are speaking gibberish is that when you’re speaking gibberish, you should use really clear and specific gestures, and as much as possible really enunciate the nonsense words you’re saying. Some people like to employ a fancy kind of gibberish language, but I don’t care about craft, so I don’t care if people say blah blah blah if that’s what they’re comfortable with. It’s up to them.

  Gibberish makes actors use expression and physicality and tone of voice—basically everything except language—to get things across. There’s one kind of gibberish acting in which the actors onstage are such masters of expression and mime that even though they’re not using language they all understand exactly what’s going on, and the audience understands what’s going on, too. I’m not interested in this. What I’m much more interested in is the excitement in the disjunction between actor and translator.

  Here’s how the game works: There are two actors onstage, and each actor has a translator. An actor says a line of dialogue, and says it with as much specificity and intention as she possibly can. Then as soon as she’s spoken, her offstage translator provides an English translation. The translator must translate instinctively. He has to know what the gibberish means and translate it confidently. Then the second actor speaks and her translator translates, and the scene continues this way.

  When the game goes well, the idea isn’t that the translator uncannily gets exactly what the actor was thinking. Rather, with every single translation, the actor is thrown off-balance. She’ll say words, thinking she’s saying one thing, and then discover that she’s actually said something that in some ways is quite similar but in some ways quite different. This happens throughout the scene, and the effect of doing it is giddy and dizzying.