How “Yes, And…” Has “Improv”-ed My Life

Make fun of amateur improv performances as you will, but one of the most important ideas I’ve learned came from improv training: “Yes, and…”

I competed in the Canadian Improv Games as a high-school student, and that’s when I learned a lot of standard improv concepts and exercises. “Yes, and…” is the most basic of the former: when a scene partner makes you an “offer,” do your best to take it and build on it. The offer might be verbal, such as an opening for a conversation or a statement describing the plot or setting or characters of the scene you’re creating. It might be physical, such as starting to dance with you or going rigid and bending arms to become one half of a set of double doors. It might even be harder to pin down, like establishing an emotional tone through body language and other communication choices.

No matter what kind of offer you’re given, “Yes, and…” tells you to do four things:

1) Start ready to perceive the offer. It’s not good enough to wait until the other person has expressed themselves so clearly you can’t help but notice it. Instead, you have to be looking for offers — expecting them — because if you’re not, you’re not really collaborating. You’re forcing your partner(s) to put extra energy into bringing offers to your attention when you should be bringing your attention to start with.

2) Acknowledge the offer. Recognize the offer as an offer. Understand that your scene partner is making a gift of their idea(s), and that the ball is now in your court, not theirs. You, not they, have to figure out what to do next with this idea.

3) Accept the offer. This step can be tricky, so I want to be explicit that “accepting” an offer doesn’t mean always going with whatever your scene partner wants. Your scene partner’s offer might be hurtful to you or others, and you don’t have to agree with something that causes harm. I’ve seen improv scenes where a performer rightly rejected a partner’s suggestion, because their partner was being a malicious douche trying to humiliate them; because their partner offered a racist idea and the performer was like “Nope!”; or because their partner unwittingly trespassed on territory too emotionally intense for them to handle in a light-hearted improv scene.

Accepting the offer means keeping the scene physically and psychologically safe for everyone involved, including the audience, but it also means opening yourself to find the difference between your safety and your comfort. It means considering wholeheartedly every part of the idea you’ve been given and embracing whatever you can from it. In the examples above, there was nothing that could be embraced. But more often, offers have plenty that can be shared and used.

Accepting the offer means swallowing your ego, your “better” ideas, and working with the other person instead of against them or beside them. It means, on a fundamental level, respecting their work and perspective as equally valid and correct. For some folks, this is easy; for others (*cough*me), it can be more challenging.

4) Build on the offer. Accepting the offer isn’t the end of “Yes, and…” Forcing your scene partner to create the entire scene while you just go with the flow isn’t collaborating; it’s abdicating responsibility. To build on the offer, you have to do more than just say “yes,” because, as above, you’re respecting their work and perspective as equally valid and correct. That means your work and perspective are important too — otherwise what would be the point of performing together instead of individually? So after you accept the offer (“Yes”), you have to add to it (“and”) and keep the creation going.

“Yes, and…” is a fruitful model not just for improv but for anything that requires collaboration — which essentially means anything that requires communication. Here are just a few places I’ve found it helpful:

1. Interacting with students as an instructor.

I once got a comment on my student feedback that praised how I “found” something good in every student’s response or question and how it made the writer feel more comfortable contributing in my class. I was gratified, because I try my best to use “yes, and…” principles to respond to answers, right or wrong. “Yes, and…” helps me to look for the ideas the student is trying to convey and connect them to the ideas I’m trying to teach, even if they’re pretty far away from one another at the start. “Yes, and…” taught me to automatically look for what I can accept instead of focussing on what I can’t — in this case, to look for what the student and I agree on, and to acknowledge it before moving on to explaining the new ideas I want the student to understand.

2. Writing

Of course “Yes, and…” can be helpful when you’re collaborating on a writing project or getting a critique/feedback from colleagues, but it’s also helpful even when I’m working on my own. I say “no” to a lot of my own ideas without thoroughly considering them, often because I’m nervous about implementing them or even daunted by the amount of thought and work it will take.

As I grow as a writer, I’ve become better at reacting with “Yes, and…” to myself. Instead of thinking “That won’t work because I can’t get rid of THIS scene” or “But I have no idea where to take THAT plot!”, I look for ways my new idea could work. Do I really need “THIS scene”? Just for the sake of argument, what would happen if I got rid of it? Maybe the new idea won’t work after all, but unless I commit to accepting and exploring my own offers, I’ll never know.

3. Conversation

I’m convinced that one of the reasons I was drawn to Drama class as a kid is how it gave me terms and strategies I could apply to everyday social skills that I didn’t feel particularly confident about. “Yes, and…” is, of course, a good starting point for practicing active listening and other key conversation skills that not everyone understands intuitively. I sure didn’t!