Yes, and....

If you've read this blog before, you know I am a frequent NPR listener. Because I listen in the car, I often hear pieces I might skip if I were reading. Recently, I heard a long piece on teaching improv, which I associate mainly with comedy and Saturday Night Live. (I was right, but not really.) The interview intersected with something else I heard that week, this time an in-person chat with poet and writer Clint Smith. I was lucky enough to be in the tent when Smith received the StowePrize in Hartford. He spoke with Linda Norris as part of the prize giving.

Improv, as you know doubt know, is live theatre where plot and dialogue are made up in the moment. Why does improv matter? How did my brain connect it to Clint Smith? And how do both link back to museums and their current state of peril?

First improv: For what appears as such a hilarious loosey-goosey enterprise, improv possesses a clearly defined architecture. One of its tenants is "Don't deny" often expressed as "Yes, and...." affirming the speaker's statement and connecting it to something else. This sends dialog forward as opposed to shutting it down with a negative.

Now, Smith: One of the questions Norris asked Smith was, while writing his prize-winning How the Word is Passed, what it was like to talk with 21st-century Confederate descendants? One of the places Smith visited was Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia. Although its earliest grave dates to 1702, Smith went because 30,000 Confederate soldiers are buried there, and it has long been a place of pilgrimage for people with family history bound up in the Confederacy. His visit with the Sons of Confederate Veterans took place on a Memorial Day weekend when he was likely the only person of color on the 189-acre site. Norris asked what it was like to speak with people whose belief systems were so different from his own? Smith answered that the man he spoke with "was a microcosm of the cognitive dissonance of the American project." In describing his Blandford conversation, Smith remarked how inconsistent our reckoning with history is, how dependent it is on the randomness of birth, where we grow up, our teachers, and the personal narratives handed down, treasured and burnished by our families. He was respectful of his interviewee, while fundamentally disagreeing with his ideology.

Both in conversation with Norris and in his book, Smith is clear his role was listener. Although he didn't use these words, what he offered was improv's "Yes, and...," adding "there is something to be said for meeting people where they are, and extending grace and generosity......" He said that the best museum guides and teachers he heard while researching How the Word is Passed offered "a balancing act,...... while also not holding back on the truth," extending an "and" that often included a sentence like "This might be difficult to hear, but I'm going to be on this journey with you."

Maybe I am late to the party. Maybe you all got there before me, and have absorbed "Yes, and..." into your daily practice. If not, how could it possibly hurt? Not only with the challenging issues of re-centering the country's history of enslavement, but how sites interpret and present issues of gender, religion, and politics, as well as our inter-staff relations where communication in our divisive age is often challenging. If you want examples of what improv exercises look like, here's a handy Youtube video. Start at about 6:59 and watch through to around minute 10.

So how might this play out in daily life?

When you say Yes, and...you're living squarely in the present.
When you say Yes, and...you're promising to listen.
When you say Yes, and...you're being present, listening and therefore connecting.
When you say Yes, and....you're letting go of the judgement genie for yourself and for others.
When you say Yes, and....you're offering trust before it's earned.
When you say Yes, and....you're letting others shine before yourself. (Adapted from David Charles @ Rollins College.)

Clint Smith quoted Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Ulysses" during his Stowe House chat. That is the poem that famously ends "Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield," but Smith's quote came from the first stanza, "I am a part of all that I have met." How easy it is to forget those 10 words as we move through life, at home and at work, with family, with friends, colleagues and strangers, trying hard to say yes, and... to listen, and then speak our own authentic truth for ourselves or for our museums and heritage sites.

Be well, stay safe, do good work.

Joan Baldwin