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Interview - Cathy Salit, Performance of a Lifetime
Apr 24, 2006
Cathy Salit
President and CEO, Performance of a Lifetime
Performance of a Lifetime brings improv to the workplace through seminars and consulting, helping people listen and communicate better - among other benefits Cathy talks about below.
(Cathy is scheduled to speak at Gel 2006 next week in New York.)
Q - What is improv?
Improv is when you are completely accepting of, and interested in, what's actually going on before your very eyes. If I'm on a stage with fellow performers and someone enters the scene, and in my mind I think, "I'm going to make this person the cop on Main Street," and they enter and say, "Mom, I'm so happy to see you," I have to drop the idea of making him the policeman and accept that this person is now my son. I have to go with that, and that's where the magic begins.
It's a dance, a back-and-forth, where the creative collaboration that unfolds is one in which the participants are working off of, and building off of, and creating and responding to whatever comes their way. New possibilities emerge because you're so open to what's happening and what you have to build with. It's rooted in not being driven by having answers, but being excited by possibility. Being excited by not knowing, and letting the answers emerge from the creative collaboration of the people who are in the room.
Q - When you're running an improv workshop with a large group, what happens if someone wants to opt out?
I do nothing. I don't make anyone do anything they don't want to do. People participate in all different kinds of ways. Some people run on stage, major-league hams; others talk nonstop, and others sit there nodding.
We've done performance and improv work with four- and five-star generals, former directors of the CIA. No matter how shy or macho anyone is, we try to create the space and the environment in which people feel free to shed their characters and walk a different way, talk a different way, slow down and give of themselves, so they can break out of their usual roles. We try to help not by saying "stop that," but by saying "try this - perform this way."
Q - "All the world's a stage."
We take Shakespeare very seriously. We encourage our clients to adopt the language of the theater. These conversations, all these meetings, the contexts that we live and work in, these are scenes in the play that we're co-creators of. We're all in the scene and we're all directors of the scene.
Q - Finally: what happened in junior high?
I didn't like it, so I dropped out. Along with some other students and parents and community activists and innovative educators, we started an alternative school called the Elizabeth Cleaners Street School. We took over an abandoned storefront on the Upper West Side and we started a school. I was 13.
