They always say don't go on a stage with a child or an animal because everybody will, they'll wipe you out because you're busy acting and the animal is instinctive and so is the child. But Chaplin could work wonderfully with children. You just have to be like they are, not acting.
Playing. Having it become real. Switching off the voice in the head and letting it happen. And what about masks? Tell me about masks a little bit.
Well I started, I mean I knew about masks first. Before I began to teach improvisation, I knew that you could put a mask on someone and with any luck they become another character. And they work in present time, not the past or the future. And like hypnotized people, they can achieve things that you wouldn't achieve as your normal self. The mask pays complete attention to what it does moment by moment.
Whereas actors tend to reach to the end of the line. Like they really, they don't want to make mistakes, they don't entirely trust themselves. So they're reaching forward and there's no pleasure or relish in the actual words.
But masks are quite different. And they do everything right, they shape the line wonderfully. You've got knowledge in people that you can't get out of them.
If you hypnotize, this has been known for a long, long time. Invite people to your lab, sit them in a room like this, ask them how many objects are in the room and they'll name, I don't know, 10 or 12. Hypnotize them, they'll give you 80. objects. They notice so much more than they are aware of. But that's old.
That research goes back to the 50s. Now it's popular with books like Blink, but it's old stuff. Now they've got brain research.
You can actually see it happening. You don't take the decision, something else does. They're the moments that I love in improvisation, the moments that you really, really genuinely was spontaneous, that you didn't expect to happen at all, and it is as if something else has just happened.
But I think you're in trance then, because the voice in the head stops. In all the trance states I know, the voice in the head stops. In normal life, the voice in the head is criticizing you all the time.
If you can bypass it, you can be creative. You can be Stephen King or somebody and pump out all kinds of stuff. Yeah, I mean, you get flow. But if your voice in the head is sitting there like a stupid teacher or a parent saying it's not good enough and tear it up and do it again. you can't really function as an artist.
So I think artists in this, I think actors in this culture work in a trance state. But because it's an anti-trance state culture, we don't recognize it. But they're cold-stopped when they go on stage.
They become other characters. Sometimes the other characters take them over. On a great night, the improvisers can't remember anything worth remembering. It's gone, it's gone.
On a bad night, they're not in trance. They remember everything. But this is a non-trance.
culture, it embarrasses us. That religious magazine, what's it called, the New Scientist, when they did a thing on hypnosis, I shouldn't call it a religious magazine but it's getting that way. The Archbishop, it can't be writing in it the other week, Daylight Lama.
and they're always trying to get religion in. There's some guy in the editorial board who's trying to sneak it in. Anyway, that magazine, they did an issue on hypnosis, and they had themselves hypnotized to see if it was real.
In the 21st century, when back in 1850 somebody was cutting people's ribs out to remove lungs under hypnosis, I mean, how can... it's ridiculous. The whole culture doesn't want to think about trance.
In trance you can achieve wonderful things. It just means the voice in the head stops.