The extraordinary improviser, Paul Vaillancourt, gave me a list of sayings that have been compiled and passed around the improv theater community over the years. The legendary teachers, Mick Napier and Del Close, get some of the credit, though the exact origins of these are as hazy as the roots of any folk wisdom. Here is the second in a series of sayings from what I call Vallaincourt’s List, with my extrapolations in italics:
A scene is an idea and a comment. Every scene you do should wheel around a central idea or theme. It is every player’s responsibility to explore this idea in a way that enlightens and engages fellow players and audience alike. This exploration of the central idea is what is meant by ‘comment’. Comment is not passive. Improvisers think of ‘comment’ as a verb, not a noun.
Avoid preconceived ideas. Start each improv as a blank canvas waiting to be filled in with detail. Good scenes very quickly get to be ‘about something’. Skilled improvisers can express this ’something’ in single look, or a couple of lines of dialogue and with that they are off and running. There is an important beat at the beginning of every scene that is the ‘blank canvas waiting to be filled’. It may last only as long as it takes two players to make eye contact, but in that instant, a world of possibilities exists. Your call, player. Are you going to lock yourself into a preconceived idea? Or are you going to give yourself options. Are you going to paint by numbers? Or are you going to bring something new into the world?
Accept what your partner says or does as you would a gift, not a challenge. Just say ‘yes and’. Honor the actions and ideas of others. Enough with the asshole unproductive behaviors — like constantly wanting to have the last word, upstaging your partners, steering scenes toward your scripted outcomes so you can prove what a visionary you are, and forcing your questionable aesthetic sense down everyone’s throats. Play nice. You expand the possibilities of the scene simply by showing some gratitude for the contributions of your scene partners.
Don’t talk about your activities, play with them. Show yourself through them. The activity is the focus. Give yourself up to it, and let it guide you toward productive attitudes and behaviors. 
A two-line email notifying your team that something has been handled is much more productive than a two page email that no one is going to read anyway, because it’s just you trying to prove what a genius you are and what a dunce everyone else is. One of the ways that good managers get results is by encouraging their groups to choose action over talk about action, and always being sensitive to the difference between the two.
If all else fails, describe. (The improv actress and director Elaine May used to say, “If all else fails, seduce” — which just goes to show you that there’s more than one way to bake a cat.) What this saying says is that you can get a stalled scene moving again by adding details to it, getting more specific, adding to the environment. The legendary editor of The New Yorker, Harold Ross often used to scrawl in large block letters across unsatisfactory reporting: “Get facts, will fix!” — meaning if the story dug its claws a little deeper into the meat of reality, that story would realize its objective.
Tags: Action, Blank Canvas, Detail, Email, Environment, Folk Wisdom, GameChanger, GameChangers, Gifts, Improvisation for Business, Management, Preconceived ideas, Preconceptions, Producitivity, Sayings, Talk vs. Action, Vaillancourt