I was thrilled last Wednesday to have lunch with Phillip Spolin, nephew of Viola Spolin, the godmother of modern improvisation. Phillip had some kind of two-pronged plastic thing in the breast pocket of his jacket, and throughout our meal, I’d steal glances at it, wondering what it was. A pair of glasses? A couple of pens? I was so caught up during our lunch in his stories about Viola that I never got to ask him.
After lunch, I left the restaurant a minute behind him, and he was in the parking lot waiting for me, with the thing that was in his pocket in his hand. It was a plastic figurine in a dancer’s pose. (The two ‘prongs’ were its legs.) He explained it to me that it was called a Quili, and that an artist friend of his, John Perry, had invented it.
On Friday, we were going to be doing a GameChangers event, and I’d been looking for some kind of prize to give away to participants. Quilis would be perfect. Our theme was ‘Connect the Dots,’ and that’s exactly what Quilis are designed to do–connect with one another in unique configurations with the super-strong rare earth magnets in their hands, feet and heads. Perfect alignment with our theme.
Spolin put me in touch with Perry, who lives in Agoura on a small ranch at the end of a winding gravel road. He provided us with 20 Quilis, including several that aren’t yet on the market, for Friday’s event. Perry had been designing refrigerator magnets five years ago when he came up with the idea for Quilis, and began making prototypes. He had to design around an old patent on a small wooden cowboy figurine from the 1960s that had magnets in its hands and feet. The patentable difference is that Quilis can stand alone without magnetism. “Quilis don’t balance,” explained Perry. “They stand.”
The current line of Quilis is available at museum and gallery gift shops. The new line will be featured in the gift shop of the Kodak Theater when Cirque du Soleil begins a long-term engagement there this July.
In certain ways, improvisers are like Quilis. They can connect with one another, with their environment and the objects in it. (Rich Talarico calls it ‘Velcro-ing”) They use their spines to help define character. They don’t balance. They stand.
Nothing ever goes away. The essential nature of a thing does not disappear. It changes. Evolves. That’s how nature rolls. It is through change that a thing makes itself timeless. It is through change that it makes itself known. It may take a different shape, or be reflected through a new reality, but whatever it was that made a thing what it was in the first place will still exist in the world. For example, Communism may have fallen in the Soviet Union, but it is alive and thriving in every petty bureaucrat, baked into every Bridge to Nowhere, and encoded in every lie told by a government to its people. Magic Johnson may no longer play basketball, but the exuberance with which he played the game is, today, alive in some gangly kid from a small town in Hunan Province, who’s sharing her own brand of hoops magic with her teammates and fans. We may lose a loved one, but we do not lose their love.
When I saw that Rich Talarico would be conducting an 8-week class entitled 
The extraordinary improviser,
This from the business section of the 
“Getting to yes” is a popular phrase among business managers. (It is the title of 
