Robin Beck: Stephen, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me, it's a pleasure and an honor to talk with you. You're a performer and teach internationally as an improvisational violinist at the intersection of music, dance, theater and multimedia arts. You're the author of two books, Freeplay, and your newest book, The Art of Is: Improvising as a Way of Life. You graduated in 1971 from Harvard and in 1975 from the University of California, where you earned a PhD in the history of consciousness for an exploration of William Blake. Your mentor w as the anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson. And you have lectured and taught widely in the U.S. and abroad on creativity and the spiritual underpinnings of art. Is there anything else you wanted to bring up about your background as it relates to your latest book?

Robin Beck: Stephen, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me, it's a pleasure and an honor to talk with you. You're a performer and teach internationally as an improvisational violinist at the intersection of music, dance, theater and multimedia arts. You're the author of two books, Freeplay, and your newest book, The Art of Is. You graduated in 1971 from Harvard and in 1975 from the University of California, where you earned a PhD in the history of consciousness for an exploration of William Blake. Your mentor was the anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson. And you have lectured and taught widely in the U.S. and abroad on creativity and the spiritual underpinnings of art. Is there anything else you wanted to bring up about your background as it relates to your latest book?

Stephen Nachmanovitch: Well, one thing about my background as it relates to my latest book, The Art of Is, is that I was once a baby. And of course, this is something that I share with 100% of all human beings. But the quality of communication that we have or can have as artistic human beings arises from having been a baby. Because we can all make noise, we can all communicate directly without even having any words. We have an immediate sense of meaning in our communications and other people may have an interesting time deciphering that meaning, because as adults we like to decipher things, we like to see one thing as a code for another. But the speech of a baby is direct and isn't a code for anything, it is itself. That's really the root of what I've learned to do as a musician. And it's at the root of what I've learned to do, teaching, improvising in the biggest sense of the word, meaning not just musicians or actors or people who perform on stage, but people in any walk of life who want to be able to communicate and understand each other completely and fully and live creatively is that we have that capacity to express what is within us and what is between us directly without having a dictionary.

I'm interested in artistic creation, but I'm interested far beyond that in the art of being a human being at this very difficult time in human history. And to see ourselves as able to listen to the world, able to listen to and respond to and have a conversation with the world around us to see the world around us as alive.

Robin Beck: So often we feel isolated in what it is to be a human being. And like we're searching for meaning constantly. And you seem to point to listening as being one of those crucial components for understanding why you're here and how to participate in that relationship.

Stephen Nachmanovitch: Yes. I mean, we're very busy destroying the biosphere and the root of our destructive impulse there doesn't have to come out of meanness or a destructive personality, it simply comes out of our tendency as human beings to regard ourselves as a thing bonded by skin and as an entity rather than being in conversation, in listening and responding to everything in the world around us.

So what we learn from artistic creation, whether it's improvisational or more composed, is to be in some kind of dialogue and multi-log with other people who are different from us, with the world around us, with the natural world.

Robin Beck: You seem to point to in your book, almost as improv or this relationship aspect as being kind of a natural state of the universe. One quote I have from you here is “how unoriginal to make everything out of formulaic building blocks, but it seems to have worked for 3 billion years. Improv even of the traditional kind is still creating new never to be repeated patterns playing out through the context and circumstance of the uncountable leaves in view on the mountainside each one is a different type. This is how nature and evolution improvise us”. And so it's interesting that we tend to think of improv as kind of this moving into a state where we create something. But you seem to be pointing to it more as a natural process of the universe that we are entering into a relationship with, becoming aware of.

Stephen Nachmanovitch: Absolutely. I mean, in America, you say the word improv and people immediately think of improvisational theater, which is usually comedy. One of the great gurus of improvisational comedy was a man in Chicago named Del Close who trained many of the actors of the second part of the 20th century. And Del Close said that your job as an improviser is not to come up with clever lines. Your job as an improviser is to make your partner's shitty lines sound good. It's quality, whatever our medium is and wherever we find ourselves to be able to have some kind of chivalry, some sense of listening to others, listening to what is around us and responding to it, rather than to be a standup solo, or “I am producing something”. And even if you are a single person who is standing up on stage producing something, you're in a state of continuous interaction with reality all time and all space focused in on the people we are with at the moment.

Robin Beck: You point towards a universal tendency I’ve read about among improv artists about saying yes to whatever presents itself in a given moment. In terms of being onstage with improvisational theater, you never deny something that's offered, you always say yes. And it seems to be universal in this play that you're encouraging in the book, to say yes to whatever might present itself in a given moment.

Stephen Nachmanovitch: I think that's usually true. However, it's also true that life presents us with a lot of situations where we have to say no. And human beings often get put in positions where they have to resist and they have to set limits and they have to say no. But to find the effective way of saying no often still requires listening and paying attention to the context around us and being able to respond.

Robin Beck: You teach improv as well, which almost feels like a meta-skill, like how to have a good conversation or how to listen. And I love how you relate to teaching itself as a form of improv in saying that education “should always be interactive, interpersonal and exploratory and where it will lead no one can predict. Merely transmitting information is not teaching”.

Stephen Nachmanovitch: I do two kinds of teaching. One is standing up and giving lectures and the second is leading workshops. And obviously in lectures, I stand up and I'm saying words as we are today because we're talking through the computer. But in a live workshop, as I've gotten older, I found that I need to say less and less. And what I've really learned is to just keep my mouth shut as much of the time as possible. And occasionally I've been able to really say absolutely nothing the whole time and let other people act and encourage them.

I tell a story in the book about my teacher, Gregory Bateson the anthropologist, and I was his teaching assistant in graduate school half a century ago. And so one time, we were in this seminar and there I was, you know, a bright young man, and I was showing off my knowledge. I was making a little speech to the students about whatever it was that we were talking about. And then when the students left, Gregory pulled me aside in the hallway and said, “You monkey! I had a nice, juicy silence cooking in there and you had to stick your feet in and muck it up.” I eventually learned from him about allowing people to feel comfortable with being uncomfortable, allowing the silence to soak into the room so that other people eventually speak up or act or perform or do whatever they do, regardless of the setting. It's really fascinating to stand back and watch. And that took me a long time to learn, because if you're verbal and articulate and you're there because you presumably know something our society is set up so the teaching is there for the person who knows something to transmit it. But that actually isn't the way it works. It's a collective enterprise in which we're all participants, and whether you're a teacher, a musician, a performer, a professional of any kind, people are coming to you for something and you think you need to provide that something. And you think if you provide more words then the people are getting their money's worth. And certainly this student who's standing up in front of the class giving a report feels a lot of pressure. However, things get much more profound when the person is able to step back and say less and allow silence to work for everyone in the room.

Robin Beck: You talk about Gregory a lot in your book. There’s a piece that sums up your focus of the book nicely where you state that “context is everything. The important thing isn't to tell the perfect story. It is to tell the story the people in front of you need to hear. And to do that, you must first understand who stands before you. And you say that we must combine old and new, prefabricated and invented, transmission and absorption, blending seemingly opposite functions in the intimacy of mutual presence, and that balancing act is The Art of Is.

Stephen Nachmanovitch: As human beings our default mode for communicating with each other is conversation. At some point somebody becomes a leader or a teacher or something like that, and of course people who learn about leadership realize that it’s not shooting your mouth off and telling people what to do. Leadership involves listening and interacting and knowing who is there and what's going on. So it's all mutual learning. Now with the presence of the media, you and I are having a conversation now and this conversation is being recorded. And if you put that conversation out on a computer network for people to listen to, that's really great. But it does become a one way communication. And television and really all of our media, I mean, all the way back to print and before that tended to be one way communications. And it really requires the element of live interaction to bring us back to the place of mutual learning.

My writing a book it's a hugely interactive activity. And it's a very fluid activity, it certainly isn't putting words down on the paper or on the screen one at a time. But then it does come out in a printed form and it looks like words coming out one at a time. I mean, one of the interesting things I've discovered was with the longevity of my book Free Play, which came out 40 years ago. Just a couple of years ago I was in Japan and interacting with people who had read the book in English or in Japanese, who brought up really fascinating discussions. And I realized that this was like a 35 or 40 year feedback loop between the time that I first had those ideas, even though having ideas is the wrong word for it, but we don't have a good word in our language between first having the ideas and writing them down and eventually publishing them and letting go of it and then people finally reading it. And now we're having a discussion all these years later and it and it comes back on me that this is actually what I do it for: to participate in that really long feedback loop. It's very satisfying because it brings any form of writing that you do or music or whatever the medium is as a form of conversation and mutual interaction. And then it goes through a stage of being media that seems to be a one-way communication, but eventually we find ourselves together talking all these years later. And that's what's really interesting to me.

Robin Beck: So how do you see the work that you do in relationship to the larger question of how we conduct our business as humans, or how we can foster a deeper relationship with the Earth?

Stephen Nachmanovitch: It’s the power of art. It's the power of artistic communication even if that communication doesn't fall into what we traditionally call the arts. It's learning the lesson of relationship and interactivity with the world and learning that no matter how wise we think we are, we can't control the world and we can't communicate one way and be listened to without the feedback loops coming back, without the interaction. The more we learn that, the more humble we get in our connection to the physical and social world and the biological world. And art gives us a window, often a multi-dimensional window. Into those kinds of relationships. Certainly in fiction and in movies we can step into another person's skin, into another person's reality in ways that we normally can't. And we can have conversations from a different point of view. And a lot of the destructive activity that's going on right now it arises from people incapable of seeing anything other than their own point of view. So there's a lot to do and a lot to learn.

Getting out of the rut of being an individual is really important. And that's where a lot of Buddhist practice has been helpful also. Because like the teachings of Gregory Bateson a lot of Buddhist practice, whether it's Zen or Tibetan or from other schools, is all about learning the emptiness of inherent existence, which means that every thing that we know, like I'm talking to you through a computer and the computer is a material object. But the aluminum of the body of the computer came from one place and it was mined by people and they have their stories and the plastic comes from other place and they have their stories all the way back to the forests in the age of the dinosaurs that became the petroleum, that became part of the plastic and the whole cultural development of computers and all of that.

So the computer is full of infinitely many stories. The only thing the computer is not full of is an independent, separate existence all by itself. The computer only exists in those stories and in those interactive activities. So now, for example, you probably hear my landline ringing.

Robin Beck: Sure.

Stephen Nachmanovitch: And if we were talking about another subject, I would just ignore the phone and listen to it, and listen to you. But here we are and we heard the phone ringing and that's part of the ecology of happenings around us. It's part of the ecology of information. And the person who's on the other end of the line, whoever that may be, who's talking to my answering machine now, is part of a story that's connected with me. And so that also is the emptiness of inherent existence that the phone ringing is a signal for connection, even if you choose to let it go and not pick it up at the moment.

Robin Beck: So I found your description of it, of what would normally be considered noise or interruption is very beautiful. And I remember you mentioning in the book you asking Gregory Bateson what is beauty? And I believe his answer was recognizing the pattern which connects. Yeah, and that in and of itself points to that greater context in which we're having these discussions. We can learn from things that are normally considered trivial.

Robin Beck: I was particularly excited to talk with you because I've studied a little bit of Nora and Gregory Bateson's work as it relates to what we could refer to as the paradigm of the individual achiever, and how I believe that you and others are attempting to articulate a new paradigm of interconnectedness and oneness. How do you view improv and the work you do in relationship to bringing about this new kind of interaction with life?

Stephen Nachmanovitch: Let's say all of artistic activity falls somewhere on a continuum or a hybrid identity between improvised and composed. And the improvised always brings us to a place of interaction, to place of listening to whatever it might be, the telephone ring, the noise of the city or of nature outside, the voices of our companions that we're interacting with or collaborating with or arguing with and to improvise is to have a conversation. And at the same time, all artistic activity involves a compositional element where you take the products of that conversation and you may edit them and select from them and put some things aside and concentrate on other things. And whether it's music or another medium. Everything that we do, whether it's a fully notated score by Beethoven or a totally improvised conversation like the one we're having now, lies somewhere on the continuum between having plans and purposes versus being open to the information that's coming in right now.

Robin Beck: Absolutely. In coming to the end of our time together, what do you see as your greater mission with writing this book? What would you want to convey?

Stephen Nachmanovitch: That was my answer.