HANNAH: In Motion Theater, through spontaneous improvised movement, we access memory and create text around stories from our lives. In an article for Yoga Journal, you wrote, “Through the demand of muscle and bone, a memory with all of its layers intact rises to the surface of awareness and forces itself into recognition. The body knows more than the intellect, and we allow physical impulses to be expressed through movement and then give voice to what we see. We give the body a medium for revealing its wisdom.” Can you speak to this process?

NINA: When I teach Motion Theater, I begin each session with a thorough physical and vocal warm-up to access physicality and vocal expression. Quite often, when you walk in the door, you need to find a way to move your focus from the left lobe of the brain (which has to do with intellect and thought) to the right lobe of the brain (which has to do with feeling and sensation). The physical warm-up shifts the mental focus so that we become sensitive to the sensations and impulses of the body. After the warm-up, I invite people to move freely. There is a deep pleasure in responding to felt impulse with improvised movement.

To enter the narrative phase of the work, I invite my students to find a gesture that arises from the body and to repeat that gesture. It might enlarge or become smaller or transform into a slightly different gesture. And then I invite them to soften the mind and to see what image arises from the movement. It might be, for example, falling rain, or curtains, or a blender, or waves. I invite them to ask themselves, “When did I last experience falling rain or a blender or a wave?” A memory surfaces—they locate themselves in relationship to this image in a specific time and space.

Often, what can stop people is a feeling or an idea that the last time they used a blender isn’t very important. There’s no “significance” to that story. But actually, if we continue to investigate, something quite interesting materializes. Let’s say they are mixing up a smoothie with spirulina and apple-cranberry juice. And then we look a little bit deeper, and the reason that they’re making a smoothie in this blender with spirulina and apple-cranberry juice is because they’ve just been diagnosed with a bladder infection. The bladder infection came from a new lover, and the new lover is somebody they’re having a fight with. The images will lead to something significant if we trust the opening image and see where it leads.

HANNAH: Follow the image, follow the impulse...

NINA: It will lead somewhere. Each aspect of our life is holographic. Every action, every microcosmic gesture, is within the context of a macrocosmic situation. The challenge is to trust that the image arises because of a need in the subconscious to reveal some part of our life’s narrative.

HANNAH: How did you come to improvisation as the medium for your storytelling, your art form, your profession?

NINA: For many years I have been writing plays and performance pieces as well as doing improvised work. I take great pleasure in improvising because it is explosive with authenticity, spontaneity, surprise, and moment-to-moment unfolding. It is completely alive. That said, I also love the craft of writing—of honing a phrase and perfecting a narrative arc. Yet improvising has, by its very nature, a spark to it…a quality of unadulterated truth. You can abide fully in the moment in a way that is very different from acting with a script. I think spontaneity is something we have a great longing for in contemporary culture because we have less and less of it in our lives and our art forms.

HANNAH: How do you mean?

NINA: We have very few experiences of ourselves that are fully spontaneous—most of our entertainment has been edited, reedited, and special-effected.

HANNAH: Perfected.

NINA: Perfected, packaged, and marketed, forced into bite-size bits for audiences. There’s a lot of finessing, which is great; there’s nothing wrong with it except that it’s taking over.

HANNAH: Improvisation as a performance genre is not widely accepted as valid by the public entertainment world. As an improviser myself, in certain contexts I feel I have to justify, explain, even make excuses for the unscriptedness (and sometimes messiness) of the form. Improv is not even considered to be art by the general public—or at least something worth paying money for. So how do we raise consciousness about it? You’ve been improvising for thirty years on stage; have you faced that prejudice toward improvisation?

NINA: Yes, all the time. Improvisation is considered unreliable. Presenters want to know exactly what they will be presenting to their audiences, and if what you are offering is one of a kind, generated only at that moment, they don’t really know what you will be doing and so are frightened of the unknown.

HANNAH: It’s risky business. And yet the improvisational television show Who’s Line Is It Anyway? is thriving in popular culture.

NINA: Right, but that’s a very different format. One of the reasons that the show works is that the improvisers are so skilled. The skill of the actors is very impressive and fun to watch. But also the form is very repetitive, so after a while it becomes predictable.

HANNAH: Describe the technique of Motion Theater.

NINA: In Motion Theater, we begin with stillness and allow a movement to arise from the stillness; we open and soften the mind to receive an image and then initiate a narrative with ourselves while we move, answering the questions, Where am I? What am I doing? We articulate the first image that comes to mind. It is important to ground the work in precise detail (color of room, shape of bed, texture of sheets, time of day, smells) and to allow our movement to flow along with the images of the story as they arise. We then continue this process, allowing one image to lead to the next.

HANNAH: In your teaching, you are very clear that we are working as artists and making art, not engaging in therapy. Yet it is autobiographical material, and many participants and audience members walk away transformed from the experience and, in fact, have experienced a catharsis. Can you address both the artistic and the therapeutic aspects of Motion Theater?

NINA: My philosophy is that if you follow the demands that the art makes, any art form, the experience of making and viewing the art will be transformative. In Motion Theater, we deal with true stories from our lives. Sometimes these stories are about events that carry great import: a birth or death, an accident, a sexual violation, falling in love. By giving both voice and movement to the experience, we are able to understand it in a new way. We are able to express it, to let it out of our mind and body and into the shared space of a witnessing audience. When we do this well, with skill and craft and inventiveness and precision, the experience is remarkably therapeutic. To do it well, we need to learn the craft well, so I do not shy away from critique. Some teachers refrain from critique because they don’t want to squelch artistic self-expression in their students. But I think directorial feedback is crucial and valuable.

HANNAH: As we articulate—in words and movement—what we see/hear/smell/taste in the image that has surfaced in our mind as we move, we will hear you coach us to ground the image in detail, describe your sensory experience: “I am in my bedroom. The walls are white. There is a purple photo of Isadora Duncan on the wall. There is no curtain on the window, and the afternoon sun is casting a shadow on my sweetie’s black Calvin Klein underwear, which lies in the middle of the wood floor.” You steer your students away from making generalizations (“Men always expect someone to clean up after them”) or stating feelings (“I stare at his underwear and feel lonely because I know he isn’t coming back anytime soon”).

NINA: I’m interested in the making of art that an audience can be uplifted by, transformed by. And to do that, the art has to be skillful. One level of the skill is writing, telling a story well. And to tell a story well, it serves us to ground the work in detail— to say what is rather than how we feel about what is. Our feelings will be revealed by the way we describe what we see and what we do. If the tea cup feels heavy in our hand as we lift it to our lips, the audience will know we are feeling sad or somehow “weighted.” And the audience will feel that weightedness along with us. That is the whole point: to bring the audience into the experience of a story rather than simply telling them about our own experience.

HANNAH: So it is necessary to call objectivity into the work.

NINA: When somebody gets out on the floor, my experience is that if they work skillfully, everybody in the room feels it. Making art that works is a different process than unbridled cathartic expression. It really has to do with following the needs that the craft itself imposes. The art will demand from the artist what it needs. Then again, you can sometimes break all the rules and still make great art.

HANNAH: In that case, someone has touched upon a truth through their improvisation?

NINA: Yes—and is transparent to that truth. The trouble with autobiographical work is that if it’s not done skillfully it can slip into a confessional form.

HANNAH: And become indulgent...

NINA: What other people call self-indulgent, I perceive as lack of skill. And very few people have the stamina to develop the skill to the point where the work is refined enough that the narcissism, or the apparent narcissism, falls away and the work transforms into something that inspires empathy and self-awareness in the witness.

I believe that there are certain components that factor into the therapeutic value of the work. One of them is self-expression. Another is the physicality of that self-expression. Another is sharing what are often private moments, or secrets, in front of a group of witnesses and inspiring a sympathetic response. In truth, I think everybody wants to perform. I think it is a human inclination.

HANNAH: Yes, I imagine we all want to be seen and heard on some level.

NINA: Yes, to be seen and to be heard. When the attention of the audience is trained on the performer, the performer has the gift of that collective awareness and can make a quantum leap in her/his own awareness. When someone is performing, in large part what the audience perceives is the awareness of the performer. Where is your awareness? And when somebody is moving with pristine awareness, what we see is conscious movement. So when the audience is focusing their awareness on the performer, the performer can work at a level they can’t work at on their own. We’re talking about the actual chemistry, the physiology of consciousness.

HANNAH: You speak of the effect that this kind of improvisational work has on the brain and one’s health in your book, Big New Free Happy Unusual Life. In his introduction, Jack Kornfield writes: “An ulcer is an undanced dance, an unpainted watercolor, an unwritten poem.” You also mention how neurologists are finding that associative thinking and storytelling supposedly stimulate the growth of dendrites in the brain and increase our longevity. This is impressive.

NINA: Not necessarily longevity, but clearer thinking. Creative activity stimulates more mental clarity. practice creative thinking, we stimulate the growth of brain cells. If we don’t engage in self-expression, then what ails us can be internalized in ways that can create physical and/or psychological damage.

A few years ago, I was teaching at Esalen and three men were in my class who, unbeknownst to me, were Vietnam veterans. One of them was working on the floor and began to recover memories of being on the battlefield. Often the images that arise from movement are linked to unresolved trauma. I kept coaching him to report where he was and what he was doing. He said he had fallen onto the ground, that limbs were flying through the air, that he was seeing this through a shower of blood. He told me afterwards that even though he had been in therapy for twenty or twenty-five years, he had never been able to speak about this experience. He said performing his story in the workshop was one of the most healing experiences he’d ever had.

HANNAH: So there was a discovery made in front of an audience?

NINA: There was the act of remembering and the act of speaking the memory. His friend took the floor and told a similar story. He, too, had been in Vietnam. His performance was just stunning. “Stick with details,” I coached. “Don’t get carried away by the emotions. Ground the emotion in detail.” There is relatively new research in the field of neuropsychology that explains that when a person experiences trauma, the pathways— the neural networks between the lobes of the brain—become severed. The good news is that those pathways can be regrown; neurons can be stimulated to develop new networks that can reconnect what has been severed. What is required to achieve this reconnection is the creation of a coherent narrative. So when our lives become coherent through the telling of our personal narrative, our brain chemistry is affected and we experience healing on both a psychological and a physiological level.

HANNAH: You also often include meditation as part of the practice of Motion Theater. I wonder if, or how much, Buddhist practice and philosophy have influenced the technique, as it seems to have many tenets that overlap with Buddhism.

NINA: I started improvising before I knew anything about Buddhism. So I don’t know if my improv is grounded in Buddhism or if my Buddhism is grounded in my improv. Perhaps, rather than one being grounded in the other, they inform each other.

I teach meditation at the beginning of class. Becoming comfortable in silence is extremely important to one’s skill as an improviser. Often improvisers will try to fill up space with something, regardless of its quality. And so, being able to be still on stage in front of people is a great skill. Once you develop that comfort, you take a quantum leap in terms of your capacity to be present on stage. You no longer panic that the next thing won’t come or you’ll have nothing to say. You enjoy the stillness. The audience will breathe with you rather than worry about you.

And also we do a dedication at the end. We dedicate our efforts to the benefit of all sentient beings. I think it’s very important to dedicate one’s efforts at the end of an improv session—to see the work as a process rather than something more goal oriented. Art requires a lifetime of devotion. I’ve come to the understanding that this practice is revolutionary. There is so little trust in spontaneous self-expression in our culture that the more people become comfortable with the freedom of expression, the better our entire world will be. I keep imagining all political proceedings—between the heads of state, congress—beginning with silent meditation and then a period of singing together, improvised singing together. Can you imagine the shift in the nature of relationships?

HANNAH: An inspiring image. Motion Theater invokes both traumatic and everyday stories as we access all kinds of memories. As moving as these stories can be, you say “tickling the funny bone” is important, too. You’ve written, “One of the most marvelous aspects of improvising is that what has caused us pain can unpredictably reveal its comedic side. Our lives, full of betrayals and disappointments, suddenly appear funny, and we giggle at our hard grip on grief.” I’m curious to hear about how you feel comedy plays out in the work.

NINA: It’s often the stories that are the most tragic in our lives that can hold the most potential for comedy. If we look at these stories in a certain light, they become funny. When we can tap into this humor, it can be very therapeutic. Sitting in a doctor’s office often isn’t necessarily an amusing experience, but performing the story of sitting in the doctor’s office can be highly amusing.

Now that’s not always the case. When we retell or reexamine a traumatic experience, like the massacre in Sudan, there is nothing funny or amusing about it. In that instance, we settle into the tragedy of the experience and report it in cold detail. The tragedy can then resonate with truth, and it can be deeply therapeutic to tell and to hear the truth.

HANNAH: When I practice Motion Theater, I am stimulated and challenged by what seem to be the rules, or “guidelines,” as we call them. Yet it seems that what we’re getting at in the practice is a kind of freedom, or liberation, of the body and psyche. I’m curious about the tension between the very concrete steps essential to building the skills for making compelling art, and the goal of letting go, opening up, following our impulses, telling our stories, in a candid and honest way.

NINA: My experience has been that when people nail it on stage, everybody in the room feels a sense of freedom, as does the person performing. It is a moment of deep spontaneity and precision; this is when freedom is ignited. There’s a combustion, and it’s clear. It has to do with following the guidelines, which are about grounding an experience in sensual detail so that the audience can feel and see and hear and taste what you as the protagonist in your own story are feeling and seeing and hearing and tasting. And you let the emotions be present in your voice and in your attitude and in your perception.

For example, instead of reporting that I was terribly anxious when I walked into the salsa club and was feeling really insecure, I might say that “The music was so loud I regretted not bringing earplugs. Women twenty years younger than I were cavorting about the room in mini-skirts and midriff-revealing tank tops with glitter around their cleavage. Men hovered on the sidelines, their eyes flitting about the room, drinks balanced in their hands. The room was hot, and I was already sweating, even though I hadn’t even put on my dance shoes.”

HANNAH: The personal experience lifts to collective experience.

NINA: Perhaps the most important guideline is to relax. The work is truly about staying open and relaxed and releasing…

HANNAH: …tension.

NINA: That’s what they say enlightenment is—the deepest relaxation. I went to a teaching last night by one of the great Tibetan Buddhist teachers. He was saying that there are two kinds of awakening. One is spontaneous awakening; the other is gradual awakening. And for the gradual awakeners, you need a teacher, because no matter how disciplined you are, you can get off track. And that’s true in my work as well—you don’t necessarily need a teacher, but it is useful to have some kind of outside eye, a director, because it’s easy to lose track. What might feel great isn’t necessarily effective to a witness, and what might feel bad could be quite effective.

HANNAH: Yes.

NINA: In the same way that writers have editors, actors and improvisers have directors. I like working with a director. I think making art is always tricky. Like enlightenment. Our egos can delude us.

HANNAH: Feedback can be delicate but is such a critical tool. How do you continually find your edge and challenge in the work?

NINA: Well, as you know, improvising will continually be a challenge and an edge. It’s always a leap of faith. After a performance, I try to examine what worked and what didn’t and why. That is how I learn. I work with a partner, and we’re still working out a lot of issues in our creative partnership—refining what we can do together. It’s a very strong relationship and still presents the kinds of challenges relationships are prone to: power dynamics, issues around intimacy. How open can we be with each other? How intimate? There are obstacles that constantly present a challenge.

HANNAH: Are you healthier for your practice of Motion Theater?

NINA: Definitely. Absolutely. The opportunity to express the stories of my life has been enormously healing for me. Not simply because I have a way of telling the stories of my personal struggles—my mother’s death from cancer when I was twenty-three, being the daughter of a Holocaust survivor—but also because I have a way to tell the stories of my daily life, stories about watering tomato plants and making tea. So often our lives seem impoverished because we have no way of perceiving their inherent value. But when we can tell one another with our voices and words and movement about our daily experiences, our lives seem rich and abundant. We reclaim the enchanted nature of the mundane.