Welcome to GAP

I’ve been thinking fondly about a time when people - myself included - used to write deeply about improv. Someone would have an idea, or notice something, or wrestle with a question, and they’d find a way to share it. Essays. Blog posts. Long Facebook notes. Half-finished theories put out into the world to see what stuck.

This still happens, I’m sure. But I haven’t seen much of it lately from the community I’m part of - the Melbourne improv community - and I realised I missed it.

Then I remembered that in 2021 I tried to start something like this already: an Instagram account called Geniuses, Artists & Poets. It was loosely (and shamelessly) inspired by the structure of James Clear’s newsletter. It was also… pretty wanky. I think I managed about four posts before quietly abandoning it, as is my way.

But the impulse behind it never really went away.

Yesterday, it came back in a simpler form: what if there was just a place where people could write? Where improvisers could submit their thoughts, feelings, questions, and half-formed theories about this silly little game of make-believe we all play and where other people could read them, sit with them, argue with them, get interested in them.

I love talking about improv. I love thinking about improv. I love doing improv.
But I rarely get the chance to really discuss improv - to engage seriously with other people’s ideas about it.

I’ve been teaching and coaching improv for around six years now, and over that time the dynamic has become increasingly didactic. I get to be in rooms full of intelligent, curious, switched-on students whose minds I know are churning with ideas about what they’re learning - but I only ever hear slivers of them. I spend a lot of time telling people things, and not nearly enough time listening to what they think.

And if improv teaches us anything, it’s this: one person’s obvious is another person’s genius.

So GAP exists as a small corrective to that. A commons. A place to share the obvious discoveries you’ve made, the questions you keep circling, the things you’re not quite sure about yet. Some pieces here will be polished. Some will be provisional. That’s part of the point.

If we treat our colleagues like geniuses, artists, and poets, maybe they’ll surprise us.

Welcome.