Life Lessons from Improv
By: Dhawal Sharma
Tags: Self Improvement, Fear Of Failure, Psychology, Creativity, Inspiration

We are all playing status games with each other

‘Things said are not as important as the status played.’

The most eye-opening idea in Impro is about how we unknowingly play status games with each other. To understand this, think of the word status as a verb, i.e. something we do, rather than your position in a hierarchy. The assertion is that in every interaction a player occupies a niche, or status, relative to the other players and behaves in accordance with that chosen status. In simplistic terms: one party always dominates an interaction while the other gets dominated; again, the word ‘dominate’ here does not denote outright conflict, but a more subtle power dynamic. For instance, in a boss-employee relationship, it is almost always the boss who is high-status while the employee has no choice but to be low-status. The same employee however, might be high-status when interacting with a member of his or her domestic staff.

Everyone has a preferred status, which they can advertise directly through speech or indirectly through body language. An upright but relaxed posture, making eye contact and not shirking from standing close to others are all telltale signs of someone playing high status. On the other hand, if someone prefers a bent posture, not looking others in the eye and generally afraid to come too close, they are choosing a low status. Now this might surprise some, but some people do prefer to remain low-status because it keeps attention away from them. Such individuals can effectively use their low status to make others feel good about themselves and keep themselves from harm (e.g. the dwarves who were kept in kings’ courts for this very purpose).

How we react emotionally to a situation depends on how it affects our status. We feel good if our status is raised vis-à-vis others, but exactly the opposite when it’s lowered. Consider how you feel when you hear about a friend’s success: you might be genuinely happy but you also feel your status slowly sinking as your friend’s rises. Broadly speaking, we want others to be low-status compared to us, but not so low that we have to feel sympathy for them. A minor setback for an acquaintance might give us pleasure because we are automatically raised in comparison. However, when a serious tragedy befalls someone, we are forced to sympathize without any elevation in our own status. And that does not feel good at all.

So why does an understanding of status matter? In the context of improvisation, actors can become more spontaneous by recreating a status game on stage rather than focusing only on each other’s dialogue. By either slightly elevating or lowering their status compared to their acting partner, they are able to generate life-like scenarios which are always marked by status interactions. When it comes to real life, we can get better at reading social situations by understanding the subtle status interactions happening just beneath the surface. Even without a word being exchanged, we can sense how the power dynamic in a room is playing out, or who the most powerful person is. This knowledge can help us respond appropriately to a situation because we can strategically play low or high depending on whom we are interacting with.

Finally, we must realize that it’s not so much the status we choose to play as what the other person perceives we’re doing. Even the most innocent of intentions on your part can be misconstrued; for instance when you tell someone you’ve already read a book they are currently reading, they might feel you’re just trying to establish your intellectual superiority. Paying attention to such subtleties can pay rich dividends over the course of our lives.