Cognitive Dissonance in Chinese Improvisation
The first time I played improv games with Chinese people, they didn’t like it. It was 2009 and I was the creative director of Shanghai’s first improv group. In addition to planning and running rehearsals and shows, researching games and techniques and performing regularly, I started to offer bilingual workshops. I love the Chinese language and so was interested in playing improv games in Chinese. I made no money for any of this, but did it as a labor of love.
At that time, there were two Chinese people in the group who rehearsed and performed improv in English. When I suggested we play a game in Chinese, they tried it and said it didn’t work and they didn’t enjoy it. As the creative director, this frustrated me. But as a professor of sociology, I found this both surprising and interesting.
I stopped the rehearsal and asked what it was that bothered them about performing in Chinese. It seemed to me that if they loved the games in English, their second language, they should enjoy the games even more in Chinese, their first language. But they didn’t.
It seemed that the primary difference wasn’t language comprehension, but rather the socio-linguistic effect of speaking the language. For a Chinese person playing improv games, it seemed that changing the language changed the fundamental experience.
After many discussions with the actors, I discovered that when speaking English, the Chinese actors felt comfortable portraying characters that were wild, crazy, open-minded or “bad” in a realistic way. Because, speaking English, it didn’t affect how they saw themselves within their cultural context. However, when they spoke Chinese, they felt significantly less comfortable with these characters. The issue then was of the cultural impact of language.
In Chinese, they played these characters with a high degree of exaggeration to indicate, to the audience and themselves, that they weren’t real; that they shouldn’t be identified with these character choices; that they were “good” people just pretending to be “bad” characters.
It appeared that the socially-constructed, neo-Confucian belief system of what is “correct behavior” was in opposition to these “bad” behaviors. It created an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance or tension that had to be resolved either by changing their thoughts (it’s okay to be bad) or changing their behavior (I will not act in a realistic way or else people will think I am really like this).
In 1959, Professor Leon Festinger of MIT created an experiment which demonstrated cognitive dissonance. In this experiment, he had a group of students perform a very boring task (turning wooden pegs on a board) for two hours. Then he offered them money to tell the person waiting outside that this task was actually a lot of fun. Some of the students were offered $20 to do this. The other students were offered $1. After they told the waiting participant that the task was fun, the students were interviewed to discuss how they really felt about this boring task.
The students who received $20 all felt that the task was boring. However, the students who were given only $1 said that the task really was interesting and fun (which it was not). Festinger discovered that because $1 was not enough money to justify lying to the waiting participant, this group subconsciously convinced themselves that it actually was an interesting and fun task.
They had to change their thoughts (thinking the task was interesting) to match their behavior (telling someone the task was interesting). The students who received $20 did not need to subconsciously convince themselves it was fun because $20 was enough to justify lying.
Professor Festinger suggested that every person has an innate drive to keep his or her thoughts and behaviors in a harmonious state; to avoid a state of tension or dissonance. If a person’s thoughts and actions don’t match, generally the person will change one to re-establish harmony.
Speaking English, the Chinese actors could pretend to realistically be anyone: a pirate, a mermaid king, an underachieving boy, promiscuous girl, gambling grandmother or drunk uncle. They felt free to have their characters cheat, lie, steal, fight or do whatever in the scene. However, when speaking Chinese, the actors tended to either revert back to more traditional, neo-Confucian roles of “virtuous” or “ethical” behavior or to exaggerate “wild” characters to the point of where the audience knew it was a clownish parody rather than a realistic portrayal.
The act of speaking Chinese caused the actors to feel uncomfortable unless they acted like the socially-acceptable good son, good daughter, good boy, good girl, good wife, good husband, good employee and so on. While playing the games in English may have been linguistically more challenging because it was a second language, it still eased the societal constraints of what constituted “correct” or “acceptable” behavior and allowed for a wider range of theatrical motion.
Having taught improvisation in China for almost ten years, these are common situations. Learning improvisation unquestionably helps people to become more open-minded, creative thinkers and problem-solvers. It allows them to break out of traditional roles and patterns of behavior and allows people to consider what their character wants rather than what society wants their character to want, or what is considered “acceptable” to admit you want.
Thus, the benefit of learning improvisation is not only in the language we speak, but in our relationship to that language, how it influences our behavioral choices and how our desire for cognitive harmony allows us to pursue a high level of realism in our performances.