Course XXXIII - Teaching 9: Improvisation

What is conversation? It is short improvisation constantly changing subject and object, and even opening and deepening them. Any preparation is impossible in it because conversation permanently change its face. So you cannot anticipate replies, or think answers beforehand, or calculate where the conversation might lead. Everything is born here and now, and ideas and word are thought, formulated and announced as soon as possible.
What may this conversation need to become a speech? Extension and security. That is to say: to have ideas to feed it longer, and words that can come to help these ideas. A continuous speech is just perfection and prolongation of a speech that has been broken by a dialogue.
What is to improvise? It is to grasp ideas easily and rapidly, and to translate them into words. What do you do when you are writing down? You remember and combine. So, through the use of the word, you should acquire the habit of making instantaneously these memories and combinations; then you will be an improviser.
Improvisation is just a spontaneous and sudden production of something that you already know, of something that you previously have learnt and meditated. Many times, like in oneiric improvisation, during a speech your soul soars to regions consciously unknown and comes back with acquisitions from a conscious meditation.
Like speeches, conversation has two aims: an ideal aim, that is, thoughts, and a material aim, namely, words. You get and perfect the former by means of constant and varied study; and the latter, by accumulating and selecting quite fit verbal expressions –because of their relevance, sonority and elegance– in order to represent the idea with beauty and close relationships of any possible kinds. Method. Any mechanism is reduced to two concepts: an analytical method to learn, and a synthetic method to carry out.
Analytic method. A speech is just several parts or paragraphs as a whole: every part or paragraph is divided into sentences, every sentence is made of phrases, and every phrase is the accumulation of its constitutive words, which are its cardinal element. So, after the analysis of the whole, the same analysis used as a means and guide must be used for the rest of the procedure. Words, phrases and sentences will form an scale of examination and exercises.
An idea is a word that has been thought, and a word is an idea that has been expressed. So, they are voices as a representative sign of idea and thoughts.
You should get a significant number of selected words and try to keep them carefully in archives of your memory. But to know these words is not sufficient; you should consider and grasp them thoroughly in order to see accurately what thought has to be served.
Use of synonyms. You can increase the number of your words (wealth of an improviser) by considering synonyms. Synonyms replace many times a word that the orator has lost in a fateful moment.
Classification of words. An improviser also should classify words, by separating those that can express great and bold thoughts from those that announce soft and sweets ideas, and those that manifest joy from those that describe sorrow.
Proper and figured meaning of words. You should know both meanings and try continuous exercises. Morning is a part of the day; now move this voice to ages of man, and you will call morning of life to infancy, where everything smiles. When you say, “An honest man get always come consolation in adversity”, you are expressing a thought in the simplest way. But if you say, “To a righteous man, light appears in the dark”, you are expressing the same thought in a figured style: you introduce certain circumstance (“light of consolation”) by using the dark to present the idea of adversity. In relation to these figures of words, which have been called “tropes” and consist in using words to mean something different from an original and early sense, we are told that the figure must disappear by changing certain words. “To a righteous man, light appears in the dark”: there the trope consists in not taking literally for granted “light and darkness” but replaced by “consolation” and “adversity”, on account of some seeming similarity or analogy with these conditions of life. An improviser should exercise himself on this hidden relationship.
Also you should practice with metaphors and comparisons. Metaphor: one is comparing when we say that a minister holds up a State, like a column holding up the total weight of a building. But you are using a metaphor when you say that the same minister is “column of the State”.
A good exercise: take a book, read a paragraph, and later try to translate as much as possible the meaning of words and, by forming metaphors, do the same with the rest of tropes and comparisons which may be useful to embellish it.
Formation of sentences. The object of this part of the course is to get the student used to any oratorical expressions or movements; therefore, he should consider their thought figures as a whole. As with a music instrument, the scale will recall all tones.
First you should formulate a “period” based on whatever reasoning in exposition form and later in interrogation form, which, as we said, increases strength and energy in locution. Then you should lead the sentence back to its early form, and repeat these transformations until getting used your thought to formulate rapidly and suddenly any of these two ways of enunciation. You should practice and repeat the same exercises with all rhetorical above-explained forms.
Synthetic method. When an improviser uses the tribune, he should encompass with only one glance the entire speech that he is about to say, not in detail, because it is impossible, but schematically, in a rigorous order.
In order to acquire this “glance”, first of all you should form the logical speech, and then, you cannot formulate more easily the true oratorical speech that through the assistance of those means that you have obtained through rehearsals.
This logical speech must consist in writing down, on a piece of paper, cardinal, proposals that you wish to enunciate and link, and remaining totally aware of them.