I forget all my good times on stage!

[Ruby W.]

Every time I'm in a kick-ass show, I can't remember any of it.

Does this happen to you? And why does it happen? If we're having fun and are in the moment, shouldn't we remember things more vividly?

[kbadr]

This happens to everyone in the best shows. You'll often hear improvisers talk about entire shows that blink by.

This is because when we are truly improvising well, we are completely in the moment and purely reacting. We are in the zone, and there is so little conscious thought that it doesn't register in our memories. The shows where I am dwelling on every choice, sitting in the wings wondering when to enter...those shows are etched into my memory.

It's a good thing to be that completely in the zone.

[jillybee72]

I recommend the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

[Rev. Jordan T. Maxwell]

yeah, i have vague recollections of good shows, like half remembered dreams...someone will say "i loved that scene when you..." and sometimes it'll come back to me and i'll think, "ooooooh yeah!" though for some reason HIGHLY sweet moments, like everything is in the zone and clicking with everyone onstage, a corner of my mind just goes "REMEMBER THIS!" and records it to come back to. but those are few and far between...and half of them involve other people.

[hujhax]

Hmm.  It takes me a while, but I can usually piece together what happened in shows I was really happy with.  This is with narrative shows, mind you -- shows without any plot to speak of, or short-form shows, never land in my memory, good or not.  But if the show told a nice story, I can usually remember one little bit of it and then start working my way out from that, recovering the rest.  (This may imply that I'm *never* sufficiently "in the zone".  Ah well.)



--
peter rogers @ home | http://hujhax.livejournal.com

Being able to look back on your youth as it unfolds is as sure a way to strip the pleasure from it as you could hope to find.
      -- Lucy Mangan

[mpbrockman]

Yah. This can be a real problem for me. It's one thing when I'm doing a class or something; but when I'm playing a musical show and I want to reprise something we did earlier to put a button on it - I often end up playing some pale weak-ass imitation of what I did before. It usually just won't come back to me.

I can make a conscious effort to remember the opener (or whatever) for a reprise, but then it's stuck in a tape loop in my head and affects everything else I play during a show because it's eating up brain space.

It's better when a reprise is a happy accident.

[Chuy!]

Poker players will often say that you always remember a hand that was a "bad beat." But when it comes to winning hands, they are forgettable. Maybe it's a safety mechanism in the brain telling you not to make those "bad" mistakes twice...

[KathyRose]

Hmm.  It takes me a while, but I can usually piece together what happened in shows I was really happy with.  This is with narrative shows, mind you -- shows without any plot to speak of, or short-form shows, never land in my memory, good or not.  But if the show told a nice story, I can usually remember one little bit of it and then start working my way out from that, recovering the rest.  (This may imply that I'm *never* sufficiently "in the zone".  Ah well.)

Perhaps the parts you remember (that enabled you to "piece together" the narrative) are what you observed from the wings, because when you were on stage, you were in the moment. That sound "sufficient" to me!

[Brad Hawkins]

And yet everything I've said or done that was embarrassing stands out in sharp relief.

[B. Tribe]

I tend to remember great shows more than any other, especially 2 person shows. The two shows I did with Joshua Phillips and the most recent one I did with Lisa Jackson are nearly word for word in my mind.

As to why we remember mistakes and bad shows is the same reason we remember insults more than compliments: cognitive dissonance. We have a certain way we see our identity, physically, emotionally, mentally. When something comes along that goes against our view of self, our mind obsesses over it, trying to make that moment of opposition make sense.

I am a good improviser.
I had a terrible show.

These two things do exist in the real world, but in our minds we run the bad shows, bad decisions over and over and over, hoping to figure out HOW CAN THIS BE.

Hm. If that's so, then I wonder why I remember the great shows more than the bad. Is the idea that I can have great shows dissonant to my own mind? What does that say about my own self worth? WOW WHAT WOW

[happywaffle]

And yet everything I've said or done that was embarrassing stands out in sharp relief.

Truth.

[ejbrammer]

Happens to me all the time.

I like Kareem's whole comment.

I also recommend The Inner Game of Tennis, if you like reading books about stuff like this.