Silly String Theory

Silly String Theory is a play that is improvised anew every night with songs and real life monologues.

The string theory of physics describes the entire world as a consequence of the vibrational modes of tiny strings. These strings exist within the true structure of space, which has eleven dimensions not three. All the world of energy and matter is just the visible part of an invisible underlying world of swarming, interconnected complexity.

Sadly, physicists have neglected to acknowledge their profound debt to the silly string theory of theatrical improvisation -- even while they have ripped off and simplified its main points.

Silly string theory has shown that ideas do not come from people, but exist independently as microscopic vibrating "threads of thought" (DelClose 1994). These threads occupy a hidden eighteen mental dimensions (or, "mentations"), where like atoms they bind and unbind, combining into transient conceptions of unimaginable wit and originality.

The silly string theorist -- the improviser -- merely slides his mind into these other dimensions, and projects on the stage a shadow of these transient but beautiful strutures. We can sense, but not see, the dimensions of connections beyond our reach.
 
                  - Alexis Gallagher DPhil, Oxford University

The women in my family have always been fairly in tune with one another - telephoning each other at the same time, giving each other almost identical presents, that sort of thing.  Sometimes my mum and I really pull it out of the bag though.  Last Friday, we had a really meaty, satisfying Silly String show, and the next day, my mum came up for lunch.  I started to tell her about the show, saying that we had had quite a poignant throughline about a failing boxer and his trainer, whereupon my mum interrupted me, saying how odd that was as, at the time that the show would have been on stage, she had been watching an old programme about Frank Bruno - both of us agreed that this was quite nuts as my mum doesn't even like boxing.  Then I explained that we had lightened that story by surrounding it with lots of fun scenes about a circus - whereupon she interrupted me again to say that that morning, she had been reading an article about circuses.  My mum doesn't really like circuses either, but it seems that even from afar, Silly String Theory was governing her cultural choices...
 - Jinni 27/04/12

A friend recently recommended Touching the Void - an interesting (and true) story about choice and morality.  I finished the book I was reading and was looking for something new.  On my journey to Brighton, someone left this very book on the train.  It had World Book Night details on the back.  Incidentally the name written inside the book (so people can track the journey of their books) was the name of my Reiki Master.
 - Katy 23/04/12

On a weekend in Hong Kong I was riding an escalator past a line of
lavish restaurants, and realised that meeting anyone here would be as likely as befriending a stranger in London. Then I corrected myself.  Trust it, I said, something will happen. Within 10 seconds a guy behind me said: 'You have to go to China, dude, it's crazy.' His aunt lived in a penthouse flat in a tower block above the bay. I was soon scanning the city from her roof. I met hundreds of people that weekend.
 - Dave 21/04/12

I've always sort of felt that the universe is looking out for me. It's those many times where I've not know how I was going to pay my rent, or my phone bill, and exactly ￡350 or ￡50 (yes, my contract is that high!) will, in the form of a job, or tax rebate, or whatever, would simply arrive.  This year, in February, I decided I was going to Chicago. I did my first budget since I was a student and found to my horror that all of my guaranteed income, minus my known/expected expenses, up until the time I'd need to fly equalled precisely, not roughly, precisely ￡0. I had exactly the cost of the trip (￡3500) to find in 5 months.  With nothing more, really, than faith it would happen, it's happening. A few job offers have come in, I've been lucky with my day job, potential pitfalls have been avoided and I'm going. With a week or so to spare.
 - Jason 20/04/12

I went to see Rachel Blackman's show tonight. She's performing a one-woman triptych called 'Attempts at Love'. I've never seen any physical theatre before and I found it utterly engrossing. You could say that I am biased because she is a friend and in this company, but I felt like an objective observer with whom this piece resonated. The character in the piece experiences her own moments of serendipity, chance encounters that cause her to think in a different way. After seeing this piece, I feel like I want to start doing the same. Does this still count as serendipity? Do they have to occur person-to-person, or can it be a character in a play or a book, a piece of music or a work of art that strikes a chord with you and sends you off in a new, truer direction? I think they have to count - someone is speaking to you and you should listen, even though their voice may be spanning centuries.
 - Jinni 19/04/12

One evening in a bar several years ago, I was winding someone up. I was explaining to a (slightly gullible) young lady that in areas of the world without a good broadband connection, they use Semaphore. People's homes are linked to the Internet by a cable, as in most of the world. However, instead of leading to a telephone exchange, that cable leads to a person on a hill with a couple of flags.  My explanation became quite detailed. I explained how there was a small set of control signals. I also went into quite a bit of detail about how the protocol had evolved to cope with the human element, and also the importance of client-side compression. Eventually, my friend realised that I was making all this up, as no-one would seriously invent such a thing.  Skip forward to 1 April 2007, and the Internet Engineering Task Force published "RFC 4824 - The Transmission of IP Datagrams over the Semaphore Flag Signaling System (SFSS)". It was an April Fools joke of course—however the 3000 word specification proves that I'm not the only person to think of such a stupid idea.
 - Phil 18/04/12

My surname is Munns. At the start of secondary school, my best friend was the name after me in the register, his surname was Murphy. My birthday is on the tenth of February, his is the twelfth, and our fathers used to work together in the seventies. Sure, a few small coincidences, you would think. But in the sixth form, it got stranger. We started to hang around a lot with two guys from another class. People called us the four hombres. And their birthdays were both on the same day as each other: the 1st April.  Then when I went to university, and inevitably, friendships began to shift and mix. Everybody finds a new best friend. Inevitably, mine had a familiar birthday: the 1st April.
I now know that if I meet anyone with that birthday, they will somehow be significant in my life. 
 - Jules 17/04/12

At drama school I was invited to a birthday barbecue and I'm one of those barbecue guests that heavily contribute to 'barbecue profit'. I'd left it late and had to buy some stuff on the way. On the bus into town the song, I Wanna Dance With Somebody, starts rolling around in my head. I go into an off licence to buy some beer, the Song I Just Wanna Dance With Somebody comes on the radio and it takes me long enough to choose my lager for the song to finish. I go into the supermarket to buy crisps and meat, same song, I Just Wanna Dance With Somebody is playing. I get to the barbecue, second or third song on the CD that's playing? I Just Wanna Dance With Somebody. Did I dance with somebody? No. But I did want to.
 - Jason 16/04/12

I was coming home on the night bus once, talking about music, and a guy with thick glasses leant over from the other side of the bus and said 'If you're talking about music you have to hear Aphrodite's Child's 666 album from the 70s.' Weird, I thought, I'll definitely remember that. A couple of days later I was home for Christmas, in the pub on Xmas eve, and a record-loving mate came over and without even saying hello said 'I've just got this mental album of old funk. Aphrodites Child, 666. It's totally nuts.' The next day in my cracker i got a download token for one song. I downloaded The Four Horsemen, off the 666 LP. It was nuts.
When I later formed a two-man improv group with Ryan Millar from Canada, he gave me the perfect song to use as walk-in music for our show - a hiphop song about the power of togetherness and saying yes. It was built around a sample - The Four Horsemen from 666.
 - Dave 15/04/12

I was in Chicago in 2008 learning improv at iO.  I bumped into a girl I recognised just outside the theatre.  A couple of us had done a scene that day about Bodger and Badger that no one understood because it's a kids' puppet show that never played in the US.  The girl I met reminded me that we used to pole dance together at a Brighton night club.  She was just in Chicago seeing friends and iO is really not in the centre of the city, so it was odd we happened to bump into each other so far from home.  I asked her what she was up to.  She was the new beautiful assistant to the Bodger and Badger stage show.
 - Katy 14/04/12

I once ambled round Egypt for a month on my own, and was desperate to climb the Great Pyramid, illegally, at night, which requires military planning. On a sailboat I met a little Japanese chap who looked like a chipmunk. He and his friends planned to climb the Pyramid when he got back to Cairo. A week later I bumped into him again in the Egyptian Museum. Tonight was the night. Even weirder, they were staying in my hotel. At 3am I was woken by a Japanese whisper and ushered into a
cab...
 - Dave 13/04/12

It was December during my second year of college, and I was on my way home for the break. This meant going through Kings Cross station in rush hour two days before Christmas. I was heading towards the mainline trains, when one of the lenses in my glasses fell out on to the floor. I started looking for it, at the bottom of an escalator. This definitely wasn't popular with my fellow travellers, and it also felt futile. However, given that I didn't have a spare pair and that opticians are generally closed over Christmas, I continued to cause trouble by crawling around on my hands and knees. Occasionally I told people what I was doing, lest they thought I was mad. Just as I was giving up, a guy came up to me and gave me my lens. He had spotted it at the top of the escalator—it must have been pushed onto a step and been carried upwards. I still find it incredible that a lens can be spotted on the floor of a major railway station, so far from where it fell. And I am still grateful to a stranger whom I'll never meet again.
 - Phil 12/04/12

Sitting on the tube this morning, I began thinking about this blog and how I wasn't certain that anything particularly serendipitous ever happens to me. I wondered if I could crowbar in that I could smell that the little girl next to me uses the same shampoo as I do, but I wasn't convinced.  When I alighted at Borough, I saw that Katy had been in the next carriage and that we were the only two people to get off at that stop. Later in the day, we improvised a song together - a few lines in, we sang 'he wants a new car' at exactly the same time, and then a bit later, we both started a chorus of 'too many changes', at the same time and in the same key. Neither of us were looking at each other at any point during the song.  Start a day wondering if serendipity exists, and it will show you that it does.
P.S. I wrote this post on the tube. Looking up after I'd finished, I found that I was sitting opposite an old school friend, who I hadn't seen in twelve years. She might be coming to the show next week.
 - Jinni 11/04/12

Today I attended a workshop run by Crumbs. We did a bit of a warm up and got right into some scenes. One of the first was in a film studio and a game cropped up involving names the characters had that were similar the equipment around them - Mike talking into a mic for instance. The mike in question, a camera operator, suggested it'd be quite funny if his scene partner's name was Len so that he and an off stage camera operator, Len Peterson, could be "the Lens". It just so happened our tutor for the day went to school with a Len Peterson...who now works as a camera operator...in a film studio.
 - Jason 10/04/12

My friend Jon-Paul is a Julian Clary fan, and in particular a fan of a line from a Carry On Film the great man was in. "I'm as full as an egg". Just a phrase which slips off the tongue nicely, you see. Then earlier this summer, doing a farce at the Bridewell, he was having breakfast with a couple of the cast. Pushing back a fully eaten full English, he pulled out his favourite phrase "I'm as full as an egg". One of the older actors started. "Where did you hear that?" It was a line he had written for JC many years ago . . .
 - Jules 09/04/12

I was meeting up with my friend Laura around the Southbank for a general catch-up and a meeting about her new show.  My husband Tony was off to see our chum Jess who lives in North London.  Laura and I had a nice coffee and a walk before looking for a restaurant to go to in Waterloo.  We wandered for some time, then I suggested a cheapo pizza place I’d been to before.  Shame I didn’t have Tony’s Taste Card, though, because that would have made it half price.  We also talked about Jess and how her and Laura would probably have a lot in common.  We rocked up to the restaurant and there were my husband and Jess about to eat pizza with his Taste Card.  Out of all the restaurants in London…  
 - Katy 08/04/12

When I moved to London my parents brought up some old furniture, including a bedside cabinet. Inside was a lone pad of PostIt notes, which had my best mate from university's family phone number on it. Weird, I thought, I'll give him a ring, as I'd been abroad for years. He was moving to London soon. One day in a pub I looked up, and saw him on a stool three feet to my left. We laughed. A week later we bumped into each other again. On the third occasion we said 'we have to honour this'. We lived together for five years.
 - Dave 07/04/12

When I was in junior school, I remember sitting in a computer lab and being given a chance to use some really advanced machines called Acorn Archimedes. A particularly interesting feature of the Acorn Archimedes was that it came with a mouse. Neither the BBC B at school or my Amstrad CPC at home had one of these things.  Being a typical man (well, boy), I didn't ask anyone how I would go about using a mouse. Nor did I look around and see if anyone else had cracked it. I simply had a go.  In my curiosity, I turned the intriguing object upside down. Now you'll remember that mice used to have a mouseball. Well, the younger me prodded at the ball and the pointer on the screen moved. Ah ha, I thought! That's how you work it!  It was a bit odd. To move the pointer up, you moved the ball downwards. And to move the pointer left, you moved the ball to the right. However, I was determined not to let this faze me. I was an intelligent guy. I could do this. I moved the pointer around the screen, clicking the mouse button as I went. I privately complimented myself on my dexterity and precision.
- Phil 6/04/12

I was on the set of the TARDIS the other day. No big deal. Sometimes I'm on the set of my favourite television programme in the world. No big deal. It happens. Get over it. Anyway, I met a tall Canadian. He was tall and good looking and garrulous. Like you expect them to be. He had an easy going way about him and smelt of maple. We got talking. About halfway through the conversation I was struck by something, an intuition I guess. "Are you an improvisor?" I asked. It turned out that not only was he an improvisor but he worked with one of my favourite Improv troupes, Die Nasty AND we had friends in common. And yet we had met on the set of a time machine in far off Cardiff, strangers in a crowd who struck up a random conversation. Yesterday I got a text 'Going to catch a Improv show near London Bridge tomorrow. Want to come?' - I told him I would. It was my show.
- Chris 05/04/12

Dear Gramps, Today is the 4th April and would have been your 87th birthday.  I realised yesterday that you are the only person of whose birthdays I have distinct memories.  I remember you turning 66 when I was little and then thinking for years that you were 66 as I had not really grasped the concept of ageing.  I remember your 70th, when everyone clubbed together and bought you a flight in a Tiger Moth, your 75th at The Winterbourne Arms and your 80th, when I made you a chocolate cake and Mummy and I managed to fit 80 gold candles on it.  She had to hold my hair back as we presented it to you so that I didn't catch fire.So many numbers.  In 3 days, you will have been dead for 6 months.  So many numbers.Marcus Aurelius said in 46 AD that "everything in eternity is of like forms and comes around in a circle".  I find this quite comforting, that everyone has felt this way before.  But Professor Brian Cox tells us of the arrow of time, constantly moving forward.  I don't know how those two fit together.So many numbers, when all that really matters is days, nights and seasons.  To me, your birthday has always heralded the spring.  Lots of love,
xxxP.S.  You were right, whisky is actually quite nice. 
 - Jinni 04/04/12 

I've lived in a few places in Brighton but my last move was founded more out of desperation than choice. I had to move into the first available house I could afford and where I now live is it. Upon moving in and meeting my housemates, it transpired one was girlfriend to the brother of one of my long term improv students, and another was best friend to one of my best friends from drama school from when they both lived on the Isle of White! 
- Jason 3/4/12

I used to live in Kentish town, near to a very well known actor who I shall not name. A frequenter of the bookshops on the high street, I bought many odd books there. One of them was a novel about an academic discovering  from old papers that she is the last of a long line of vampires. The book contained three things: a photo of a beautiful young woman, who turned out to be the actor’s daughter, a receipt from a bookshop in Venice, and a piece of headed paper with a list of films on it. I guess the ones he crossed out were the ones he turned down.   
- Jules 2/4/12

London is a massive, sprawling place.  You never really bump into people you know like you do in a small town.  But, like there are 8 degrees of Kevin Bacon, there is 1 degree of improvisers.  In Italy at the Match Improvvisazione Teatrale, Jinni and I met two English improvisers in Piza who have mutual improv friends in London, despite the fact that they haven't been in the country for years.  Teaching a course last weekend, one of my students who used to live in London lived in the flat next to the one I live in now.  One degree.  
- Katy 1/4/12