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cgbeck's review
3.0
Wasn't too into the theater stories, but I found some truth sprinkled in here and there.
melanie_page's review against another edition
4.0
The Chairs are Where the People Go is a hard book to classify—my favorite kind—but once I was 30-odd pages in, I realized I wasn’t sure how I was approaching the work. I was sort of just going along and expecting to gain a clue. Albeit an easy read, The Chairs doesn’t instruct in the common sense of the word. It’s a self-help book that doesn’t advertise itself as one. It’s funny without the comedic lead-up. It’s like a biography, but doesn’t claim to be that, either. The Chairs is broken into 72 very short chapters that theorize, explain, and ponder Misha Glouberman’s experiences as an instructor, student, facilitator of creativity, and neighbor living in Toronto. I was worried that if I didn’t like the book that it meant I didn’t like Misha. However, I couldn’t resist even the title: I imagined the many times I’ve sat on things that weren’t actual chairs, angry that I had to improvise or stand.
As an artist/facilitator of improvisation and music, Glouberman’s attitude toward art influenced me the most. He takes out the exclusion of high art and adds people back into the mix, claiming, “The idea that the point of art is to be impressed is—to me—incredibly distressing….At a certain level, virtuosity has only one things to say, and that is: Look at how good I am.”
Most of the book is focuses on games and strategy, and Glouberman applies these ideas to life to survive impatience and annoyance: “What I often do when I get frustrated is I think of something as a game. With neighborhood activism, I might think to myself, It’s a video game. There are patterns on my screen—in this case emails—and I’m trying to get certain patterns to come about and certain patterns to not come about.” The games—mostly improv—also reveal the humor of Glouberman. He describes a class he teaches where students play a game where they must improvise accepting “gifts” happily: “The Doctors Book of Home Remedies is a pretty good source for ailments, by the way, partly because there’s roughly one per page, but also because there tends not to be home remedies for really serious sicknesses, so people aren’t constantly giving each other leukemia, which might be less funny. They’re more likely to be giving each other dandruff or stuttering.”
Glouberman is a man who worries, seemingly, about everything, including his relationship to social class. He also admits when the answer isn’t clear: “So while going to Harvard constitutes a sort of invitation to join the American upper class, this invitation is pretty useless if you’re living in Canada. I often think about how I was given this invitation—this tremendously valuable thing—and I just kind of threw it away. I’m not sure how I feel about this.” As a result, the book doesn’t pretend to know everything, pushing pretentious theories that claim to fix your life, but communicates, almost like a friend.
Ultimately, I’m still not sure how to categorize The Chairs are Where the People Go, but I do know that as a catalyst for self-reflection, this book has affected me greatly. Glouberman, with the help of fiction author Shelia Heti, encourages people to be innovative, communicative, and individuals.
As an artist/facilitator of improvisation and music, Glouberman’s attitude toward art influenced me the most. He takes out the exclusion of high art and adds people back into the mix, claiming, “The idea that the point of art is to be impressed is—to me—incredibly distressing….At a certain level, virtuosity has only one things to say, and that is: Look at how good I am.”
Most of the book is focuses on games and strategy, and Glouberman applies these ideas to life to survive impatience and annoyance: “What I often do when I get frustrated is I think of something as a game. With neighborhood activism, I might think to myself, It’s a video game. There are patterns on my screen—in this case emails—and I’m trying to get certain patterns to come about and certain patterns to not come about.” The games—mostly improv—also reveal the humor of Glouberman. He describes a class he teaches where students play a game where they must improvise accepting “gifts” happily: “The Doctors Book of Home Remedies is a pretty good source for ailments, by the way, partly because there’s roughly one per page, but also because there tends not to be home remedies for really serious sicknesses, so people aren’t constantly giving each other leukemia, which might be less funny. They’re more likely to be giving each other dandruff or stuttering.”
Glouberman is a man who worries, seemingly, about everything, including his relationship to social class. He also admits when the answer isn’t clear: “So while going to Harvard constitutes a sort of invitation to join the American upper class, this invitation is pretty useless if you’re living in Canada. I often think about how I was given this invitation—this tremendously valuable thing—and I just kind of threw it away. I’m not sure how I feel about this.” As a result, the book doesn’t pretend to know everything, pushing pretentious theories that claim to fix your life, but communicates, almost like a friend.
Ultimately, I’m still not sure how to categorize The Chairs are Where the People Go, but I do know that as a catalyst for self-reflection, this book has affected me greatly. Glouberman, with the help of fiction author Shelia Heti, encourages people to be innovative, communicative, and individuals.
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