For 20 years, Piolo Juvera has dedicated himself to the art of theatrical improvisation, which consists of telling, acting and singing stories. Stories and songs that have not been previously written or planned, which are created on the spot based on contributions from the public. In this book he shares how the teachings of “Improv” can be applied to one’s own life, which is the maxim of improvisations.

The skills that must be developed to accomplish these stage feats are the same ones that the author chose as his life philosophy and that he now addresses in the book: listening, acceptance, decision, adaptation, speaking loudly and clearly, being in the here-and-now, play seriously, follow fear, fail in new ways, be the protagonist that your story needs, use error to your advantage.

Improvisation is not an indecipherable entelechy. It can be an art. But it is also a technique. It has a methodology and rules that anyone can learn. The first and most important of those rules: the YES-AND. I say “YES” to your proposal “AND” I add something to make it ours.

Commonly loaded with comedy, theatrical improvisation can also surprise us with stories that move and excite, that inspire and shake. The same thing happens with the book Life is an Improvisation: it is sprinkled with humor, entertainment and lightness, but it delves, layer by layer, into the author’s life, marked by abandonment and neglect, by the absence of his father. and his mother’s suicide attempts. He had to improvise to survive. He now improvises to live.

“At home there was never talk about my mother’s suicide. It was added to the list of prohibited topics. As if it had never happened. But it did happen. And although he did not achieve her goal, she did die. Something in her. Something in me. Something in each of the closest beings dies when someone tries to commit suicide”.

“It is hard. When the person who gave you life places such a lower value on life itself, you are in trouble. You may also begin to believe that living is not as important as it seems to the rest of the world. It’s scary to carry that inheritance. Including genetics. When you come from there, you better assign another value to life, arbitrarily, and establish your own rules. “When your own mother doesn’t care about you, you better care enough about yourself.”

Life is an improvisation. Get up. You’ll Know What to Do While You’re Falling is not an educational guide, nor a cold instructive, but a personal and intimate book, with powerful analogies, funny anecdotes, exciting chronicles and stories full of vulnerability that can resonate with others. It is a book that Piolo Juvera was thinking and planning for a long time, until he finally decided to listen to his own advice and wrote it.