Diary of a TwoProv Virgin (tomorrow's entry, today)

There's a shortform impro game where you jump back and forth in time from a central point. Different groups probably play it in slightly different ways, but the way I've played it is you start with a scene that encourages a wider story, then at suitable points a director calls out "5 years before" or "30 minutes later" or suchlike time changes, and the action immediately jumps to that point. The time change always being from the beginning scene, i.e: if you've jumped to five years after the 1st scene and you want to go back and see 8 years before that, the director will call out "3 years ago".

I. Suck. At. It... I get massive brain-fuck. If there's one major thing that will remove me from the here-and-now and plant me firmly inside my head, it's mental arithmetic.

The thing is, Chris and I are working on a science fiction show. And people have seen Back To The Future, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Doctor Who, Superman and Primer, so time travel is likely to come up.

Wait... you've seen Primer, right? Well, you should, it's brilliant.

In a rehearsal the other day, Chris and I worked on jumping about in time. Self-directing it. Well, I 'say' we self-directed. What actually happened is we jumped back and forth, mainly led by Chris shouting out our new time position, and I finally dissolved into a mush on the floor exuding the smell of burning brain-matter from my ear canals, not a hope in hell of holding all the non-chronological events in my lobes in a way that I knew where we were or what had happened at any point. Not a hope in hell.

But, man, it made me more excited about the show. Now I know it's going to be horrendously difficult to get this right. Which is perfect. Lately I've had one of those periods you get where you feel like you've plateaued, where you feel like you've reached the limits of your ability and nothing can pull you upwards. I've felt like that for about 6 months. But...

Now I have no choice, I HAVE to improve. On 4th April me and just one other person will be on stage - chances are - performing a hugely complicated time travel storyline. I have to get to a level where I'm not on that stage crapping my own mind out about having half the responsibility of a TwoProv show, a potentially very intricate one ... in just a few months. And that is very exciting. There's nothing like forcing yourself outside of your comfort zone to increase your range.

And there's nothing like improv for providing a platform where that can happen.

Yes and...