PPP 1 - Improv is Meaningless

Luke Beahan is in Chicago right now, learning the ways of Improv in one of the best Improv cities in the world. Lucky so-and-so.

There I said it, improv is just pretending, you can do whatever you want.

Often when I hear or read people using the term impro or improv I have no idea (and thus I imply they probably have no idea) what they mean when they say impro. Something I was thinking about before I came to Chicago has now crystallised in my mind, and I will now explain how talking about impro as this unified thing confused me and held back my learning.

When people talk about improvising they are actually talking about 3 different things, which I have named as Process, Partnership and Performance. Just to be clear these are headings I use to organise things in my mind, if I treated them as absolute definitions then I would have a completely different problem blocking my learning.

Process

Process is what goes on inside you and brings up the ideas you use in improv. Complete beginners and dabblers in improv have the same problem when it comes to process, they are afraid of getting it wrong, so they filter everything that comes out of them. Improvisers that never seem stumped for an idea are the ones that have connected with their process. They don't worry about being right or funny, they just say what comes into their heads. This is really hard but really important to learn, and we often have different blocks when it comes to process. I began as a very verbal improviser, so I go to physical workshops to learn how to tap into being more physical, and these workshops contain people who can roll around on the floor and act like a duck at the drop of a hat but who are clearly afraid of everything that comes out of their own mouth.*

Process is so much larger than most beginners tap into. We can work from words, we can work from emotion, we can work from action, we can work from object-work, and in longform we can work from theme. It is impossible to be on stage and get stuck because for example you can just bend down and pick up an imaginary object and relate it to your scene. Most improv I have seen so far is verbal. About 80% of scenes start with two people walking on stage and talking to each other. A game like Freeze Tag uses positions to start ideas. Imagine combining the both and suddenly your options for stumbling on fun ideas is multiplied. Throw in all the other things and you have a literal infinity of resources on stage. There is no such thing as a bad improviser, only a scared improviser. Everyone is interesting and filled with imagination.

Right now you are either reading this and thinking "Yes I agree, I remember this scene or this teacher..." or you are thinking "I don't agree, what about that one guy in that scene..."; whether you agree or disagree your mind has thrown up a whole load of random connections, specific to you. Learn how to turn that connection into a character or line of dialogue (or whatever you want) and congratulations, you are now an improviser, stop paying for classes you imaginative fool and get on stage.

If you have ever looked at a first-timer in a class and thought "That person is boring and will always be boring," then congratulations, you have just placed an invisible ceiling on your own mastery of Process. If you don't believe that all humans are imaginative and are held back by social chains then you are not training yourself to recognise those chains and if you can't see them then you can't take them off yourself.

That's all I got to say about Process. It's a personal thing, everyone has different hang-ups and learning experiences. I think we only learn by challenging ourselves and doing new things, so that we gain the confidence to use those things more.

Remember: If you look at an improviser and say "She is a good improviser because she has loads of ideas," then what you are saying is that she has confidence in her own ideas and is in touch with her own imaginative process.

I will write two more posts detailing what I think Partnership and Performance means, and then maybe a summarising post explaining why thinking like this is going to help me move forward in my learning. I think I will call it Collisions because you get a lot of contradictory advice and teaching in improv and making sense of it has been my biggest challenge. Now I can decide what part of improv a teacher or game is working towards. I am also going to talk about an elephant, prepare yourselves.

*Here is a tip for this kind of thing. It doesn't matter. Every hang up comes down to the same thing, you don't want to say or do something 'wrong', but there is no such thing. Is the idea that I am afraid of moving in a certain strange way any different from not wanting to say something strange? They are the same fear with a different label, we need to be more confident in our own inherent interestingness as human beings. Simple and therefore very difficult to do.