Luke Beahan presents the second part of his interesting insight, as he learns about making stuff up in the great improv city of Chicago
Hello and welcome to the second part of my exploration of what people mean when they say 'Improv'. Improvising is really a set of different skills that we use to create sketches, plays or abstract games on stage, and for me it took a while for this to sink in. I just thought of it all as Improv. The second part is:
Partnership
This is something I only really started to get a couple of months ago, and I am still practicing it now. I think I will forever be practicing it, because its all about supporting my partners, and they will always be changing throughout my improv career. I would say this is the most valuable improv skill, and the most difficult to master, because you don't know how well you are doing unless you ask your fellow improvisers.
Supporting your partners means a lot of things, but at the basic level it means coming into every scene and respecting your partners' ideas and reacting to them or heightening them. It means suspending all judgement on what's going on and joining in, and that goes against a lot of habits that we all have.
At a higher level it can also mean supporting the story as a minor character rather than adding to it. I saw a lot of improv in Chicago and a lot of Harolds spiralled out into overly complicated narratives because people kept introducing new characters and ideas instead of picking what they started with and supporting that.
I didn't even realise how guilty I was of such habits until I took a Crunchy Frog workshop earlier this year. My job was to come in at the end of a scene and reincorporate, and it wasn't until Dylan Emery sidecoached me to use only what had come up before that I realised how much new stuff I was adding. When I just reinforced what had already been said I got a laugh and the scene ended on a coherent note. I had been standing offstage judging the scene instead of waiting to support it. You can't invent or support if you are judging.
Think about that example pragmatically, if the scene really was that 'bad' then all I was doing by adding more stuf was prolonging it. By coming in and supporting it the scene ended straight away. So even if you believe that you should be standing there measuring ideas, the only way to avoid doing 'bad' work is to stop thinking that there is such a thing as 'bad' work.
Here is another revelation I got whilst I was in Chicago. I used to get frustrated in scenes with newer improvisers who would ask a lot of questions or make similar scenes where they don't add much information into the scene. I used to think of it as them 'not giving me anything'. But they are always giving you something. Craig Uhlir was my teacher in the last week and he said something offhand that clicked for me, always be assuming. So if they are just asking you questions about how you are going to do an operation, just assume they are after your job, or they are a health inspector, and endow them. You have reacted to their input and given them something in return, parternship yay! If they are really fresh then there is a chance they will deny that endowment and you are stuck, but that's the learning process.
So now I try not to think of people as 'not giving me anything', instead I feel more frustrated because they are not playing with me. That is a judgement-free observation that allows me to step up my interaction with them. How do you get an improviser to play with you? Play with them by respecting their ideas and react to them. There is no such thing as a bad improviser, only a scared improviser.
This contains a lot of humps to overcome. You have the idea from your own Process that everything you say is cool, but now you have to modify that to fit in with other people. Also the 'Do unto others' paradox, you have to be completely supportive, but what if they aren't supporting you? Can you even make that kind of judgement in the middle of a scene?
Partnership is what I would call the real core of being an improviser. If I can't get up and make anyone look good then I have a long way to go. That might sound like a ridiculous goal, but people can do it. If you really want to create something unique then you need to learn how to create with other people, so the creation is more than the sum of its parts. Otherwise all you have is two or more people being funny or interesting on stage.
Next up - Performance, what it's all about.
Next up - Performance, what it's all about.
No comments:
Post a Comment