What I Learned in the London 50 Hour Improvathon

... As Dizniz Al'Adin in the
2013 Improvathon 

By Jonathan Monkhouse

I am afraid of heights. I get vertigo when my body is not surrounded by very specific guidelines that, when boiled down, are based on two factors: 1) My own physical ability, and 2) My trust in the objects being used to support me.

I'm unfit. Chubby even. In places. If I fall, I'm not strong enough to grab something and pull myself back up. I couldn't hang from the branch of a tree safe in the knowledge that if things went wrong I could swing myself to safety like a howler monkey. Abseiling. Why the hell do people do that?

Found this in a lamp

I'm alright with some things, though. Actually I'm fairly okay if I'm up high on a genie-lift (pictured), because I know the tests that these things go through to make them safe. But a plank of wood hanging at a precarious angle on a couple of scaffold bars high over the stage at Hoxton Hall, where you have to go if you want to hang any back-lights. Doing that is not hilarious.

This fear is potentially crippling in multiple ways. Yes, the physical injury I would sustain when the ladder collapses beneath me and I fall 30' onto my face.. but more present is the fact that I earn a fair proportion of my living from working up high. As a live events technician I'm often up a ladder focussing blisteringly hot lights or hanging bulky projectors or heavy speaker stacks, or a 60ft banner from the front of an old crumbling theatre while wind and rain try to knock me to the pavement. Often under time pressure, often in venues that were never designed for ladders or rigging or people who need a cool ambient temperature. But it's part of my job. It's how I get to buy useful things like croissants.

So I have to do it. I have to do it. The croissants compel me.

And I'm compeled to do improv. I love it at least as much as a French breakfast pastry, and it is the most exciting, most liberating, most extreme sport I can think of. It is more petrifying than abseiling, and more rewarding than three wishes from a genie. So fuck it, I do it.

Cairo, 1926. Improvised. Epic.

While I was growing up my Dad often used the phrase, "It's not the fall that'll kill you, it's the hard bit at the bottom." .. one of my earliest discoveries of humour in the Monkhouse gene-pool. I believe there are others. And others. As advice, though, it didn't really help me with my fear.

The London Improvathon was terrifying. It has a fairly epic reputation amongst audience and performers alike. People fly in from round the world to be a part of it. It is performed in a 150 year old, lofty venue with a rich theatrical history. The stage towers over the audience giving any performer an instant status way higher than any single human deserves.

This was my first performance in the London 50. I've performed in other Improvathons in London, Liverpool and Bristol, and they have been totally fun and enjoyable. But this was my first London 50. And I was entering in the 30th hour after watching from the sound-desk for the first portion of the show, watching the very talented folk around me create the magical world that I was to jump into later on.

Entering my first scene felt like falling. From a great great height. I haven't felt that in an improv show for years.

Intimidated much? Yeah. Nervous? Feeling lost when I'm in a scene? Out of control? Yeah. Paranoid from being awake for the last 50+ hours? Not. Helping.

Lighting-tech Damian Robertson with director Adam
Meggido: sitting in the dark, in front of a computer
screen, in a warm room, concentrating, for 50 hours.
The hardest two jobs in the room.  

Learny thing number 1: Being awake that long is mental. Mental. But that's a given with a 50 hour show. I don't really need to talk about that, it's too obvious a part of the experience. Yes, it's painful, but I knew exactly how painful it would be. I've done it before when I operated lighting for the entire London 50 last year - which is, by the way, a nightmare and all credit to Damian who lit the whole show this time. The sleep deprivation is way harder on the desk than it is on the cast. Oh my god. At least the cast get to move around occasionally. And have adrenalin surges.

The biggest thing I learned from the Improvathon is about how much you take on stage with you.

Learny thing number 2: While it's an improviser's aim to be creating on the spot, on the stage, right there... unless you know how to play the Die-Nasty Improvathon format this is really hard. So I tell you now, with hope that if you ever get to do one, you are better prepared than I was. My biggest discovery leads to this:

DO NOT THINK ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER WHEN YOU ARE OFF STAGE.

Don't do it. You'll want to, but don't. It's a piece of advice I have heard from much more experienced improvathon players, but it never quite took hold until I experienced it first-hand. Sadly I learned its importance too late for this 50. If I get to do it again, at least I'll know.

Lately in my Improv life I have been used to freeform improvising. Little or no "format". Where the whole thing happens with you on stage, or just off-stage looking to come on and support at any given moment. It is your own personal instinct that takes you onto the stage, it is your own feeling for the story that drives it, and there is no time to excogitate the precise direction of the show because you are right there in its midst the whole way through.

Support group scenes have a certain double-resonance with
exhausted performers. 

With the way the Improvathon format works, you spend a huge amount of time off stage. It might be 45-60 minutes between your scenes. Stop, start, stop, start. And it is the director's decision when you enter, who you're entering with, and (often) what task you're going to complete while you're there. Its almost short-form in that way. That is, a predetermined set of actions that you are to 'play' during the next few minutes.

Yes, you can be off stage enjoying the scenes the other improvisers are doing, and sometimes running on to help in crowd scenes or to be scenery. This is good. Great. That is a very fun thing. However, my biggest problem was that I was spending these long stretches of time also thinking about my character: How my story was and should be progressing. How good/bad my last scene was. The fact that I haven't found my rhythm with this show yet. I'm exhausted. I have to prove that I deserve to be here. Are these thoughts led by sleep deprivation, or are they justified? I know I'm a better improviser than that last scene I did. Why can't I get comfortable on this crazy stage? Where do I want my character to go next?

That's it. That last one. That's the most problematic of all. DO NOT THINK ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER WHEN YOU ARE OFF STAGE. All this does is put obstacles in the way for your next scene. It led to me walking on stage for each of my scenes with a list of objectives that I wanted to achieve, which did nothing but get in the way of the scene that I was actually performing. My own thoughts had infected everything I was doing and despite the awesome offers being made for me by other improvisers, my brain had already decided the course my character should take and it was hard to deviate from that.

So.. DO NOT THINK ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER WHEN YOU ARE OFF STAGE.
This, of course, is so important in any improv performance. It's just harder to avoid when you're given an hour to think in between your scenes, and you've been awake since 6am two days ago.

Salvador Dali (Mark Meer) presents his finest work.
Historically accurate. 

DO NOT THINK ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER WHEN YOU ARE OFF STAGE.
When you inhabit the same character for 20+ hours you really begin to care about them rather a lot, and you want them to achieve something cool. But all you are doing is planning. You don't want to be doing this. You know it's wrong, that's why you perform improv.

DO NOT THINK ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER WHEN YOU ARE OFF STAGE.
Your character only exists in the on-stage moments. Anything else, is nothing. Forget it. A predetermined plot is limiting, not freeing. One of the most enjoyable characters in the show was Ernest Hemingway, played by Die-Nasty's Jamie Cavanagh, who had barely done any research into the real life of Hemingway. This was a great decision and meant that Hemingway was one of the most fun characters to watch. Remember when Hemingway donned a cocktail dress, became part of the feminist alliance and revealed himself to be from Crete? Brilliant.

As the dust settles on our version of 1920's Cairo, there seems to be a widespread opinion that this was the best London 50 ever. A massive part of that success, I think, is down to the simplicity of the overarching storyline. It was essentially just a backdrop to much more interesting stuff. I don't think most of the audience could give a fuck whether the overall plot makes sense; especially the majority who aren't even there for more than 4-6 hours. For them, the 50 hour plot is irrelevant and unimportant. People want to see relationships between people and funny things. Who gives a crap whether a comedy show is historically accurate?

DO NOT THINK ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER WHEN YOU ARE OFF STAGE.
God, it seems so obvious now. Now that I am rested, lucid, and blessed with hindsight. I totally fucked up a scene in the last 6 hours of the show because I did not know this. Because I took too much on stage with me, stuff that I'd been throwing around in my mind for 45 minutes. Its not Improv, and it doesn't make your scene better. It makes it worse.

DO NOT THINK ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER WHEN YOU ARE OFF STAGE.
Just. Don't.

Don't think.

Dana Anderson of Die-Nasty said of the 50 hour, "It's the most intense improv workshop you'll ever do." He's right. Not many workshops leave me emotionally scarred, exhausted, and having learnt a lesson with that level of potency. DO NOT THINK ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER WHEN YOU ARE OFF STAGE. Alright, alright. I get it.

In a few months I'm going to be in a 34-hour in Liverpool. Similar format. I'll be giving myself one rule from the beginning (see above). I'll arrive with a costume and a character name, as required. The rest is just enjoying the scene that I'm in at any given moment, feeling privileged to be playing with wonderful performers, and getting to do something way more fun than most people get to do.

Improvathon photos courtesy of Scarab Pictures and Sam Carpenter.