Vanda Slice is a civil servant, occasional part of a ukulele-playing duo called Ukes at Dawn and a disciple of the London Impro workshop scene.
"I stopped doing improv about 5 months ago. Just like that. Cold turkey. It happened more or less just after I came back from a 5 week long summer intensive course at the iO in Chicago, one of the most exciting places to study improv in the US, or anywhere in the world. Up until that point, I had been doing improv pretty much constantly since I first dipped my toe in its murky yet thrilling waters in June 2010. I can still recall the elation I felt after that first class, which left me with spirits soaring high above the roof of Camden's St Pancras Community Centre. I realised almost immediately, after years and hundreds of pounds wasted on the fruitless search for that elusive “thing” that could provide me with an outlet for my creative energies, that I was onto something. It felt as if I was the first and only person in the world to have discovered something as tranformational and exhilarating that I truly believed that I, like the doomed protagonists in the film They Shoot Horses Don't They, would never be able to stop.
So what was it that caused me to give up something that had become such a central part of my life, both creative and social? How do I now find myself struggling with the desire to go back, but uncertain as to where it might lead me and terrified of rejoining the fray?
I think that for me, as with many of my other endeavours, both creative and professional, my love of improv was ultimately sabotaged by an overwhelming fear of failure and of my own perceived shortcomings at this highly self-revealing art form. It's not the first time that I've started pursuing something with great enthusiasm and determination, only to find, further on down the line, that something is holding me back from taking that vital next step. That something being myself. We're all familiar with the accusation that we are our worst enemies, but in my case, I definitely was. I think that my stint in Chicago, although unforgettable and life-changing (largely down to the magical staff and fellow classmates at iO), came slightly too early in my improv journey. I was still too vulnerable to my own searing self-disapproval, and being thrust into a group of extremely talented and confident people led me down the dead-end path of making unfavourable comparisons with everyone else, rather than focusing on what it was doing for me, both as a human being and a performer. If only I had been able to chill out, have fun and remember why I had started doing improv in the first place, then I think I would have returned still brimming with the enthusiasm of an improv ingenue.
So that brings me to the question of what useful lessons can be learnt from my experience, to avoid coming up against the same psychological brick wall that I ended up slamming into? My one piece of advice, to paraphrase the words of latter-day philosophers Take That, would be: never forget why you started doing improv in the first place. To have fun, to meet people, to challenge yourself and your own expectations of yourself, to connect with yourself and others in ways that can sometimes be unbearably visceral, to laugh until you are doubled over in pain and can hardly breathe. And many countless more. So if your own inner critic (or the man with the clipboard as improv guru Steve Roe would say) ever gets in the way again, just tell him to F..K THE F..K OFF!"
If you're a regular to our comedy nights, you might by now have noticed a few changes hither and thither. Not huge ones, merely a poster swap really. The Improvised Comedy show information up around The Miller pub has all become part of the bright red London Improv brand, and the familiar Hoopla! electric blue advertising is now focussed on impro workshops. If you're very keen of ear and have your Observational Switch set to 'on' you may have even noticed Steve shout out the London Improv website (www.londonimprov.co.uk) at the end of shows instead of HooplaImpro.com.
It was a subtle introduction, and purposefully so. As Steve wrote in this blog, things are remaining largely unchanged for you, dear dedicated audience. There will continue to be a high standard of comedy every Tuesday and Wednesday, concentrating very much on building the reputation and outreach of impro, and showing that it is live, vibrant and exciting. We will still be welcoming good quality, well-produced shows from all sorts of improvisers around and about. We continue to only charge £5 for an entire evening of brilliant entertainment. Lucky for you, faithful ones.
There's another reason, and Steve is too modest to acknowledge it, but it's a big reason.
Uncle Steve has almost single-handedly got these nights to be the success they are. The reason there is great value hilarity every week, the reason those performers have had a stage beneath them and an audience before them is because if the amount of work that Steven 'the imp' Roe has put into it. And believe me, after doing a fraction of it over the last few weeks, it is a helluva lot. Steve continues to pump that work in, and he's now joined by a few others; all under the London Improv banner. We could have had a big launch party, but that would have neutralised Steve's long and continuing dedication. No-one is working harder than this man to further impro in London, and for us to come bounding in with a big party would be grotesquely glory-seeking.
Steve is The Man; so next time you see him, tell him how awesome he is and how thankful you are for all the hard work he does.
And if you've ever had an inkling to be funnier or learn any new skill, get yourself down to a Hoopla! workshop or two, and learn from him. He's a chap who knows.
Thanks Steve.
Ooh, if you do want a big party, we'll be having a big send off to mark the end of the season on the 27th July. And if you're good boys and girls over summer, we might have a big one when we start up again in September. Sign up to be kept in the loop by emailing LondonImprov@gmail.com
So Fast and Loose happened. Impro is finally back on mainstream TV, at least for 8 weeks anyway. We had an impro-watching party around the main event, watched some made-up-on-the-spot telly such as Curb Your Enthusiasm and Reno 911, and we watched some YouTube clips of brilliant groups like Beer.Shark.Mice and the amazing Upright Citizens Brigade (video below). which were all magnificent, but by far the central reason for our evening was Fast & Loose.
There has not been a mainstream British impro TV show since Whose Line Is It Anyway? about 15 years ago, so the expectations amongst the impro community could be felt like a build up of silence before a tidal wave hits...
So did the wave hit with the full force of a 15-year surge and a burgeoning contemporary impro scene? Well, um,... -ish... sort of like... sort of.
The twitterverse was lit with swathes of commentators. I would say it was mostly positive. Interestingly, the good complimentary stuff seemed to come from the 'normal' TV viewer. Lots of people thought it was hilarious. That is great. The dissenters, however, appeared to be people from within the improv community. There was a noticeable voice from improvisers all over the country that was disappointed and unsatisfied.
I am mixed. I thought the show was okay, but felt very calculated and safe. One if the most joyous aspects of doing impro is that the audience call out suggestions. This does two things:
1. proves that it's improvised.
2. gives the improvisers completely bat-shit crazy unexpected suggestions to work with. There was no audience interaction whatsoever on Fast & Loose. Why the hell not? They managed it 15 years ago with Whose Line? so why take a backwards step now?
The cast list included Pippa Evans and Humphrey Ker. These are two perfectly decent improvisers who could cope with any suggestion the audience could muster. Future cast members for the series include Ruth Bratt and Dave Reed, who are also off-the-cuff masters. The Fast & Loose decision-makers are happy to use less-well-known but entirely capable improvisers, but it appears that due to some wet fear of risk-taking they also had to go down the danger-free route of stand-up comedians and a fail-safe format. The name of the show ended up being quite the opposite of the truth.
My lady-cohort observed that if you wanted to broadcast a show about mime, you would go and talk to some mime artists; find out if there was a community of people who do mime and which performers those mime artists respect most. You would work with those maestros to form the best mime format you could for your TV show and the best mimists for your cast.
Why then, didn't Fast & Loose work more with prominent people in the improvisation circuit? There are people out there who've practiced incessantly on the art of improv for years and years and are regarded as figureheads in the community. Dylan Emery is one of the creators of Showstoppers, performs in Grand Theft Impro, runs the Crunchy Frog Collective, part of the astoundingSchool of Night and is well regarded as a bit of a powerhouse in making existing improvisers work harder and be better since he took up the mantel that Alan Marriott left behind when he moved back home to Canada. Steve Roe almost single-handedly runs Hoopla! and you won't find anyone battling harder to get improv out of dingy pub cellars and into the public eye. He is also a brilliant improviser himself. Katy Schutte is just about one of the best improvisers I've ever worked with and imparts the knowledge she has gained from training in (impro-Mecca) Chicago to our little island.
Any one of these people could have given Fast & Loose a list of incredible, reliable, hilarious improvisers (including themselves) who would have astounded the audience. They'd have had some pretty brilliant ideas about show formats too, that certainly wouldn't have felt as stale as F&L did for a lot of it. These are people that trust in the abilities of fellow improvisers, and prove it by performing in front of real-life audiences with them. 'Them' includes me, and I'm a long way away from the best improviser in town.
When you perform live you don't even get to edit out the poorer bits in post-production like they can with TV. If F&L producers were scared of going the whole hog and committing to impro, why didn't they learn from the success of Whose Line.. and allow the performers to fly?
Fast & Loose just didn't seem to stray that far from the sterile safety we see in Mock the Week; a show that willfully gives the impression it is impro, but is not even close: Exhibit AIt doesn't really have improvisers in it. Exhibit BIt is mostly made up of stand-up comedians. Exhibit CEverything just looks, well.. rehearsed.
hmm.
Wow. that's all pretty negative. There are positive things that came out of the Fast & Loose series debut. For a start, with the above list of evidence you can now delete Exhibit A. F&L did actually have improvisers in it... It's a start.
Also, there were some bits that were actually impro. The dinner scene was a TV evilution of a 'Scene Replay' impro game, albeit rushed through.
The sideways floor thingy near the end was pretty much a classic 'Genre Swap' but with an added aspect you can't easily do live on stage in a room above a pub, with no budget because it's hard to get a decent-sized audience because no-one knows about improv because TV execs have been too scared to put it on TV even though everyone EVERYONE liked a show that was on 15 years ago. That game worked really well and the twitterverse was almost unanimous in it's appreciation.
So, I guess in summary; it was frustrating for improvisers or impro-fans who've seen just how good impro can be; and what can possibly be achieved live on stage. Those who have seen entire musicals and shakespearian style plays created in a moment, those who have been whisked along an intricate weave of intertwining storylines and characters, those who have seen skilled actors work together to create miraculous and hilarious things on stage... will have been rather underwhelmed.
But for anyone who doesn't know about improv and hasn't been exposed to it, well, it may have opened their eyes to a whole new form of performance that isn't the standard vanilla 'much-repeated one man stand-up routine with the same jokes coming up time and time again but with slightly different delivery'. Which can only be a good thing. It's a tentative toe-dip in an improv pool that can only be improved by a braver jump into the shallow end. And then a doggy paddle.
For impro virgins with a whetted appetite, there's so much to discover (shortform, longform, musicals, theatresports, impro soaps, harolds). If you want to discover more, don't limit yourself to a TV show that's controlled by TV executives, seek out the good stuff:
Vanda Slice is a civil servant, occasional part of a ukulele-playing duo called Ukes at Dawn and a disciple of the London Impro workshop scene.
