Geekeasy: Comedy For Nerds

This is a message to all the geeks of London. We know you're there: Superhero obsessives, steampunk cosplayers, people who know everything there is to know about the life and career of Marina Sirtis. This night of comedy is for you, you wonderful nerds, as the improv group Project 2 finds comedy that understands you.

The geekiest comedians around all collected together on one new monthly themed night.

"There will always be an underground." Chuck Palahniuk

A night of sketch, stand-up, improv and .. well.. presentations. But good ones. Funny ones.
Join us on 12th April for "Comic Books".

Featuring:

The Beta Males
★★★★★ Three Weeks
★★★★★ Broadway Baby
★★★★★ Spoonfed
★★★★★ Fringe Guru
★★★★ Time Out
★★★★ The List
★★★★ Chortle

Bec Hill
★★★★★ Three Weeks
★★★★ Chortle

"Top 10 funniest comedians on Twitter" - TimeOut

Surname & Surname
★★★★ EdFest
"They're both excellent." - TimeOut

Tom Adams
★★★★ Chortle
"A totally unique comedy experience." - TimeOut

Al Samuels (from Baby Wants Candy, The Improvised Musical with Full Band!)
“Pretty damn brilliant... pretty damn hilarious.” - The Huffington Post
★★★★★ WhatsOn Stage

With music provided by soon-to-become-regulars
Laura Mead and Dave Waller.

COST: £10 on the door, or pre-book <here>
WHEN: 7.30-10.30pm, Saturday 12th January 
WHERE: The Nursery, Arch 61, off Great Suffolk Street and parallel to Union St. SE1 0EU

NEAREST TUBE: Southwark

London Improv have stopped producing shows ourselves, but improv nights are springing up all over the place. It's very exciting. The main improv nights in London at the moment are summed up by this list on the Hoopla Impro website: link

Audience versus Improviser

by Katy Schutte

It seems to me that there is sometimes quite a disparity between how much an audience enjoys a show and how much the performers enjoy a show (or how good they think it was). 

For me, there are three broad reactions I’ll have after doing a show:

• Recriminating myself and/or the group for being awful (sometimes out loud, sometimes in my head  
• Fairly satisfied, but analysing the crap out of the show (“Mr Muscle was a funny character, but why didn’t we have any depth to our relationships?”)
• An air-punch where it was so great that I love my life and the show and everyone I’ve ever met (Bill Arnett has the term ‘way-homer’ for these; where you keep remembering a great moment from your show, all the way home)

There’s also a reaction around the ego where you personally feel you did or didn’t do good work.  Sometimes it can feel like you’re the only one who dropped the ball, or the only one who kept it together.  Interestingly, in improv, if the show as a whole fails, you feel like you’ve failed, because it’s a team game.  Conversely, sometimes a show can fail because one person stood out and the whole team game fell apart.  You’ve got to make other people look good.

With short form at least there are in-built safety nets; if you are brand new you will likely succeed because;

• The audience are probably your friends and family.
• Games are built around letting the audience know when to laugh and automatically generate jokes. For example, New Choice means that you are regularly given a set up, set up, twist that always works.
• Also, the audience love to see you die just as much – if not more – than they like to see you succeed.  In ‘Die’ for example, the competitive storytelling game where the audience shouts die when you mess up telling the story.  If no one died, the game wouldn’t be fun.

With long form it’s a little harder because there is less tolerance of bad improv.  There aren’t built-in safety nets (unless you count a form you’re using, but that’s really just a structure).  If you are just truthful and listen well, the audience are much more keen to see that than you being clever or funny, but it does take years and years for people to feel perfectly comfortable doing those simple things.

Coming off stage it’s sometimes confusing having the audience really love a show that you thought was bad or okay.  When someone comes up to you to tell you how great your show was, don’t tell them that they’re wrong!  Telling a fan of your show that they are incorrect or that your show is poor makes them feel bad and rips on your work, neither of which have a good outcome!  Just say thank you and work on your craft.  Also, they may be right, and you may be wrong. 

There seem to be a couple of reasons for the disparity between the audience and improviser’s viewpoints.  Audiences may not have seen as much improv as you.  For some people, they are pretty amazed that you can make up a show as you go and thoroughly enjoy the magic unfolding.

For me, I feel like a show fails when I am consciously working hard on it on stage.  Improvisers call this ‘being in your head’.  My favourite of the shows I have done are where my characters feel like they are being channelled and have a life of their own, that the beats or chapters of the narrative naturally fall out one by one.  I am perfectly in the group mind of the company and we all have similar ideas and initiations, or immediately enjoy and jump on board the surprises.  So, what’s the difference between one of those shows and one where I am standing on the side thinking ‘I haven’t really done many characters, maybe I’ll do a character’?  Well, here’s my revelation; nothing.  Nothing from the audience’s perspective anyhow.  For them it’s a great show.  They enjoyed everything about it.  It just happens that today, your auto-pilot didn’t kick in as well and you had to fly on manual.  It’s sometimes difficult to know which way to fly.  I had a show after Christmas where I hadn’t done a show for a few weeks and just thought ‘ah, it’ll be fine – I’ve been doing improv for years’.  Even if you’re an Olympic diver, you can’t just fall off the board and expect it to work, you have to use all your awareness and training and make that dive happen.  That show was a belly flop.  If you have a show where some other part of your brain is doing all the work; lucky you.  I’m not suggesting you spend all your time on stage consciously planning and analysing, but I am suggesting that you need to be alert and open the whole time, you can’t just sit back and expect it all to happen. 

There’s also another kind of show where you loved it, but the audience didn’t.  It was your best work, you did great.  These shows tend to disappear after you’ve done a fair bit of improv, but the causes are mostly vanity and in-jokes.  If you’re doing all your best schtick and having a super time but not listening to the other players, you may feel you did a great show, but the audience probably felt the gap between you and the other players.  In-jokes are also a problem.  You may have something that you do in rehearsals (we have some 8-year callbacks in the Maydays) but the audience are not only going to miss the joke, but will feel distanced by it.

It’s great to know what you’re working on, it’s the only way your improv will get better.  Enjoy the things you did well just as much as you notice the stuff you want to build on.  You are doing this because you love it (no one chooses improv as a sure-fire career path) so notice the great bits.  I used to keep a ‘Creative Arnica’ file on my laptop; every time someone said something nice about my or my team’s improv, I would make a note of it.  That way, if I had a shitty show or thought my work sucked I could have a look back and realise that I was probably just forgetting to give myself positive notes as well as constructive ones.  Creative Arnica; what can I say?  I lived in hippy Brighton for 10 years.

Remember that improv is a team sport.  Everyone has your back.  The team win – you win!  Hell, that’s why I ditched stand up to do more improv.  And it’s okay to fly on manual sometimes.  It won’t feel quite as magical as those autopilot gigs, but unless you show it on your face, the audience can’t tell the difference.

Conscious Incompetence (and why it's your friend)

by Katy Schutte

Over years of teaching improv, I have begun to notice that many students at one point or another appear to have a crisis of confidence and dips in their skill sets.  There seems to be an ongoing cycle that starts with enthusiasm, becomes more of a serious work ethic and then turns into a mini freak-out.  I have always advised these students - based on observation - that a dip in confidence seems to come along at the same time or just before a big jump in skills.  I had no evidence or explanation for this apart from my own observations.  Until now.

I was working in Chantilly, France recently, coaching improvisational thinking with leaders and was struck by something one of the other coaches mentioned.  If you work in the corporate world, this is probably not news to you, but it really lit up a light bulb for me.  There is a scale that runs like this:
Unconscious incompetence
Conscious incompetence
Conscious competence
Unconscious competence

So: we don’t know that we can’t do something, then we know we aren’t doing it right, so we learn to do it, then we forget that we’re even doing it.  

For me, these are very clear levels within our improvisational learning.  The most important of which is conscious incompetence. 

When you are a total beginner in improv, you can often hugely enjoy performing; there are no nerves, no stress, you know you can do whatever you want and there’s nothing important riding on it.  You perform, you get LAUGHS - which is amazing - and then you’re done.  Fun.  After a while, you realise that you are maybe hitting on similar characters and gags because you know they work and because they feel easy and comfortable.  You begin to realise that there’s more to improv.  Where is the initial spark you had, why has it gotten harder?  There is more to learn.   You look at the people around you and see that they have skills you don’t, or that you’re not as good at.  So you work on those skills.  You increase your range, you take more risks, you are starting to enjoy the work again.  You get a lot better, then it’s easy, then you are slightly disconnected.  You’re maybe the best person in your company and you start to feel frustrated that others can’t keep up, or that the beginners class is too easy for you.  So you are consciously competent.  You join a more advanced class and really enjoy the scenes, they are rich, you are all listening to each other and the audience likes your shows.  You believe that this is the norm.  You are no longer stressing about your skill level because it is comfortable.  You have forgotten your struggle.  You are unconsciously competent.  You are GOOD.

Oh wait, another group came to town.  How the hell are they doing the improv they are doing?  What is long-form?  Is that monologue genuinely from real life?  Their physicality is incredible.  They sing!  Then here we go again.  Alexis Gallagher always maintains that it is best to be the second worst person in a company.  I think that’s a nice way to aspire to good improv.  That way, you are always consciously incompetent and trying to learn the skills you see around you.  But you’re not the worst, so you’re not going to feel like crap.  And confidence is a key part of successful improv.

This is by no means an experience that is only applicable to beginners.  I come across these blocks in my work every so often when I’m working with amazingly tight companies, strong singers and improvisers that never forget a name or drop a ball.  Just remember, whenever you know that you are terrible, that your improv is stale, that your work sucks, that you are the least funny/interesting person on stage; that is the point where you can go up a level.  That is the point where you’re challenging yourself and taking risks.  If you know you’re the most funny, interesting, talented, spontaneous person in the room, change rooms.  It’s important to feel good about conscious incompetence.  It’s the point where you’re most likely to surprise yourself, to take big risks and to push up your skill level.

Your degree of competence is important to different people in different ways:

The audience.  Audiences love to watch people that are at their ease, even if they are enjoying their own incompetence.  

Your peers.  Your fellow improvisers, employers and teachers; they all want you to be good.  They want you to step up and they want to help you achieve great things.  They also have your back.

Yourself.  No one is a harsher judge than yourself.  Enjoy it.  Let you be the harsh critic of you.  Just don’t let the critic get in there when you’re playing.  Love a show, get out of your head.  Then sit down after and watch the video, see what you did good and bad and set yourself some goals.  A side note on notes; I was shocked the first time I had two improv teachers contradict each other.  It’s not like maths, there is no absolute right.  Do what you think is more interesting.  Just make sure you’re not doing it because it’s safe.  Push your own boundaries and take advice when it speaks to you as the right advice.  Try everything you get taught and keep what works for you.  Always go in with an open mind, then jettison stuff afterwards if it doesn’t help.

Now stand up and declare “I am consciously incompetent” and enjoy how much you can improve every time those words ring true. 

www.katyschutte.com
@katyschutte

Clown, Conceptualiser or Adaptive: Our Habits and Fears

By Katy Schutte

I know it isn’t always realistic to pigeonhole improvisers into one bracket or another, but in planning a rehearsal for the Maydays I realised that there are things that we get into the habit of practising and avoiding depending on our innate style and on what the groups we play with NEED.

I read something interesting in a book called Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps.  It points out that in a romantic relationship, we sometimes work like a two-person ant-colony; if one of us can do one job, then there is no point in the other taking up brain space to do it too.  One of us learns everyone’s names at a party so the other one doesn’t bother, one knows how to make the surround sound work so the other one doesn’t bother.  We have one double-sized brain between us.  In an improv troupe, there is something similar.  After years of playing with the same people, we can end up having a specific role in our company shows and rehearsals.  The positive aspect of this is group mind.  The downside is habit and stagnation.

Without really thinking about it, I know that within the Maydays, we have improvisers who are stand-out aces at character, singing, rap, game of the scene, follow-me initiations, object work, clowning, emotion, lateral thinking, topics, support and of course cock jokes.  Because individuals are so good at their particular forte, sometimes it is easy just to leave it to them.  The only reason we don’t leave it to them the whole time is because we generally have a cast of 4-5 per show and our company has 12 improvisers.  Each show has a different vibe and we find that there are golden combinations.  An argument for getting good at all the stuff you normally avoid is so that when you’re in a show where everyone you’re on stage with is character-driven, you can be the one remembering names at parties or sorting the surround sound. 

I guess what I’m saying is; to be the best improvisers we can be, and to be able to play excellently with improvisers we’ve hardly even met, we have to have the whole set.  If you don’t practice all your improv keepy-uppy, you won’t be good enough at it when the nerves kick in, when you’re under the weather or tired, or when your mind goes blank. 

What type of improviser am I (or what role do I play in my company)?

The Clown

Clowns love to come on stage with a strong character or emotion.  They sometimes pull their character idea off the call-out/scene before and sometimes just pick an arbitrary emotion, choose to lead with a certain body part (stacking), or alter their face or voice.  They love to sing or rap - and find it easy - because it is a way of channelling their emotions.
Clowns avoid driving the plot of a show or the journey of a scene and they don’t like to be the initiator.  Their reasoning is often that they aren’t ‘clever’ like that or that they can’t think of anything in time.  If they do initiate, it is often just an initiation for themselves.  They don’t want to be in charge of the other improviser and their journey through the scene.
Bad clowns are particularly scared of initiating and just wait for their scene partner to do the work, partly out of misplaced politeness.  The other type of bad clown is someone that will just cock-about until they get a laugh.  It’s often funny, but can end the scene abruptly and make the show pretty shallow.  Bad clowns can also get stuck in stereotypes or in their regular go-to characters. 
Good clowns really listen to the show as a whole and allow their rich characters to embody the themes and feelings tackled.  They can change the rhythm of a show and take the audience into deeper states of emotion.  Good clowns often get the audience feedback ‘wow, you were just like this person I know’.

The Conceptualiser

Conceptualisers love to initiate and drive scenes and help tell the story of a show.  They love to talk.  They’re very good at conversational topics, verbal games of the scene and reincorporation.  They always remember names at parties.
Conceptualisers avoid playing big characters or characters that are wholly different to themselves.  They also don’t tend to go for full-on emotional responses or very physical scenes.  Their songs will be all about the lyrics, less about the melody.
Bad conceptualisers tend to talk about action or plot instead of showing it to us.  They get cross when the scene or show isn’t panning out how they thought.  They fight against ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ moves by other improvisers (which are actually just different than theirs).  They sometimes announce out loud what will decidedly happen in the next scene in order to control the show.
Good conceptualisers are ready to drop their heavy concepts at a moment’s notice.  They also let the show as a whole be determined by the group and not by them as an individual.  They are great lateral thinkers and inspire originality.


The Adaptive

Adaptives love to help their scene partner.  They see what’s happening in a scene and do whatever is needed.  They are just as happy playing strong characters as they are initiating a verbal follow-me scene.  They will initiate just as much as not.
Adaptives avoid freedom.  On paper they are the perfect improviser, doing whatever is needed.  And though you’ll get a good solid show every time from an Adaptive, it won’t be a life-changer.  Adaptives avoid just fucking around.  They want to know what is needed and how they should do it.  They don’t take enough risks or really surprise themselves.
Bad Adaptives do too much.  They see a fun scene going on and they want to get in there, as a walk-on, as a scene-paint, as another character.  Sometimes scenes need it of course, but bad Adaptives overdo it.  It’s not a lack of trust, they just want to play.
Good Adaptives are just as happy ending up as the lead as they are being one of the chorus line.  They see what the show needs and they do it.

No one type is better than another.

We talked about whether it was a good idea to have a balance of these types cast in our shows, but were more excited by the idea that we could all be freed up to serve the show.  

How Can I Work On This?

Well, that's a whole other blog for the future, but here's a taster: I gave the Maydays piles of post-it notes for each type to draw from.  Each had a mission on it, based on what their type avoids doing.  They used these as the inspiration for a set of scenes.  We did a few sets with everyone working against their fears and into the skills of other types before looking at how that worked out or didn't work out.

We learned that when Clowns initiate a game, when Conceptualisers do a silly voice and when Adaptives fuck around: magic happens.  

Minute Improv: Who, What, Where

In the new series of minute-long improv lessons, Katy Schutte demonstrates 'Who, what, where.'
www.katyschutte.com

Minute Improv: Yes And

The first in a series of minute-long improv lessons by Katy Schutte.
www.katyschutte.com

AUDITION! - for a new Improvised Musical at The Canal Cafe

Silly String Theory is a new improvised play with songs, to be performed at the Canal Café Theatre in December. Directed by Katy Schutte (The Maydays, Katy and Rach, Music Box) and produced by Jules Munns (Music Box, Slapdash, The Nursery), it will be both funny and serious, dramatic and downright silly. Kind of like Katy and Rach, but with five people and songs.

Rehearsals will be week beginning 28th November 10-6, Monday to Friday, then a couple of afternoons TBC the weeks of the shows. Cast members will be expected to attend every rehearsal. It's all about knowing each other's style backwards and being super super super professional.

Performances will be 8th-11th and 15th-18th December, 7.30 at the Canal Cafe. That’s right, it’s pretty much the Canal Café’s Christmas show! And with a bit of luck, it could become a regular thing.
Fee for the show is two hundred English pounds, perhaps a little more if the audiences are good.

Auditions will be held 11-5 on Sunday 13th November. Location TBC. If you want to come along, send a short email about your improv experience to julesmunns@hotmail.co.uk. We are looking with people with experience of either long form or musical improvisation, or ideally both.

Applications by 10th, please.

Improv: Film versus Stage

Hi, Katy Schutte here.  I’ve been making some improv film shorts over the last month and have more planned over the summer.  It’s not a new idea, Mike Leigh and Christopher Guest being the most famous pioneers in this area, but it continues to be re-invented.  The Office has much of the feel of a Guest mockumentary and Gervais nods his head to the likes of Spinal Tap as his inspiration, although the series is scripted.  Likewise Parks and Recreation with Amy Poehler.  But where is improv better – the stage or the screen - and what’s the difference for performers?

First off – how do you improvise a film?  With stage improv you can create the who, what and where in the moment, so how can that work on film? 

The who?: In improv there are a billion ways of finding a character – starting with a genre idea, leading or stacking with a body part, loosely impersonating someone famous or someone you know, mirroring your scene partner, finding the opposite to your scene partner, building on an accent or way of walking and many more.  These are general acting tools but we pick them up as self-suggestions as we walk into a scene.  On stage they are instantaneous or they might come from a scene before, when such a character was described.  On film it’s good to know the connections between characters in advance so that some kind of plot can be worked out, but I give my improvisers the gist of who and they come along armed with what they might wear, what their point of view might be, who they might like or dislike and what they are cool or not cool with in the story.  A detailed character back-story helps some improvisers too.  I enjoyed Kate’s personal character trait of carrying mini post-its with her to mark any health and safety faux pas.

The where?: On stage we can create an imagined set or location through scene and person-painting as well as through our words and with object work but these don’t work on film.  Or rather, they can, but you’d be looking at a style that’s not immediately congruent with mockumentary.  Even Lars Von Trier’s Monster had props, costumes and set dressing in the massive black box studio where it was filmed.  The where is still pretty loose in our films in that we will have an idea for a setting – we filmed the first one in Richmond Park and the second in a community centre – but we will look around for fun spaces on the day.  These will influence the scene’s content and game.  We had a lovely where for Jen’s character monologue when someone had the bright idea right before we shot it to have her walking along in a river!

The what?: Or what’s going on or what is being talked about.  Having the what nailed down means that there is a storyline ahead of time.  It would be possible to create a story from filming characters (who) in locations (where) but it’s not quite as interesting if it’s not headed somewhere.  There’s the technique of making a storyline in the edit – which is how a real documentary is often made – but that requires an awful lot of footage and more time editing and we’re interested in quickly turned around episodes with a clear direction.  Confetti managed this approach very well.  Also – when a great game is discovered late in a filmed scene, you can edit out a long lead-up and perhaps even pause the scene to tell the actors to play the game more or heighten it, or just emphasise to them what the game is.  Many British shows like to use this safety net on stage whereas I am more used to long form where we just have to get good enough to find a game quickly! 

Which is better?!  On stage you get audience feedback, which can tell you if you’ve hit a good seam of comedy or found a character that people empathise with.  On film you have to trust the director with this and you lose a bit of the fun of getting laughs (which we all like, let’s face it).  The plus side is that the improvisers will more likely go for truth than comedy and the show will have a bit more depth whilst still being funny.  We thought we were doing fine on this score before one of our crew lost himself in laughter and we had to have giggle breaks from Jon’s bird-hating monologue.  Of course, there are times when we can’t help ourselves...  With filming you also have a number of goes.  If a scene doesn’t work, we can just reshoot it, or if we get a different idea as we work, we can try both.  Film will last and be re-watchable, whereas a stage show will never be seen again.  But our stage shows don’t date and our films can never be perfect.  As we are making mockumentaries, the screen demands more subtlety than the stage, though I think me and Rach have a similar feel in our 2-person show inspired by TJ and Dave.  So for me there is no real best, apart from the fact that I love and dislike both for all these reasons.  The shorts provide a nice contrast to the freeform work I do with the Maydays and Katy and Rach, but I love both forms – one with a tight backbone and one whose skeleton comes into being at the same time as the rest of its body.  When it comes to commercial success of course, many comedians and bands find that their TV series or their downloads bring more people to their live shows and that’s what they really love to do. 

So what is the structure?  I write a loose Harold ahead of the filming.  One of these will fit onto one side of A4!  Each scene just lays out the situation and perhaps a gentle game or character suggestion for those involved.  We have found that with this grounding we can improvise all the dialogue fairly easily.  I have the actors watch each other’s performances where possible, so that strands of story unfold during the filming day – even when we’re filming out of sequence.  I have to be a careful listener just as I am on stage to make sure that the dialogue does not contradict.  Sometimes the cast can’t be there all day or have to be quiet off set in which case I fill them in with as much detail as I can.  The prep the actors bring to the floor is their own costumes, character back-stories and points of view.  With everyone taking this much responsibility we can make rounded characters exist within a real-feeling comedy vehicle. 

Each episode is independent so it’s also fun for me to cast my regulars in differing roles to challenge their range and give us a bigger world to dip into throughout the series.  I have also found that scenes work better with improvisers that have worked together before.  It helps them get to a place of group mind much more quickly.  Though I’m working with Del Close’s Harold structure at the moment, we are evolving to look at the La Ronde and Time Dash.  None of these are original film structures, but all serve to build a backbone.  Memento for example is a Time Dash and Le Ronde is the namesake of the 1950 film with this structure.  To start, I sometimes pick a venue, sometimes a random word or idea and I find a venue to fit.  This is me giving myself audience suggestions.  My crew are improvisers too.  We have no storyboard of shots and all I tell Arash (the director of photography) is whether the characters know there’s a camera or not.

We have filmed two shorts to date and will be doing our first editing session this week.  There are more skeleton scripts waiting on my laptop.  We hope to film 6-8 over the summer with a variety of improvisers, comedians and actors dropping into the team.  It’s like film repertory.  I love it.

Thanks to the cast and crew of the last two films as well as the venues which let us film (and boo to the venues who didn’t).  The films will launch at the beginning of September with a new London arts website.  I’ll keep you posted with details.

Go see some of my improv favourites: Vera Drake (not a comedy!), Reno 911!, Factory, Waiting for Guffman, This is Spinal Tap, Confetti.

Katy Schutte Swears By Improv

She’s in the Maydays, Katy & Rach and Music Box. Here, seasoned improv-goddess, Katy Schutte, talks to Rhiannon Vivian about her favourite moments on stage, her teachers and heroes and why all comic performers should train in improv...

When did you first discover improv?
KS: I had a great drama teacher at secondary school who used to wear slippers, and unbeknown to me at the time, she played loads of short form improv games with us. I was a very straight kid but I had a rubbish English teacher so I used to skive his classes and sneak in on the other half of the year’s drama lessons with this teacher instead. She never said a word, even though I clearly wasn’t on her register! I remember getting laughs and loving it. It was nice to be in a class where I could chill out and have a personality and not get told off for being intelligent. My school was rough as fuck, and if you appeared intelligent you just got bullied loads. Drama lessons were my oasis.

Tell us about training in Chicago...
Rachel Blackman (Katy & Rach) had heard about Second City, and told me it was like the Mecca of long-form improv. So we thought, ‘right, let’s go on holiday there.’ We wanted to learn some new things, having done the same short form games over and over. We were skint, stayed in a hostel, ate spinach and walked everywhere, but it was fantastic. The Second City shows are more like sketch shows. They then have a free improv set later in the evenings - very loose and fun. Then some brilliant improv geeks told us about Improv Olympic (IO) down the road. At IO, the improv we saw was The Shit. It was improv purely for performance and it was amazing. I saw a bunch of shows at IO I loved like the Armando Diaz Experience. The whole thing was an incredible theatrical event: I’d never seen 20 seasoned improvisers in a show before! We also saw TJ and Dave (TJ Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi) for the first time, a duo who we now base our Katy & Rach show on. I remember thinking, ‘this is like comedy theatre, but not gaggy.’ It’s very funny, but it’s all characters, realism and scene painting. Rach and I remember TJ & Dave’s first show like it’s a film we’ve seen together, because we have the same mental image of the places they went to. IO felt like magic. Also, we’d never done any musical improv before, and we found Nancy Walker at Second City who taught us how to improvise songs, which at the time was the scariest thing ever.

Had you sung before?
A year before I’d done my first lead in a musical, but I’d found it really hard and had singing lessons. So to go from that to improvising songs was scary.

Which teachers have inspired you most along the way?
I keep chasing after skills I see in other people, so I love all The Maydays because everyone has these core skill sets, and you can collect them like Top Trumps. There’s always a goal. From Chicago, Bill Arnett is my favourite ever teacher. Jason Chin was amazing...I also love Jay Rhoderick from New York and Tim Sniffen from Baby Wants Candy. There was also a teacher in Chicago who I thought was going to be awful, because we’d seen him in a not so good show. But as it turned out, he had some incredibly useful stuff to impart. One lesson he taught us, subtly referencing the show he’d done, was: ‘never think, “I’m going to take it easy tonight. Even if you’re tired or feel rubbish.” And it’s true. If everyone decides to take it easy, you’ve got a shit show. Of course, this guy took it easy and he became the protagonist in the first two minutes! He then had to carry the whole show and wasn’t in the right head space for it. It’s a brilliant tip because we’ve all been there. Especially in Edinburgh, when half way through you’re knackered.

What’s your favourite ever improv moment to watch?
There was a troupe in Chicago which had all of the seasoned improvisers in it, including TJ and it was amazing. We’d been learning organic openings all week and hated them. We thought they were shit, and looked like A-level theatre. But then this troupe blew us all away. They did an opening where were all enacting a chess game and were perfectly in sync, without looking at one another. It was theatrically powerful and it just looked incredible. I remember thinking I want to do this until I am that good at least. Very important in my improv journey was seeing Baby Wants Candy in 1999. I’d never even heard of an improvised musical, but they were so cool. In the show I saw - I was Born Without A Brain - they did all this cool scene painting, but the great moment was when they reprised a song. It fitted so beautifully with the show. And then there was a song where two people sang at the same time, by just looking at each other. At the time I was like, ‘how do you do that?’ Since then, in 12 years, I think me and George from the Maydays have done that well maybe twice.

What’s been your favourite moment on stage?
Me and Rach did a Katy & Rach show in Brighton, and I played a woman who was a sewer tour guide. I was in a scene where she was getting tested for her tour guide licence, weaving around the sewers with her examiner. When they finally came out into daylight, I had a blank moment - so I just disappeared. It meant I’d been a ghost all that time. It was like a proper sixth sense twist, and we’d got the audience audibly going, ‘nooo!’ And me too, as I didn’t plan it. I’ve watched the video back since, and it’s not nearly as good as I remember it! And I’m also sniggering.

Ever had a really awful show?
The Maydays did this corporate gig that just didn’t work at all. I’m not sure if it was before or after we got an award for our long form musical, but we obviously thought it was a good idea to ditch the short form, and do that instead. And they really didn’t get it. We went: ‘give us a name of a made up musical!’ And people were going: ‘Phantom of the Opera,’ and, ‘Mary Poppins.’ This went on for ages. It was like a press conference game. In the end we got something to do with a farm, and proceeded to do the worst improv show ever. The characters were shit, it made no sense at all and no one knew what was going on. And it was made worse by the fact we were earning several grand for it. Our Jim Bowen Guest Who show in Edinburgh last year was pretty mental too. Everyone had come to see Jim Bowen, but the trouble was, they all like darts and Jim Bowen - they don’t like improv. Right after the show, Jim came up to us and said something like, ‘you’re all very talented. I didn’t understand any of it, but I’m sure it was very clever.’

What improv books do you recommend?
If you’re new to long form, then Truth in Comedy, by Del Close, Charna Halpern and Kim Howard Johnson. Then again, it says so much useful stuff about scene work regardless. Guru: My Days With Del Close, by Jeff Griggs is all about Del Close’s life – a good read as he is thought of as the Godfather of long form. And if you are sick of your own work, then Improvise by Mick Napier. He sort of said ‘fuck IO’ and he hates clichés. Brilliant.

Why do you think improv has had such a slow burn in UK?
In America it’s like a total rite of passage that a comedy actor or stand up goes and does shit loads of improv. Whereas here, we put stand ups in improv shows, and watch as they crowbar their own material in regardless of the setting, which means the whole thing loses depth. If you watch old ‘Who’s Line...’ shows, they’ve got the two Canadian improvisers, Colin Mochrie and Ryan Stiles who are amazing – but then unheard of - and then loads of British stand ups, like Paul Merton and Tony Slattery. Basically, producers over here want a guaranteed laugh, so they’re scared of taking risks. I find it really sad compared to US. In the UK, we are too focused on instant gratification. And our improv tends to be more competitive - elimination games, people trying to be ‘better.’ It’s not a level playing ground. As Charna Halpern said (and Heather Urquhart mentioned on her blog): "If we treat each other as if we are geniuses, poets, and artists, we have a better chance of becoming that on-stage."

Do you still get nervous before shows?
Not for improv. I do for things I have to memorise lines for! My fear is forgetting things and I can’t get scared if I have nothing to forget. Occasionally I get nervous for Katy & Rach because we rarely rehearse together, but mostly I just get properly excited. I get nervous if I feel like I have to be the funniest person in the room – which might be if I am auditioning for companies who are like that. But with freeform, what can you possibly fuck up? Nothing at all. And if it’s not going well, someone will save it – that’s the team thing.

What is your favourite improv show?
Baby Wants Candy makes me physically laugh. I love that it’s full of joy and so fucking silly. And the other end of the scale is TJ and Dave, where they’re deep into role and it’s like they’re psychic with one another.

How would you describe Improv in three words?
Spontaneous theatrical magic...

Musings on Musical Long-form Improv

You’re in a dark, damp tunnel under Waterloo Station. As you glance to your side, you realise that there is an auditorium so sold out that people have to stand at the back. With a mix of armchairs, sofas, kitchen chairs and velvet curtains it looks like a Terry Gilliam set (approved by David Lynch). Now comes the beginners’ call and you know that you will shortly be on stage with more than 15 people, some of whom you’ve never met. There’s not only no script, but you’re also required to make up songs in the moment. For most people this is an actors’ nightmare, but for the participants of SlapBash it is BLISS!

SlapBash is a wonderful improv event that took place last Thursday at the Old Vic Tunnels to raise money for London’s improv festival Slapdash in July. When a large group of musical improvisers turned up from different companies - many of whom had not met let alone worked together – with barely an hour in the space before the doors opened, I was thrilled. The levels of experience were quite different – from a glut of full time professionals to a couple of part-time hobbyists. We warmed up (and met) with Big Booty, Hot Spot, gift-giving and a pattern game, all of which told me that I was working with a fun, enthusiastic and capable bunch. For the show we had a possible list of mostly musical short form games, including a couple of ‘set pieces’ from the different troupes, but mostly simple set ups that anyone could join in. We had no MC and it was decided that we would just jump on stage when there was a gap to introduce any that took our fancy. I was delighted that almost every formulaic short form game was assimilated by the long-formers into a whirl of colour and movement! A blues number has a huge chorus line at it’s feet, all in perfect time and motion, a game reading from a book (and then having it taken away and continuing in the same style) is beautifully illustrated in tableaux from behind, Machines is filled out with glorious harmonies from all over the theatre. We played for two 40-minute sets in a fairly seamless ménage of music that enthralled the crowd.

It was very interesting to see how the various styles of improv fitted together. Showstopper endowed, led and directed from within, the Maydays connected with the audience using their real stories to make glorious playback songs, Music Box came from a place of character and monologue to find wonderful counterpoints, Friendly Fire spoke through physicality and sound to form abstract and beautiful theatre and Marbles kept it real with some awesome rap. Somehow all of these styles and games were brought together wonderfully. Any number of improv styles can be combined successfully if each accepts the common ground of listening, accepting and building.

I think the main difference between British and American long-form musicals is that the British say their intentions out loud, whereas Americans keep it unsaid and communicate with their group mind. The British like to see the workings, they want to be shown that it is improvised, to have storyteller and a familiar style named and called out before it is parodied rather than for someone to spot the style themselves. I for one am excited after Thursday that these are not mutually exclusive styles, they can live and breathe together for any good improviser and any audience.

Don’t Congratulate Yourself Too Much

I’m a very lucky (and talented) girl – in the last few weeks Katy and Rach, Music Box and The Maydays have all got fantastic reviews (see the end for links).

Well done us.

But before I celebrate, let’s remember the Baz Luhrman singing ‘Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)’ offering advice to college leavers. There is one line that says ‘whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either. Careful if you listen to it, though – it always makes me cry. Stand-up teacher Jill Edwards echoed this advice to me in Brighton. You can go on too much of an ego rollercoaster if you’re not careful and that’s why a lot of comics and performers become depressive or alcoholic. One night people think you’re great, one night people think you’re not. So, are you great; Or shit? Let’s not do a Tony Hancock and fire everyone around us to prove to ourselves that we’re the funny one.

Reviews however cannot be ignored. They are often the main point of marketing that connects you with your audience and a bad review can curb your audience numbers. My first directorial experience at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in ‘99 coincided with my first Scotsman review. We got 1 star. The review described my cast as ‘rampaging toddlers’ and despite flagging it as a great idea for a show, and pointing out ‘an impressive backwards farce skit’, we were damned. I remember the first line clearly, though it was around 12 years ago now: ‘This is the hell that is student theatre’. I had to take my cast to one side before the next show and explain to them that it was one person’s opinion and that if they believed it was a 1-star show, then it was certainly going to come across like a 1-star show. To add insult to injury, we failed to get any other reviews for the whole festival and therefore our Scotsman diatribe was the only voice out there. If we’d had another terrible review at least it would be consolidated. If we’d had a good review, we could understand that people have different tastes or perhaps we’d caught the Scotsman on a bad day or a bad show. The cast went on to be on the Big Breakfast spot ‘Edinburgh Cringe’ and I was too sore to be a part of it. At the tender age of 20, it was a big blow.

I have read the Artist’s Way several times. It’s a 12 week course in creativity and quite clearly a self help book, but it’s a good self help book and really looks at some interesting issues that come up for all creatives. There was a section on criticism which I found particularly useful. The author pointed out that poor criticism just makes you upset, whereas constructive criticism makes you happy, because you can see a way to make your show (painting/book/dance) better. ‘Yes’, you think, ‘that bit didn’t work and now I can see that if the audience understood Clive’s motivation, then it would be a stronger piece’. Or whatever. A good technique for dealing with bad reviews is to review the review. Take apart the reviewer’s language and point of view. Also, if you’re particularly cross, Google them, find their own failings and attribute your bad review to their personal experiences. Don’t send it to them, it’s just a catalyst!

It’s always nicer to be part of a group for reviews – being part of an improv troupe instead of a lone stand up for example. One of my favourite reviews of all time was a 2-star ThreeWeeks review for the Maydays’ first show at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2006. Regarding our revolutionary new short form show, the reviewer summed it up as ‘reused drama workshop games’. She wasn’t wrong – I mean, that is the root of modern short form improv (thanks, Viola Spolin). Over the next few weeks, we thoroughly enjoyed describing Richard Allston dance as ‘just a bunch of people keeping fit’, Rhod Gilbert as ‘just a bloke doing a bunch of jokes’ and Camille O’Sullivan as ‘just a woman talking at various pitches with some people on musical instruments.’ Incidentally Chortle came to the same exact show and gave us a glowing 4-star review that we still quote on our publicity.

This is all very well, you say, but you started this with ‘I got three great reviews’. Yes, but I strive to be no more affected my high praise than I am by being rubbished on paper. I have a good idea about what was wrong with all of these highly praised shows and they are things that we strive to improve continually. There will never be a point in improv when you are done. Even TJ and Dave, Baby Wants Candy and all my favourite shows vary in quality and as an improviser that is satisfying in a way. If your show feels safe, it probably isn’t that great. If you’re not pushing boundaries then why are you improvising?; If you’re wheeling out your five favourite characters for the umpteenth time then why don’t you write a script for them?

The magic of improv lies in risk. If you’re lucky, your risks will pay off and you’ll get a good review. If not, well done you for expanding your range and striving for something better. Another sage piece of advice from Jill was that you learn nothing from a good gig, but you learn loads from a bad gig. I think that translates very well from stand up to improv.

So, my advice is that if you want to get ecstatic about 5 star reviews, you have to be depressed about 1 star reviews and your ego isn’t worth all that trauma. In my opinion, we didn’t deserve a 5 star review for Saturday’s Music Box show, but I also believe that we have done some brilliant 5 star shows that weren’t reviewed. I’m very pleased that we get to use that review to tell people how good we can be. I don’t feel like we can sit back and enjoy that we’re perfect. Still, I might quietly crack open a beer...

“Remember the compliments you receive, forget the insults; if you succeed in doing this, tell me how.”
– Everybody’s Free (to wear sunscreen)
Katy and Rach in the Argus
The Maydays 4* Fringe Review
Music Box 5* Fringe Guru review

Online Harold for Long-Form Improv Disparates

I have had the pleasure of working with some wonderful teachers and improvisers from around the world. Sometimes we Maydays invite favourite teachers back over from Chicago (Bill Arnett, Nancy Howland Walker and Marshall Stern) and New York (Jay Rhoderick) to fine tune us and join in our shows in Brighton and London. And let’s not forget Tim Sniffen (Baby Wants Candy) who coached me and 8Bit at the end of last year.

When I was at iO and Second City, I met some great American, Canadian and Australian improvisers who I loved performing with. I also dearly miss Jason Delplanque from the Maydays who has moved to South Africa to take the improv world by storm over there. I was contemplating the international talent I have connections with and realised that – of course – we live in a world of vast media and communication opportunities. Why not make an online improv show where any of these people, and any of you, can add the next scene? London Improv have been kind enough to act as host and me (Katy Schutte) and Laura Mugridge are launching ‘Open Letters to P. W. Wiseman’.

Open Letters to P. W. Wiseman is an online Harold where we publish an improvised scene and ask the world to improvise the next one. There will be 9 scenes (or so), each inspired by the last and by the themes ‘organic’ and ‘rural’. Scenes must be one continuous shot with improvised dialogue and have a connection (i.e. to do with character, object or environment) with the scenes that have gone before. 'Open Letters to P. W. Wiseman' has three chapters and we encourage successful submitters to film second and third beats to their story or exploration. Each scene must be under 5 minutes and entered within a week of the previous one being published. To enter, publish your scene on youtube and send the link to katy@katyschutte.com including which scene number it is.

Scene 2 is due by Friday 30th April. As this is our trial show, guidance/rules may change as the project goes on… Good luck – let’s make some new comedy!

Scene 1:

by Katy Schutte

Slow and Tight

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 astounding School 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 A It doesn't really have improvisers in it.
Exhibit B It is mostly made up of stand-up comedians.
Exhibit C Everything 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:

in London:
hoopla!
showstoppers
music box
8bit
grand theft impro
school of night
horse aquarium

in Brighton:
the maydays
the noise next door

anywhere else:
start from the London Improv website, and work outwards.

and then demand that TV execs allow this kind of thing to happen:


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