PPP 3 - What are You Doing?

It took me a while to work this out in writing because it’s a really simple and obvious idea and therefore easily overlooked. I think missing this is what caused me a lot of confusion when I started out learning improv.

Performance

This is a quote from the 1977 December issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction;

“Intelligence and creativity are not what readers want. What readers want is the result…”

This is the sentence that confirmed in my mind the idea of the performance or the product in improv. When you get up and switch on your mental engine of creativity what is the output that you are creating? In terms of shows it is very easy to see the different kinds of performance.

For example I saw a scene from Music Box a while ago which was set in a Jacuzzi and some of the cast created the whole thing through physicality. That was really fun to see, another image that sticks in my mind is Showstopper where the cast created a beating heart on stage.

This is completely different from the style that the Milk Monitors use for Austentatious. They create a Jane Austen novel for their show, even to the point where their suggestion slip looks like a Penguin classics cover. They don’t use that kind of physicality at all, I’m guessing for practical reasons because you can see how they dress for their shows on their site. Also it makes stylistic sense to me, they are playing in a Wilde/Austen space where things happen in abbey gardens, drawing rooms and library annexes. Watching them feels like watching an actual play that you go to the theatre for.

Very simple difference and makes complete sense, I think you can also think about performance on the smaller scale when it comes down to single scenes and other creations. Even a monologue can have its own form. At iO we were coached to give monologues that were about personal stories to us and also finish it up with a summation of how we felt about it or what we learned on that occasion. That gave really memorable monologues that were easy to take into Harold scenes.

That is not the only way to give a monologue, but that little extra effort of listening to your own monologue and then reacting to it at the end makes a world of difference for other players who are going to use it. Especially in a Harold which is about expanding a single word and exploring all the themes that come out, practicing monologues like that is hitting the ground running. If you are doing a Harold, other shows need different things.

Seeing monologues like that was the last part of the puzzle for me when I was thinking about how to approach improv. Knowing what I want to create and supporting that kind of play is the goal for me in improv right now. Looking it is this way makes it easier for me to learn how to make different kinds of scenes, because it teaches me that I need to put myself in a different mode for different kinds of improv. Same basic engine of adding to what I am given but it’s plugged into a different machine. Doing who, what, where uses a different part from reacting emotionally and they both need their own practice time. Practice them apart and it becomes easier to slip between different modes and be more flexible as an improviser. I will happily learn a certain style of monologue because it helps create a certain show, but I certainly won’t cling to that as ‘how I do monologues’ or ‘the right way to do monologues’.

Conclusion

I try to look at things in terms of Process, Partnership and Performance. There is how I do stuff, how I do stuff with other people and what is this stuff?

This had made it easier for me to use all the conflicting ideas that float around and the different styles. There are good things to find everywhere and there are also dead forms/games/scenes that don’t support anything and are being done by rote. My goal is to find the play in it all so I can enjoy creating a variety of different performances. Cutting it up without seeing that as a cast-iron definition allows me to easily digest all these different experiences I am bombarded with as I improvise. Much like cutting up a lovely potato allows me to stick it in my gob.

Now go and eat a potato.

No, a real one.

PPP 2 - Partnership

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.

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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.