Category: Link

Find Scene Inspiration in Four Easy Steps! Guaranteed!→

This post lays out a thought process for distilling themes and finding characters from monologues. I’m careful when I teach it; I’d rather my players be present in the show and not be doing math on the side lines. I’ll introduce this concept in class, do some exercises that use it explicitly but I always remind the student that the audience (and myself) won’t be judging them on their inspirations but on how well the scenes are played. However a player gets their inspiration, whatever technique they use to cook it, it is the scene that occurs onstage that is most important.

EDIT: More stuff from Bill on separating specifics on Reddit.

Entangl→

This is a great improv app I found on Reddit ages ago and finally got to put into practice when training with the Full Disclosure cast a few weeks back. Add a minimum and maximum amount of time in seconds, and click start. The timer counts down to a randomly set time, blaring an air horn to mark the end of the scene. Then it starts again with a different amount of time. Really awesome, especially when running a min of 2 seconds and a max of 12 seconds to encourage people to get out there and start doing stuff.

Observed Key Factors to Successful (and Unsuccessful) Improv→

Commitment goes beyond what you do in scenework. Commitment is itself a practice. When you do an exercise in class or practice, do a scene, run a long form set, or even do a stupid warm up exercise to start a session… doing it with commitment is going to give you and everyone more than just doing what you have to do.

I got a note: when you’re playing a married couple, act more like you’re married. What are some actionable ways to do this?→

Well, you’ve known each other for forever, so every argument you’ve had is a rehashing of an old one. Nothing much fazes you when you’re fighting–unless it takes a turn and gets really, really bad, at which point you get confused, then deeply hurt (this is someone who you didn’t think’d be like this, and you bet half your stuff you wouldn’t).

If it’s a healthy marriage, your body language and speaking language is also really relaxed–what haven’t you done in front of the other person? You’re not aiming to impress, you’re aiming to coexist. This isn’t a first date. If things are well (if the couple is healthy) you talk smoothly. If things aren’t (the couple is unhealthy), then the inverse of all this. You want out of the situation ASAP and the other person is right there keeping you from doing that, and that’s a major source of stress.

If the marriage is going well, reflect that. If it’s going poorly, reflect that. You’ve likely seen both and know how to replicate the social conditions if you think like a reductionist about it.

Creating inclusive improv→

Improv theatre is about saying yes. It is about accepting offers. It should be a place where all people are accepted and tolerance is practiced. But it’s not always. Often racial, cultural and gender stereotypes and cheap jokes at the expense of those with less privilege get rewarded. It can be very hard for people affected by this to confront those who are making jokes without being told they are being ‘over-sensitive’ or ‘it’s just a joke’. But for many people, those ‘jokes’ aren’t funny and they’re the same thing they’ve heard time and time again and they may go to the very heart of their identity. Why would such a person stick around to perform with people who perpetuate the shittier aspects of an oppressive society? Why would an audience want to stay and watch stories that play out the oppression they see and experience everyday when they could be watching something that transcends it?

Great post, read it.

I like improv because you can present your worldview (or perhaps how you’d like to see the world) to an audience in a non-preachy manner – it can be done in stand-up but it’s much more noticeable when it’s done badly. The downside is that unlike most stand-up, improvisers are making it up on the spot, which mean more factors come into it – performer experience levels, the nervousness of performers, or whether the show has been getting a response from the audience (laughter, total silence, etc). It’s a theory, but I believe that those factors dictate certain choices and when they’re made by performers.

Ultimately, what you do on stage as an improviser is a presentation of yourself to the world, even if it’s masked by the character you’re playing. I have a bit of hesitance playing the opposite gender on stage at the moment. I fear being on stage playing with my long (and it’s always long) hair, arms bent in the air at the elbow. I fear it twice as much if I’m stirring a pot and/or talking about a male character not in the scene. The reason is two fold. One, by doing that the joke becomes the fact that I’m a man playing a women in an improv scene, and that means that the audience isn’t engaged with what I’m doing on stage. Two, the subtext is that this is how me, the improviser feels about women in the real world.

The strawman argument to that second point usually is “aw nah, I was just playing a character!” But if playing a character means playing the above in order to get a laugh, or to save a show from dying, or because it’s what the show needed and you were working from instinct; it still suggests that the choice is being made so that you can be personally rewarded. And that’s not respect – its entitlement.