True. True and good.

Melbourne Fringe starts next week! Between drinking beers and seeing all of the shows, I’m going to appear in a bunch of them! I’ll be with my three person team It’s A Non-Committal Date, appearing with my Harold Night team Your Elected King, and producing Cage Match. Check out the link for tickets and times.

You can do the very best you can when you’re very, very relaxed, no matter what it is or what your job is, the more relaxed you are the better you are. That’s sort of why I got into acting. I realized the more fun I had, the better I did it. And I thought, that’s a job I could be proud of. It’s changed my life learning that, and it’s made me better at what I do.
Bill Murray on finding satisfaction with your career.

The big thing from yesterday’s workshop, I think, was about taking the scene at face value. A beginning improvisor will tend to project things onto the scene to give it weight, significance, plot. A more experienced improvisor will find those things in what has already been offered, drawing them out and amplifying them. This is important because it relieves us of the pressure to “come up with something good” and instead lets us relax into the scene, focus on our partner, embrace an outward-directed style, and present ourselves naturally.

Matt Powell writes about a body language/non-verbal workshop he ran. Really love the above paragraph and need to incorporate more of it in how I play.

If you turn up to a show having skipped training, or with sloppy stage work or without having worked on your notes from last show, you are telling your fellow players and your audience that you aren’t taking this artform seriously, that you aren’t taking our experience playing with you or watching you seriously.

I’ve always thought of balanced improv in terms of not having three scenes in a row be a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship, or not having three straight/absurd hard comedy scenes. This is something else that I read and said “OH” out loud to.

At best, you want to sort of feel like you’re unconsciously hanging out with your friends, creating a funny scenario out of nothing. You’re not aware that the audience is there, you’re just in the moment like, ‘That’s funny. I’m gonna add more to that.’ And then before you know it, you’ve got a fully fleshed out idea.

Mark’s most lasting gift was this simple note: Realize what you’ve done at the top of the scene.

You walked on stage a certain way.  Your face was conveying something.  Everything you do from the moment you walked on stage is noticed.  You can either make a choice to enter a certain way or simply let your body make the choice and focus on intensifying that.  Your scene becomes immediately easier.