Warm Up with Commitment→

An effective warmup ultimately comes down to whether people engage those warmups with commitment. Often the reason players aren’t ready to go after a warmup isn’t necessarily because the warmup sucked, but people’s commitment to the warmup sucked, or their commitment in general sucks. That’s not necessarily going to change if you do a better warmup. Often, the warmup doesn’t need to get better. The attitude and approach needs to get better.

For me, it’s playing a crazy warmup that gets me warm for a show – something fun, something fast, something that’s easy to generate energy. I’m Coming Over For Pancakes, Vroom/Click/Clap, Rotating Pattern Game with four or more patterns are all great. Running half-assed intentionally bad scenes makes me to do bad scenes in shows.

When you’re performing, you know, it’s about you. You have to be kind of in touch with how you’re doing and how you’re responding and relating to the audiences and to your band members. But when you’re writing, it’s not about you. Even if the speaker of the poem or the speaker of the rhyme is ‘I,’ it’s not necessarily you — you need to take yourself away from it so your characters can speak, so the words can speak. So those two things, the performer and the writer, they don’t sit very comfortably in the same space.
Been listening to a lot of Kate Tempest lately. From an improv pov this is something I’ve been working a lot of lately – separating Michael from the person in the scene. It’s hard! You are training yourself not to get distracted by yourself while in the act of a show. But at the same time you can’t entirely put that away, you need to be in tune with what you’re doing and what you’re teammates are doing and how the audience is reacting to it. I’ll keep y’all updated with how I deal with this.

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.

Rough Show

About a month ago my team Airblade had a “rough” show. Fresh off a weekend workshop, we decided to implement a bunch of techniques that we had learned, but hadn’t entirely worked out how to use. Some stuff worked, and some stuff didn’t; shows like that happen all the time.

What made it rough? The content that came up in the show. The new techniques somehow cause a shift in how we played. Our show, built off the suggestion of corn cob featured scenes about human trafficking, self-harm with knives, and suicide, not to mention a ships worth of swearing. The audience laughed at the show in certain stages, but also let their discomfort be known out loud. When we got off stage to decompress, the team felt pretty crummy about it.

Later on that night a teammate and a punter were having a chat about the show. My teammate was explaining how we tried something new, and that sometimes you need to fail before you succeed. The punter in turn responded that we should never try that again, because the self-harm stuff offended them and could have offended others in the audience.

Thanks for coming out.

It got me thinking. What is the role of the improviser? I’ve often heard that an improviser is simultaneously a writer, director, and actor during a show. But I’ve never heard anyone add producer or promoter to that sentence. I don’t mean in the sense of plugging your show that night on Facebook, but creating something that the audience wants to see more both during the show and after it’s finished, bringing out new people to see it. Not necessarily funny improv or even “good” improv, but something intriguing, something with curiosity, something that’s bold and takes risks and where something happens and my brain is forced to play catch-up to make sense of how the performers got to that point. Sustainable improv – otherwise we may as well just practice improv to no audience.

What I have had people tell me is to ignore the audience. Don’t play to them, play ahead of them. Focus on your scene partner and yourself, not the thing the audience responds to. Part of this is to prevent judgement – if I put something out there that the audience doesn’t like, my focus might change to a point where I’m ignoring my scene partner in order to give the audience something they do like (if you’re a standup fan, you’ll see this a lot in people who have been performing for a year or two. They keep going on after they get the light). Or worse, I’ll go into self-judgement mode – I’ll freeze on stage and not offer anything, essentially shutting down the scene or the show. Part of this is also to prevent gaggy play, where the performers get so hung up on generating a response from the audience that we lose any realism the performance has, coming off as desperate.

Unfortunately, what I think gets lost sometimes in play is mindfulness. We are mindful of our scene partner and our fellow players, because we are told to focus on what they are doing and support those choices, not judge them for making them. But we’re not told to be mindful of the audience, and we need to be. They are part of the show as much as we are – they don’t go away after we ask for a suggestion. I also have to be mindful of what I’m doing on stage. Just because we are making it up on the spot doesn’t mean that every offer is equal. All words and actions have meaning, so we have to be measured with what we offer.

Mindfulness in a show is a tricky balancing act. The improviser needs to give equal weight to mindfulness of self, the team, and the audience; but also needs to shift that weight on what the show needs almost immediately, all while not taking away from what’s come before us. Ultimately we have one job to do as improvisers when performing to an audience, and that’s to provide an engaging AND entertaining show, and it has to be both of those – it can’t only be one.

So if we’re being mindful of the audience, the solution to this problem is to stop any sensitive content that comes up in a show to avoid offense, right? Well, not quite. Consciously avoiding sensitive subjects results in polite, self-aware improvisation. As an improviser, if I’m so busy catching myself in shows, constantly looking for something that I don’t personally agree with, it’s unlikely that I’ll get to those moments of total surprise where I find something “right” instead of something wrong.

If I’ve learnt a lesson from the show, it’s being mindful of the variety of show and letting that dictate the kind of content that comes up (yes, one more bit of mindfulness to balance!). Being aware of what has come before you in the show in terms of speed, energy, emotion, and technique, and presenting something that the audience and your teammates haven’t seen yet. That will lead to different choices being made, and therefore different content coming up. It doesn’t mean you avoid those sensitive subjects – but it means you get some lightness with the dark.

Back to the punter and my teammate. The punter had every right to be upset with that show, and I don’t want brush it off by saying “this is just acting, it’s not real, it’s not how I feel, you shouldn’t be upset”. I’m sorry for offending you, it wasn’t what I set out to do. My teammate is right too – the show failed. We may have been engaging enough in our show to draw audible groans, but if a person is coming away offended we can’t say we’ve provided entertainment.

What’s nagging at me is the idea never trying that again. It would certainly be an easy solution, throw away the learning that leads to bad stuff. But my goal is to make sustainable improv – intriguing, curious, played boldly with risk and variety. So shying away from new techniques isn’t an option, even if occasionally it leads to a place that means that we don’t hit that goal. We’re going to keep trying until we crack it, and then rip it all apart and start over I’m sure. All I ask is that you come back again, because it will always be different.