Tag: mindfulness

David Razowsky: Improvising as an Actor Workshop – Day 3

Long-time Second City cast member, director, and teacher David Razowsky visited Australia in July 2015, and I was lucky enough to be apart of a three day workshop focused on his various techniques and approaches to improvisation. Here are my notes and lessons from that weekend:

  • No-one ever wants to start. You want to continue.”
  • Specificity: Add something to what you already have. It’s not just a pair of glasses, it’s a beat up shitty pair of plastic reading glasses.
  • “Either say the line and shut the fuck up, or say the line, repeat it, and shut the fuck up.” (Be efficient with your dialogue! We’re watching a finish product, not a first draft. Trust yourself, say less.)
  • “Dare to leave me dangling.”
  • Unfolded, unfurled, and evolved: How we treat a point of view. “And we don’t do anything but keep going.”
  • Listen to the exact words that are said.
  • “Funny trumps logic.”
  • “it’s not my obligation to explain what the scene is about.” We are acting in the scene, so act in it.
  • Exercise: Solo Exercise: Inspired by music, deliver a monologue.
  • Once you bring in the past, you have to keep creating it. That’s when you get stuck.
  • Be aware of the words you are saying, and be aware of the emotional content of the words. (This will inspire what comes next, as opposed to getting stuck and inventing what comes next).
  • “We have to go forwards with what we say and do. Don’t go several steps back.”
  • Being positive is work – unless it’s your inspiration.
  • The first line of dialogue doesn’t set the scene, the second line does.
  • “Specifics beget specifics. Once you have a few, it’s easy to find the rest.”
  • “We’re writing using the ink of our voice onto the paper of our partners ears.”
  • “You can say a lie, as long as you say the truth later.”
  • Listen to yourself. You don’t just say things, you say them for a reason.
  • Observe the scene. Don’t just “go forward.” Be mindful. The only time we say that we’re done is when we’re done. We don’t call it ourselves.
  • “Don’t be in a hurry to get there, because it doesn’t get you there any faster.”
  • If you fight it, no-one wins.
  • If it feels different to everything else, play with it.
  • Statement of truth – When you announce it, it’s done! (A statement of truth marks the end of a scene – good cue for an edit).
  • Don’t leave out the middle parts – we need to know details.
  • The audience can pick up subtext.
  • Your scene partner ends where they want you to begin!!!
  • “If you say one thing that doesn’t make sense, you can continue not making sense.”
  • It’s not about finding the first thing interesting. It’s about weighing up everything and choosing the most interesting thing.
  • When responding to your scene partner – is the answer yes or no? Then you will know how to respond to them. The obvious choices become clearer every time.
  • Object Work: Easier to do things, then define rather than vice versa?
  • “If you hold on to point-of-view – it can be written.”
  • “A major part of what I’m asking you to do is have permission to be silly.”

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.