I believe you need hard work to find success and talent just makes the work easier. Success eventually knocks at everyone’s door. But you need the talent to be let in when it comes knocking and you need the work to develop that talent. Additionally, you need the work to keep putting yourself out there and present yourself for when success comes sniffing around. Plus you need to work to maintain and build on that success.
Tag: skill
Sidney Goldstein, Basketball and Improv→
Goldstein has a solid fundamental philosophy on developing basketball skills, one a lot of coaches don’t share. Most coaches recruit and play the best talent available, treat drills as a warm up and think that drawing up plays and running their players in scrimmages will make them better. Goldstein believes any player of any shape or size can learn and develop the skill to do anything with regular, proper practice. Goldstein for example says a 7 footer could learn to crossover dribble and hit a jump shot with practice, and the reason most can’t is because most coaches focus on having them stand near the hoop, rebound, block shots and dunk on people… and thus never teach them those other skills.
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I read through Goldstein’s topics, specifically his Advice to New Coaches, and couldn’t help notice parallels to learning and teaching effective improv. Both basketball and improv are active skill based endeavors that for any preparation has to be done in the moment on the fly, where a combination of execution and creativity determines success.
A Tale of Two Shows→
Despite the grief we give ourselves for poorly timed edits and missed game moves, it’s the other show that matters more. The one about people just making things up as the go. The one about people pushing boundaries, taking risks, experimenting and being brave enough to follow the fun.
This isn’t sketch or theater. The audience knowingly came to see improv. They want to see both kinds of shows. A bunch of people making things up (and sometimes failing) isn’t a bad thing. It’s what makes our art form unique. And when everything comes together, it’s what makes improv seem like magic.
Talent vs. Skill→
You wouldn’t expect a class to just “get” a short form game without explaining the rules, just as you wouldn’t expect someone starting UCB to “get” game without having it broken down. That doesn’t mean some people won’t get it right from the start—whoop dee doo, they’re your Level 1 class star. Big deal. But there’s plenty of people who just need the steps explained and suddenly they’re killing it. On the flip side, they might never get those steps explained and, despite what you can see is a sincere engagement with the process, they can’t seem to do a good scene at a basic level. In my experience in the English and improv classroom, this is almost always due to the teacher not breaking down the process into manageable steps, or, if the process was adequately broken down, the student is trying to “skip steps” and get to the result faster because he thinks that having to work through the steps makes him “dumber” or “less funny,” respectively.
Hoo boy. A big fat yes to this post.
Kevin Scott on the unspoken improviser/audience agreement
[..] part of being an improviser that the audience wants to see is a display of skill that the audience does not have. It’s like watching dancers on Broadway – they want to see someone who can do something that they can’t.
Kevin Scott of Centralia on the unspoken agreement between the audience and an improviser, as heard on Improv Nerd E134.