Sunday (9/30/07) 11:48pm - ... wherein Peter reports on how improv is going.
I thought I'd let people know how things were going w/r/t my gradual resumption of improv.
Some historical background: the first time I did improv was in late 2000.
When I first moved to Austin,
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hangingfire was pretty much the only person I knew, and I felt kind of at loose ends for finding stuff to do. Occasionally I'd see a movie with my coworkers. I was tentatively trying to swing dance (and oh god I was such an awful lead when I started out). And, after looking around on the Internet for stuff to do in Austin, I went to a few improv shows at the Hideout.Later on, the Hideout announced they were teaching improv, and I wound up in the Hideout's first improv class. Shana was teaching. Shannon McCormick, who's gone on to do lots of cool stuff (No Shame, Backpack Picnic, that Dell thing) was a fellow student, IIRC. I met
apthorpe in their level two class. Most everyone else from those first classes has left improv or left Austin, or both.I progressed through their classes. After our level-three class finished up, we all got glommed into the house troupe to perform Micetro. I kept doing Micetros for a few years, but I never really progressed as an improviser. I only ventured once into long-form -- an improvised slasher movie for Halloween 2002.[1] I think I only directed Micetro once.
And around 2004, the scene got a little moribund. The community and the audience both dwindled. Personally, I was getting sick of it, as detailed here. Shortly after the 2004 Out of Bounds Improv Festival, I bailed.
Shortly after I left, the local scene exploded. The Austin Improv Collective started up, and fomented the formation of a dozen or so local troupes. A year after that, Coldtowne moved here from New Orleans, and founded a second improv theater behind I Luv Video.
For the last year or two, I'd figured I should give improv another shot, both because the community was so vibrant and because I felt a little more in touch with my priorities (executive summary: I'm cool with just having a good time and not making the most amazingest improv in the history of everything).
Occasionally I tried to dip my toe back in the water.
apthorpe and bowlofmo put together an ad hoc troupe for one of the Hideout's Friday-night half-hour slots, but I bailed out of that when I found out I couldn't rehearse with the troupe. No way was my first improv in three years going to be done in front of a paying audience.I wanted to find some way to get back into the improv scene without doing anything that stressful.
Last month, I mentioned this on the blog, and
ripresa pointed out that the Hideout was putting on regular Tuesday-night rehearsals[2]. This was what they were doing in lieu of Micetro rehearsals: improvisors from around town would just show up on Tuesday night, do a bunch of warm-up exercises, and then put on a fake show -- no audience, just entertaining one another.This sounded ideal, so I gave it a shot. I drove back from a voiceover gig in Kyle (for a political ad recorded for broadcast in Alaska, but that's another story), and stopped in at the jam for an hour or so. I immediately volunteered for a simple game, one of those improv short forms based on hosting a dinner party. There are several variations on this: people show up to your dinner party as celebrities, and you have to guess who they are; they show up with quirks, and you have to guess the quirks; or (in this case) they show up with emotions, and you all just play your emotions to the hilt.
Ironically, I was given the emotion "confused". In any case, I practically had to stop myself from shaking from nerves. Not a proud moment. I did horrible space work, told jokes that failed, and generally did about the worst job I could do.
It was good, in a way. It put a floor on how bad things could get. And there I was, still alive and feeling decent about things. I bailed a bit early from the rehearsal, and headed off to the Fed convinced I had made the right choice.
I've been attending the Tuesday-night rehearsals regularly since then. Wes Bain, whom I mentioned favorably in that "Cops and Lawyers" review last year[3], has been running them, and he finds good scenework exercises to work through. Dav Wallace, who got his start in Theatersports, knows more about the game end of improv.
At first, I kind of hated the gamey stuff -- any setup that requires me to play charades in any capacity feels like a waste of my time -- but we're starting to pick up some very useful tips on how to handle game setups. For example: there are many setups that require you to re-run a short scene several times -- the most common version of this has you do a scene in several different film or TV styles, but there are other variations. In such a setup, you want to make a short scene with several clear 'marks' -- memorable actions, lines, or bits of information -- that you can hit *every time you do the scene*, regardless of how you alter it.
(We did an excercise on this, and I completely hit the wall. But I at least know what I'm doing wrong now.)
Wes has also started up Saturday-morning improv rehearsals at various parks around town. I made it to the first one -- it was just three of us. More people would have showed, but there was a big, rowdy, and lengthy after-party for a local troupe's hundredth show.
But we met at the park and did exercises about character. I absolutely suck at creating characters onstage. I watch somebody like Troy walk onstage with a distinct voice, physicality, and manner, and I just want to curl into a ball out in the wings. Me, I just show up as me, perhaps sounding a bit more definitive about things than usual, maybe throwing in some clichéd affectation of old age or a bad accent.
But one learns not to suck by practice, so I went into the exercises as best as I could. The most memorable one was at a nearby sand-volleyball court. First off, imagine three people playing a mimed volleyball game. Second, imagine each person playing as multiple characters -- one person portrays three players on team A; one peson portrays three players on team B; and the third person portrays two characters on each team.
NOW, imagine every character has his/her own name, physicality, and voice. And finally, imagine that every time you hit the (mime) ball, you give the name of the person you're hitting it to.
Again, I borked the game pretty bad (I was the third person, and couldn't remember for the life of me which teams my various players were on), but I had fun failing. Mainly, it shows me something new to work on, if I'm feeling ambitious.
So that's how the free rehearsals have gone.
There was also a $20 workshop last weekend about Micetro. Honestly, I didn't get much out of it. There was some lecture material that covered stuff I mostly knew already. (Especially the teacher's main point: it's not about winning the game, it's about putting on a good show for the audience.) We did some exercises that were pleasant enough, but none of it really went anywhere.
Frankly, I don't have a lot of faith in improv pedagogy. I think instructors are good at teaching students the basic principles: don't block, always listen, make offers, and accept that you're going to fail 99% of the time.
Learning those principles -- not mastering them, not 100% understanding them, just learning what they are and working with them a bit -- makes newbie improvisors get substantially better. Beyond that? As far as I could tell, everybody plateaued, and the people who succeeded at improv were the people who were engaging performers when they walked in the door the first day.
And I'm not saying that teaching improv is useless. Instead, I believe that teaching improv beyond a certain basic level is very difficult. You can draw an analogy between improv and cancer. (Bear with me a moment.) The main research in cancer right now comes from the realization that cancer is not one disease -- it's hundreds of distinct disease pathways that lead to the same sort of pathology. Similarly, 'knowing how to do improv' isn't just one skill. It's hundreds of smaller skills, from being able to remember somebody's name to being able to effectively mime mixing a drink.
And I think, to learn improv effectively, you have to diagnose what specific things you're weak on, and then drill the hell out of those things. The former rarely happens because people are too polite to critique, and the latter rarely happens because nailing one tiny little skill can be dull as hell. So most classes are kind of vague, "here are some exercises you might find fun" affairs that don't accomplish much in the long run.
I guess I sort of delivered my rant about this back in 2003. The only thing that's changed these days is that I'm not too worked up about getting better at improv. I mainly just want to have a good time and occasonially prod my brain into doing something creative. So I doubt I'll be doing many classes or workshops.
After attending several free rehearsals and going to the Micetro workshop, I decided to volunteer to help out with this past Saturday's Micetro show. I got assigned sound and lights, so I got there early and tried to reacquaint myself with the stage-lighting board.[4] I also spent a little time warming up with the cast.
They had some warm-up games I'd never seen, and I remembered that I hate "Song Spot". "Song Spot" is a game where the improvisors get in a circle, and someone jumps in the center and starts singing a song. Whoever else knows the song sings along. After some length of time, someone in the circle switches out with the person in the center and sings a different song. And so on.
Mostly, this game reminds me that (1) I don't know a lot of lyrics, (2) I listen to too much obscure pop music, and (3) I know jack about radio hits. Usually (2) and (3) make me feel all cool and hipsterish ("No I didn't listen to the radio in the 80s! because I valued my soul!"), but in "Song Spot", it's just annoying and isolating.
Anyway, being the sound and lighting imp was fun. Unlike in 2003, I had a laptop this time, so I brought that in and made everyone listen to a Jay-Z/Futurama-theme mashup. I botched things here and there. The worst was when Sara Farr tried to end a scene while I was busy chasing down a scene-appropriate song ("My Best Friend's Girl", the Cars) on my laptop's filesystem -- she ended up staring out at the audience for several seconds, waiting for a blackout that never happened.
The other Big Improv Thing is that I went to the first rehearsal for the Hideout's "Improvised Shakespeare" show, due to go up in (maybe) February 2008. This is a long form, where a group of improvisors come up with an hour-and-a-half-long show in the style of William Shakespeare, spouting iambic pentameter off the top of their heads, and involving as many classic conventions of Shakespearean drama as they can pilfer from the poor Bard.
I was an English major when I was young, and satisfied most of the degree requirements by attending various drama classes, including a couple semesters of Shakespeare. On top of that, I did the annual Baker Shakespeare production three times (Parolles, Don John, Leontes) and have occasionally gone back to poke at various plays since then.
There are lots of places that do Improvised Shakespeare. Perhaps the most respected such troupe is the Improv Olympic in San Francisco, who did a long-form Shakespeare show for Out of Bounds. (I saw the start of it, bailed early to go to the Soul Jam, and nearly collided with improvisor Dan O'Connor as he performed a scene in the main aisle. Oop-la.) And frankly, I've always wondered if I can do it. I feel like I have a knack for poetic language, I know more about how Shakespearean lines are put together than is perhaps healthy, and I can improvise passably on a good day. So when that first rehearsal was announced, I quietly pencilled it into my schedule.
The first rehearsal was a blast -- we ran some scenes in little groups (*misses Shakespearaoke*), did some exercises to get us used to the 'wall of verbiage' that Shakespearean genre work requires[5], extemporized simple soliloquys about household objects, came up with arbitrary metaphors[6], practiced translating modern English into Shakespearean English[7], and then did some broader analyses on the large-scale structure of several Shakespearean plays. (Our group chose Measure for Measure, 'cos we were obscure like that.)
The group of improvisors that showed up to the first rehearsal was really damn talented. And it was humbling to see that several of them easily out-classed me on Shakespeare knowledge. Not that I'm King of Shakespeare Mountain or anything, but I keep forgetting how many dedicated English major/theater geeks we have in the local improv scene. It ought to be a good show, when it finally comes around. In the meantime, I've got another activity to keep me out of trouble.
(Side note: for at least the next month, these Shakespeare rehearsals are open to absolutely anybody, so feel free to join the fun.)
So all in all I'd say things are humming along nicely. I'm meeting a whole new group of people that have gotten into the scene in the years after I quit, and they strike me as genial and talented. I'm getting to improvise several times a week, and I'm finding I haven't *completely* forgotten how to do this.
Most importantly, I'm having fun. And that's really why I'm here, anyway.
[1] I still to this day tell the anecdote about trying (and failing) to get out of rehearsal early by using every horror trope I could think of to get my character killed. ("Let me just finish up this joint, and I'll go check out the scary noise!" And yet, nobody would kill me.)
[2] The local improvisors refer to this as "the Tuesday-night jam". I refused to call it a 'jam'. 'Jam' just makes it sound wanky and stupid.
[3] I was amused to learn that in the six hours before I remembered to friendslock that review, local improvisors were already forwarding it around to each other. Oop-la!
[4] I'd forgotten that I myself wrote a guide to running lights at the Hideout. Ah, well. It was over four years ago.
[5] 'cos think about it -- how many silent scenes have you watched in Shakespeare productions? It's all built from dialog. Constant, constant dialog.
[6] This was fun: two people got on stage. The first would say, "my love is like <random object>", and explain why; the second would say "my love is like <different random object>", and explain why; the first would then describe some action involving both objects, and it would almost by necessity serve as an interesting metaphor.
[7] Another fun one: we got in a circle. Person #1 would tell person #2 something in modern English; person #2 would repeat it back in a Shakespearean idiom. Person #2 would then tell person #3 something in modern English, and so on and so on.
I gave Andy Crouch a Windows error message to translate. (I grinned; he didn't.) It didn't occur to me later that I *should* have said, "Who's the black private dick who's a sex machine with all the chicks?" That's how it is with brilliant ideas, I suppose.
Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/niaha/kitty/ankhappyg.gif){kind=small} optimistic · Music: none |
