The Bloodless Coop
Artistic collaboration is a profoundly strange business. Do it right up to the hilt, as it were, and you and your partner will generate a third party. Some thoroughly other. And often one capable of things neither you nor the very reasonable gentleman seated opposite would even begin to consider. Who…is the third who walks beside us?
The improvisation scene is great. The warmth, the inventiveness, the commitment to the craft, the welcoming atmosphere. If you’re reading this, I’m sure you agree.
Only… what scene are we talking about? I’ve found that we think about our scene in terms of our local area, or perhaps stretch it out to include the folk we encounter at the Edinburgh fringe once a year. Of course, we also pay tribute to the big hitters in North America, and some of us are privileged enough to make a pilgrimage out to one Mecca or other ( http://www.loosemoose.com/ ,http://www.secondcity.com/ http://ioimprov.com/ http://www.ucbtheatre.com/ ), but these are necessarily rare events. The thing is, it needn’t be that way. Almost every month of the year, you can stretch your improv horizons outside of the UK. Ladies and gentleman, may I introduce… Europe.
I myself got an introduction through mask-work, a somewhat niche activity that gathers nationalities together for an opportunity to play. (In other words, like in so many areas, I didn’t take the plunge, the plunge took me.) That opened my eyes to just how much activity is going on in Europe, highly accessible to foreigners through a developed festival circuit. A circuit on which you can both encounter celebrated international performers/teachers and be exposed to wonders previously unknown (such as Gregor Moder & Maja Dekleva Lapajne’s wondrous two-prov FM http://www.drama.si/repertoar/fm.html )
Yes, I know. We don’t speak the languages. We don’t like flying. We’re scared of currywurst. Not to worry! Many events, including most of the festivals, use English as their lingua franca. You can take a train or even a bus to a great many locations. And once you get past its gruff exterior, the wurst is a kindly beast.
Here’s a potted description of just some events coming up.
[There must be more stuff going on in summer, but I can’t be speaking to the right people!]
If you find something that takes your fancy, you might want to explore it with your friends, as it’s always fun to share such experiences. But even if you would be flying solo, remember: The improvisation scene is great. The warmth, the inventiveness, the commitment to the craft, the welcoming atmosphere. Go to one of these festivals, and I’m even more certain you’ll agree.
In which me colleague and I talk masculinity, violence, initiation, schooling and sushi.
Liner notes:
Josh Bowman – The Four Types of Men
Wilhelm Reich – The Mass Psychology of Fascism
Alastair MacIntosh – Soil and Soul
Israel Regardie – The Tree of Life
Matthew B Crawford – Shop Class as Soulcraft
(& Alex’s posts on it)
Improv Nonsense: Trying To Win The Scene
Another angle on give and take from Will Hines. Will is focusing on the tone of offers, and how playing by the letter of ‘yes, and’ can belie the attitude underneath: protect my character at any cost.
Saw this in a class:
A: So you hated the dog I bought for you.
B: Yeah, well I already had 4 cats. The dog is going to murder those things. You buy me the worst gifts. You always buy me gifts that just don’t fit.
A: (side coached to say why he bought a dog as a gift) I got you it because I…
No apocalypse! But I enjoyed my apocalypse themed week, which was spent:
And also watching films (Looper, John Carter Ted), drinking whiskey, walking on the beach and having my face licked by an enthusiastic dog, which aren’t apocalyptic per se. But fun.
I played Monster of the Week! It was super fun. A bunch of us have been hanging at the house of some friends in Wales, bedding in for the end of the world with some meditation, movies and munchies. We made characters one nights, and then played out the mystery over the next two. I’m the only regular gamer, and three of the four others had never played before. It was nice to see how easily people got to grips with it. Some poor rolls at the beginning put the game in a bit of a slapstick mode, and we discussed after how the failure rate for the game felt a little high, with futzed magic rolls leading to mess, explosions and helplessness in scene after scene. I do recognise that I could have pushed the use of luck, which was deployed more later in the game; this happened to give a nice failure-to-success arc that made the last session feel gratifying.
As the Keeper, I felt the game looked after me really well. Mystery advice was generally useful, although I think I was making things hard for myself for trying to pull all the character backstory (which really emerged in early play) and feed it into the mystery, as I knew this was likely to be a one-shot and wanted to maximise the pay-offs.
My only area I struggled on was magic. My sense from the rules was that there is no division of playbooks into magic-users and non-magic users, and so in play all but one player elected to Use Magic during the game, generally in high-stakes fight-or-flight situations. At times the use of magic felt like a get-out-of-jail free card, pulling off tricks that were otherwise impossible to do. I knew that I could counter that by upping the criteria involved in the magic, but that tended to feel arbitrary, a form of stomping on the player’s ideas. Yeah, the Expert can dispel the magic that is holding everyone in the air as the police are converging on the room… but it will take several minutes / a rare ingredient to do so. So I generally just acceded to the requests. Demanding an ingredient (sacrificing something alive) at one point led to a flubbed preparedness role by the Expert that nearly killed the momentum of the climactic sequence. In the end it became incredibly cool when the player decided to amputate their finger and get rid of that, but there was a cold moment where no-one wanted to let go of the idea but felt stuck on how to execute it.
The team bested an attempt to reincarnate Y Mab Darogan, the Red Hand of Wales, a saviour predicted to crush the Anglo Saxons, manifested as, yes, a giant red hand. It was a fun finish in the Welsh Millenium Dome, the Spooky tk’ing cables to power up a speaker rig that the Flake ported ‘God Save the Queen’ through to paralyse the Red Hand with its former defeats ‘rung by the horns of the Saxons’, the Expert opening up a dimensional gate for the Summoned to fling it through, with the fallout of trapping forever the Expert’s enlimbo’d lover from her swinging 60’s dark past. The highlight of the game for me was an earlier attempt by the Summoned to cast big magic to find the lair of the Boggart minions, which I stipulated required a boggart skull to do so. The Summoned bulldozes through police lines to the location of their Boggart fight, to snatch a skull and run…. only at that point we all remember how that player beat me into agreement that his final blow in that fight ‘made the monster’s head explode clean off’. Cut back to Summoned laying down defensive fire while scrabbling for pieces of skull fragment embedded in the floor and walls…
Dec 2012
I had a fun chat on Google Plus last month with a few gamers about different approaches to managing successes and failures in the fiction. The conversation was originally framed around roleplaying games but I was invited in to talk about improvisation. How do we mediate ‘giving and taking’: who gains advantage or disadvantage in a situation or narrative? Glancing back over it it seemed worth sharing, with a bit of tidy-up. Here you go.
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Although improvisation and gaming have fundamentally different agendas – in brief, the distinction between playing just for the experience vs with the aim of including an audience – ‘give and take’ is relevant to both. For now let’s just look at this in terms of character success; obviously there are other even more crucial things to give and take, like focus, space to develop ideas, spotlighting and endowing one character or another.
The clearest example of ‘refusing to give’ is when performers are unwilling to get their character in trouble. I saw some clear instances of that at an improv show recently, the defensive instinct where unconsciously we see risk to the character as risk to yourself. None of us are totally immune. In every style of improvisation it’s vital to get past that, but the ways in which we give and take are going to differ from style to style.
In narrative-focused play, the ratio of give to take may depend very much on the role your character plays in the narrative – we are probably enjoying seeing the ‘big bad’ be successful and fearsome earlier in the story, but later their invulnerability is likely to be up for grabs. A stand-alone scene with a high-status character may have them ruling the roost for two minutes and then we want to see them toppled.
In game-style play (associated most strongly now with the UCB) it’s possible for the give and take to become hardwired into the scene. Once an action has been determined to have consequences, it will continue to do so rather than fizzling out because that is the pattern of play thus defined. Example from one of our rehearsals: the loafing paleontology grad student will continue to find fossils wherever he sticks his shovel, to the disbelief of his professor, whose string of certificates have never resulted in a successful find….because that is the pattern we are exploring in this scene. When grad student gives – “Oh… nothing here!” – then we have jumped tracks into a different style of play (no bad thing, but doesn’t negate the point).
In more Chicago-style slice-of-life play, my sense is that give and take (in terms of character success) is driven much more by the implications for relationships. In fact, the give and take is the relationship. Example from a recent Alex and Julia show:
J “I feel our sex life was more exciting at the beginning."
Me "But it was awkward! Now we’ve settled into a groove. You have sex, you come. It’s nice!"
J "Exactly. Nice. Which isn’t the total of what sex can be.”
The last point is weighty, so I let it land instead of quibbling. You could see that as a form of success. We allow this established fact to have significance and move forward, ok so our sex is nice but that’s not enough for her. What does that say about her, and what does that mean about our relationship? So it’s a success with consequences, that we then explore (I start to see her as a specimen collector of sexual experiences).
Outside of the relationship, other successes/failures aren’t trivial (do I command my environment or am I frustrated by every bottle I try and open?) as these serve to ground the situation in detail and give life to the characters. But the ones that serve the relationship dynamic are key, and at this stage in my development I can’t see any rules of thumb around them: every choice to give or take moves the relationship into new territory that can be richly explored if you are honest and true to the characters and the established situation.
I know it feels like we’re on a drum roll…. I’m so sorry.
What can I say, I love drummers. Always fascinated by the complexity of what they do, generally in service to the wider sound. Core to the rhythm section, unarmed with melody, giving shape to the piece. I’ve seen David King play three or four times and not only is he incredible, the simple joy emanating from him behind the kit is inspiring. He’s a child given the one toy he is after, and like any child he doesn’t play with it as you are supposed to: I’ve seen him caress the skins with a football rattle, explore every edge of the drum carriages, drawn by intuition into any contact that moves him.
He’s playing, pure and simple.
While we’re on video, this is the most awesome thing.
That guy, what he’s feeling? We’ve got that inside of each and every one of us. The trick is to find out how we can let it out.
Oh, this was via @robgrundel
Funny thing about having improvisation on video. In many ways it’s totally inadequate. But it’s still a tool that can be incredibly valuable for evaluation and a reminder of what you want out of the form.
Here’s a case in point. It’s several years old – considerably older than the 2010 upload dates – but it’s always been a fond scene for me. I’d suggest watching it and then hear my post-mortem…
OK, scalpel out.
First, it begins from nothing. We’re just looking at each other, mirroring a slight contortion in each others’ faces, and James gives me an arbitrary action as an offer. I like this – it’s one of my favorite things about improvisation when rolling well.
Second, I say what I see. The contorted faces and the rhythmic movement spur the words “Physical therapy” from me. This is not a light choice – it’s harder to hear on video, but I remember an intake of breath at that point, at the prospect that we’re going to do a scene about stroke or palsy rehabilitation. I like this too.
Third, we don’t go there. I fix it, by putting this in the context of a revision of many types of therapy. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I believe strongly that improvisers do ultimately have a responsibility for what they put out there on stage. I don’t believe it’s ok to perform a scene that displays and reinforces prejudice, and then shrug and hold ‘spontaneity’ as your excuse. On the other hand, you can find pathos and indeed comedy in a scene about rehabilitation; there would have to be a lot justified (who are we to each other, why are we standing up and both looking so bemused) but there could be richness in it. Granted, I’d been performing outside of classes for just a few months at this point, but if I came up against this choice now I hope I would go with it.
Fourth, we find some differentiation, mainly in status. James plays naive fool (in his peerless way) and I play a bit more upwardly mobile, a little straighter. I like this, it’s not obligatory but it adds texture to the scene.
Fifth, we find some physical patterns that we can return to. Thinking about this, the physicality is inspired from the initiation of the scene, the somewhat gormless postures and arbitrary movement. Our failed high-fives, our confusion about the seating, and the general tentative body responses when tested. It’s not really ‘game of the scene’ stuff because it’s not quite specific enough, but it is a sensibility that infuses the scene and I quite like it.
Sixth, we have a game of naming therapies. I ID it and then James plays it exquisitely. One interesting feature of this scene, and the kind of thing I like to puzzle over after the fact: some would say the game is enough, and that additional content just dilutes the essence of the scene. I’m not sure I agree (see below) but I can definitely see occasions in this video where the game pattern could be played with even more, and is ignored in the aim of ‘pressing on’ in some way. As I say, James is bang on it, he has a great intuition for this stuff.
Seventh, we create some story around the situation. The therapy game is placed in a fuller context, there are stakes, character aspirations. I’m pretty happy with this, I feel it gives a bit of a richness, opens up and specifies the scene a bit more and gives us other dimensions to play with. However, it risks hitting Exposition Mode, and is not as effortlessly playful as the first part of the scene. Could we have just stuck with the games? Maybe. I’ll stick to my guns and say that elaboration of character and relationship – even when you have a game going – is often a useful way to go. Which is not to say it can’t be done more smoothly than in this case.
Eighth, we have a potential status reversal in a callback to aromatherapy (that Dewi correctly intuits is a wonderful offer). This is interesting. I’ve been leaning over James in status at points, particularly when it came to his inability to name that particular therapy. So in principle, my forgetting it is a chance to find the ‘point’ of the scene, maybe see his character blossom, and mine learn some humility. But it didn’t quite go that way, and I think part of it is that I’d not kept enough of that status separation: in the joy of returning to those comedic patterns such as stumbling physicalities, I think the two characters joined to enough of a degree that it just felt better to keep going with it.
So keep looking for something from nothing, be provoked by your partner, notice patterns and extend them. Find what makes your character, be prepared to change. My big two takeaways from reviewing this are firstly, to hold on to my character’s shit a little more. And secondly, to be aware of when I am looking to shape or fix the scene rather than being swept up within it – see 3, 6/7. It’s not a perennial sin but it’s something I do notice, and it’s less fun than Being There. Most of all, I shouldn’t be seeing it as my responsibility alone. Direction will emerge between me and my scene partners, after all.
