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street conflict. [g+ backpost]

I just wrote a witness statement for something that happened tonight, and remembering in the mists of time on other forums (eg IWKFAM) some people sharing this kind of stuff for general usage, thought I’d post it on to people. I probably don’t want this shared but if there is anything usable in it for any reason do ask. Also, I’m interested in any advice from people on other things that could be done in that situation to minimise risk and harm. I’m fairly happy with how I handled it, but it’s always good to be better equipped.

“I’m walking on left hand side of the road. Nearing the estate I hear a female voice saying ‘get the fuck out of my car’.

I glance over and get the sense of a door opening – I think the back door facing me (car in drive facing towards  road X, making that the back right). I look away and back and this time the woman is out the car grappling with the man, who pushes her to the floor with him on top and begins punching her around the head area (possibly landing to the shoulders/neck, but certainly focusing on that upper area).

I begin running over and scream get off of her several times, passing the car (I think on its left flank, eg passing to the right) to be behind him. I continue screaming and engage by wrapping my arms around his upper body and restricting his movement. I am looking around and there are two men on the far side of the street (where I began) who I try to alert with helps, and another man on the near side whose attention is gained more quickly and begins to approach, but slowly.

They separate a little, and he spins around and I back well away, hands placatory and saying sorry, sorry, and he turns back to her and begins engaging again at which point I take the same position. I am struck several times – possibly some the first round – certainly from her kicks, directed in our general direction. I am unsure whether he strikes me substantially. He is wheeling his hands against me and my head is struck at one point.

The individual man has gotten within reaching distance but is not engaging, and the two men are finally approaching, although with no obvious desire to get close. Eventually the two separate, and he is focused on me again. He shouts something and seems to change target so I scream I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I just don’t want anyone to be hurt, over and over. He seems unsure and meanwhile she enterst the car and closes the door and it begins to move. he approaches the door but she is on her way now, so he turns back again [from this point my sense is the car leaves the scene entirely but I can’t be sure, as my focus is on the threat] and shouts ‘who grabbed me?’ at which point all the bystanders back off. My route out is cut off by his position, so I take a few steps and then vault the low fence and run down [my] road at full speed until my lungs hurt too much, and see that I am not pursued. I keep moving, walking the running, until I reach home. “

The take-aways for me were to alternate between action when it was needed – when he was trying to harm her – and extreme submission cues to reduce the risk of escalating the situation and bringing harm to myself. It seemed to work ok. It helped though that he was pretty off his face.

Shins are sore but my lungs have calmed down, and a few hours have passed and no shock symptoms. I pretty much ran on adrenaline throughout, which was handy. I’m running a bath now! 

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Playing with your voice

Julia has been back in London, and we managed to cram together a string of shows, from awkward to joyous. We learned a lot.

Firstly, a reminder that improvisation is all about connection. As well as raw time spent together, we managed to fit in two rounds of contact improvisation and pulled some solid rehearsals, which began after the first two (awkward) shows and took us to a good place together, with better performances as a consequence

One of those later, fun shows was a duo set at Hoopla’s crash pad, where we performed Postcards from the Edge, something we tried in Marburg and inspired by Moon’s Pocket, a show we watched on our arrival to the Würzburg festival. The form is sitting really well with us now, and I’m hungry to get back to it. My learning from that show was if you honestly talk about sex it is the best kind of funny.

The other two shows we trio’d, the first with Ed Bennett in a family gathering form we’ve toyed with before and the other with Brandon again, a montage begun with a painting of a two-dimensional picture at stage front. The former was simply wild fun, with the three of us in hysterics after finishing the show, the second had some magical moments, from slow discoveries to gentle monologues to steamrollering our scene partner (yes I did but it’s ok).

My learning from those is just how important voice is for me to get out of my head and be active. In the family gathering opening scene, when I opened my mouth I made an arbitrary choice to sound Russian. Now, I’m not good at accents. I want to be better, am even doing accent classes, but I know it’s not a strength. And my Russian simply wasn’t good enough to be pleasing as an offer in itself: I could feel it from the audience after a few lines, an almost disappointment ‘oh. It’s an accent but not really, and not in of itself funny’. And I could feel the pressure to drop it, to accept that I’m not delivering something useful there, but stuck with it.

One thing to note is that as the character became more familiar across the show and his turns of phrase became reused, then something that wasn’t funny became funny-ish and then plain fun. Stick with your details and give your audience the gift of familiarity. But my main point is what the voice did for me. It took me out of my head. How?

Firstly, a booming, clipped and jolly diction is simply distinct from myself naturally. When I use my natural voice, the voice that I buy chips with and talk to customer service reps with and probably have anxious thoughts about improvisation with, I’m holding my own identity close. A different voice doesn’t so readily cue those memories, and once the character has started rolling the voice will cue character memories, which are far more useful. As a case in point, my Russian had at least three games running (talking about life on a Gym Ship, finding wisdom in Dumpling-making, and preferring to examine people indirectly through a mirror) and I never felt myself trying to remember any of them, they just kept returning.

Secondly, the voice was strong and diaphragmatic. I’ve done Trance Mask work for coming up to four years now, and it’s clear there that the state of effortless trance that the masks allow you to discover is accessed in part through bodily vibrations from the sound that each mask possesses. In a sense, simply speaking louder gets you some of the way there – which is what I discovered in the steamroller scene I played with Brandon, and is akin to Christian’s scene mentioned elsetumblr. Even more fundamentally, the quieter you are the more inward you are retreating, and the louder the more you approach and mix yourself with the outside world.

A final caveat to myself. Julia reminded me afterwards that techniques such as voice, physicality and stream of consciousness (which we rehearsed heavily to great benefit – do it if you can!) were just one approach to staying out of your head, with another being to simply be present and not want anything, just let it come. I know that’s true – we had found that on stage the day before – but I can easily find myself worrying that I’m not giving enough to my partner, or indeed the audience, if I’m not bringing at least a specific energy to the stage, if not a more explicit offer. Devolution into ‘you-first’ improv, essentially, the crime of the polite English. The fact that I’m resisting this evident second wisdom as being so useful to me makes it certain that I need to approach it more, and be, shall we say, present in active emptiness.

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To Marburg, to play.

On the back of the Würzburg festival, Fast Forward Theatre generously invited Julia and I to join their stage in Marburg. FFT’s Martin and Christian run a show in an endearing, wood-stove heated box room, playing with different formats week on week. Julia and I took 25 minutes in the first half to do a twoprov that kicked off with something between an organic opening and Matthieu Loos/Marko Mayerl’s matter-working image approach: intuitively finding a physicality/action onstage and allowing your observing partner to name and make sense of it. We then moved into a series of scenes. It was interesting and I think a nice gentle start to the night, but there are definitely things we are learning about playing together: we have a tendency to slide into realism very quickly and although this can be refreshing sometimes the playfulness can be sidelined, in spite of how much we enjoy it. We chewed this over the next day pretty comprehensively; one of the things I love about working with Julia is that we can love the work but also talk about it objectively and robustly.

We checked in on the crowd at the top of the show as to whether some English in the show would be ok, and although they gave no objections, we were all aware that it was an indulgence that shouldn’t be taken too far. Accordingly, the rest of the show was entirely non-English language. The native speakers ran a fun narrative set together, and in the second half we did a series of short-form games. Given that prior to August my German language was pretty much limited to wunderkind, kartopfelkopf and danke, and is only dimly beyond that now, this was a fun first for me. As I suspected, the restrictions perversely freed me up, urging me to bigger characters, more physicality and strong, raw emotions. It was a ton of fun and seemed to delight the audience, proving the Johnstonian maxim that impro audiences are happy paying money to see people screw up good naturedly on-stage.

Links:

Würzburg fest

Fast Forward Theatre

Matthieu and Marko, whose Moon’s Pocket is a lovely show you should catch when you can, as they now live in different cities (and also in France).

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“That’s right. I’m a one-legged seagull, all fucked up! All because of PLASTIC!!”

October sees the Würzburg Improfestival, this year its eleventh and my second. It was a chance to study with wonderful international teachers – Patti Stiles and Matthieu Loos, in my case – reunite with a core of my Improv Olympic cohort and enjoy playing together again, and to socialise with the wonderful, diverse body of attendees, including old friends from last year and others not seen since Canada in 2010. Oh! The shows! From wonderfully dishevelled cabaret-style chat to long-form reinventions, together with time-honoured formats…I enjoyed it a lot. (I also got myself back into the lighting booth for a few of them, which was tremendous fun.) If nothing else, consider this me urging you to go next year.

I caught a Micestro show during my stay, which was a great example of the form at its best: bitty in parts, sluggish early on, but building in confidence and playfulness to a glorious end; a great arc to the evening. The wonderful Filipe Ortiz came out top, with a solo prison break scene that will forever stick in my memory, but another scene moves me to write. Christian Capozzoli of NYC’s 4track, was called up along with Jim Libby, a top-rate improviser I’ve seen before in Wurzburg and at the London impro festival, and I was looking forward to seeing in action here. But in the scene that followed, Jim didn’t get to say a thing. Really, didn’t get to do a thing. Christian steamrollered the scene. And it was brilliant.

Let me unpack. The scene was a police interrogation, and Christian was the cop. He began talking, a tough mouthy new york plainclothes, establishing a situation that was pretty close to the bone – Jim was under suspicion of murdering children in a theme restaurant  ball pond. You could kind of feel in the room this sense of ‘we’re going there?’, but Christian stuck with it, and kept talking rat-a-tat at Jim, and… it started to become apparent that this OTT cop was enough for a scene, and Christian knew it and was feeling happy and good about it being that, and that he saw that Jim was being overwhelmed but in a fun way. And that he realised that he could give his partner a ride on the crazy train.

Then it just kicked off. All the emotional tonal switches in the scene that prevent it being monotone? Christian was good cop and bad cop moment to moment, beseeching then outraged. All the content he generated got fed back into the next round, feeding himself constantly in a stream of consciousness that stopped making sense and became cut-up poetry in interrogation format. Plastic drinking cups led to the murderous plastic of the ball pond, and on to beach creatures maimed by 6-pack connectors, to later him delivering his righteous smackdown in the voice (and flapping, ridiculous gait) of the one-legged seagull.

And as this went on, what was Jim doing? Corpsing like crazy. Every muscle of his body was convulsing as Christian brought the ridulousness up notch after notch, rabid and careening in his face. It looked like torture: pure, blissed-out torture.

If you can delight your partner more by breaking every rule, do that. Jim had a great, active show, but I’m sure he had the best time in that scene where he didn’t have to do a thing.

Links:

Würzburg Improfestival

My teachers there, Patti Stiles and Matthieu Loos

Filipe Ortiz and La Gata impro

Christian Capozzoli 

Jim Libby and the English Lovers

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Back from Germany

Some delayed reports from my trip to Germany at the end of October follow. The visit was partly for leisure but also to return to some sources of inspiration and connection in the improv world.

Yesterday [and a month] I co-facilitated a lovely little impro playshop with Julia Pöhlmann in her home town. It was a little off the cuff and with a modest group size – just two wonderful students! – but it was great to work with beginners again after a while working with performers as coach or peer-practitioner.

While it evolves at each encounter, my teaching framework is becoming more and more solid. It’s really just an expression of what I reckon as the fundamentals of the art. It helps me make sense of why games are useful, and why some exercises seem in themselves sufficient to elicit good scenes, whereas others feel more like laser-focused techniques that attend to one thing well, but aren’t enough to equip a beginner to play through a scene.

It was also my first time teaching out of English! Well, i mostly spoke English but the scenes and some of the warmups were in German. It really kept me aware and conscious of how the scene felt, and i was happy that my sidecoaching appeared to fit what the scene genuinely needed. Julia did a great job translating my ideas and providing her own, ran great sessions and kept the temperature of the session really well.

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I take my cue from technology historian George Dyson, who argues that, from the perspective of the real world, the digital universe is accelerating rapidly but, from the view of the digital universe, the biological world is slllllooooowwwwwiiing doooowwwwn. Since we humans are amphibians and live in both universes, we are being torn by acceleration on one side and deceleration on the other. That sounds rough, but it’s actually pretty exciting.

Stewart Brand, interviewed by Kevin Kelly.

Quote entirely lifted from Matt Jones’ amazing blog Magical Nihilism

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sinful characters [g+ backpost]

Hi gaming peeps

(I’ve just added back a bunch of people into my gaming circle – if you aren’t into that, please let me know.)

I’m toying around with a little technique to develop interesting characters that I’d love to get feedback on. I haven’t formally tested it yet, though it grew out of things I do semi-consciously on occasion. Also, I’m particularly interested in this as a stage technique for improvisation shows, and it may feel less useful/needed in some rpg contexts. But I reckon it may be relevant for any on-the-fly character generation.

This is intended to mitigate 1-D characters by dipping into charged and easily accessible human qualities, or as these are typically termed, sins.

The seven sins – wrath, pride, gluttony, lust, greed, envy and sloth – are fairly accessible in Western J-C culture. So what happens when we mindfully use them as a palette to paint our characters in, together with a set of guidelines for the kinds of results you are likely to get? I think fun happens! Here are the guidelines:

1. Different combinations encourage different roles

You want someone who performs a social role in the story/situation, but with a bit of definition:

A flawed paragon is markedly prone to a single sin

Examples: the priest who is pious but lazy, the artist who is selfless but obsessed with the greatness of their sacrifices.

You want someone who is pretty horrible – a real heel – but want to accent their self-indulgence with some iron discipline

A disciplined badass has several sins but is totally immune to one or more.

Examples: the greedy, wrathful priest who can never be tempted by sex, the artist harping on and undermining the success of others, too lazy to achieve it on his own merit, but cannot be bought off by any amount of coin.

You want someone who is colourful, you kind of hate them but just when you make your mind up you love them again.

A big-hearted scoundrel has several sins but also exhibits the polar opposite of one sin, to the extent that it kind of redeems them.

Examples: the lustful, lazy priest who desires the best for others at the end of the day, the artist perpetually drunk, full of pride, and wallops anyone who doesn’t appreciate expressionism, but is respectful, diligent, even courteous to the opposite sex.

(This is my favourite and the reason I started making this stuff explicit, after reading John Berger on Rembrandt: ‘no saint’, indeed)

2. Different specific sins have a different emphasis on plot vs immediacy

Firstly let’s unpack the sins a bit more. To my mind,

 –   Wrath can include irritation at small things, and great roaring enjoyable anger cf Mark Rylance in Jerusalem, a bellowing Falstaff.

 –   Pride can involve suffering when other people see the world other than how you do – eg how Roger Ebert probably feels about McG’s success.

 –   Gluttony includes boozing, drugs, all vices of consumption.

 –   Lust isn’t merely desiring sex but any example of objectification of other people.

 –   Greed involves any material advancement, including ambition/getting status. The ‘lawyer sin’, reptilian, whereas pride is more peacock, where you really believe it and can easily be wounded.

 –   Envy includes any wishing-ill on others, general grumpiness and zero-sum attitudes towards life (those immigrants get all the social housing!)

 –   Sloth encompasses laziness, unhelpfulness, and demandingness to others (clean my teeth for me!) – a classic nasty Master sin, for those familiar with the Keith Johnstone improv set-up.

So what’s this about emphasis?

The first two are energetic and egoistic. They make the character grow out and show themselves, their sensitivities and buttons to push.

The next two involve approach and physicality. They make characters approach immediate components of the world and grab things (or people) within reach.

The next two are more tactical and scheming. They might involve grabbing things within reach but can be a little more abstract, and execution is often a bit more considered. Think Iago.

To my mind, the first two are great, and the third can be tricky, risking putting players in their heads for the ‘right’ way to get their goals. Compare with Be Angry Now/Get My Mack On.

What about Sloth? To me, it’s a bit of a wild-card. On a stage, played well, inactivity can heighten immediacy and perversely, make stuff happen. This is trivially true if the character has a high status – the king that requires the retinue to carry him to his horse, or delegates all the important decisions to his page – but also for ordinarily low-status roles: the stable-girl who never carries out the orders of the (highly-strung) head of household. No surprise, really, who can care less is status, after all…

But! I think this may play very differently at a game table, where an inactive character can be genuinely forgotten about.

3. How it works

For me, the notion is simply to walk on stage, find reasons to exhibit a sin or two, and then elaborate on these in the context of your role in the story (find a reversal to show your scoundrel’s heart, for instance).

That’s it as it stands. I’d love to hear your thoughts, both from a tabletop and Larp perspective.

Nov 2012

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Play With Intent – tools for open play

I’m super excited that Emily Care Boss  and Matthijs Holter have released their roleplay framework, Play With Intent, as an open document. It’s a customisable methodology that helps us make up a story as we go along. It can be used in a way similar to ‘tabletop’ play – sitting around a table and describing events – but encompasses acting out events live, using mime objects and environments, cinematic techniques (‘cut to…’) and so on. For improvisers it will feel familiar in some ways to what we normally do, but it can go to very different places and is forgiving of lack of improvisation training.

I played with it twice at the Solmukohta convention in Finland earlier this year, and it was a blast – particularly the first session, pulling off an involving melodrama between a group of people who hadn’t played before, going to emotional places and forming a truly unexpected but coherent narrative, played live before each other. Much credit must go to the other players, of course, but that was the point where I became satisfied that the framework is much more than a set of training wheels for improvisation.

After playing with it I became fascinated with the customisability, and wrote some notes on  comedic techniques that Emily and Matthijs have built into the framework. Fun! They are mostly taken from improvisation and clown training, and simplified as much as we were able. But comedy is only a small part of what we’re capable of, so have a look, and be ambitious with your imagination.

Play With Intent is freely available here.

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Play With Intent – tools for open play

I’m super excited that Emily Care Boss  and Matthijs Holter have released their roleplay framework, Play With Intent, as an open document. It’s a customisable methodology that helps us make up a story as we go along. It can be used in a way similar to ‘tabletop’ play – sitting around a table and describing events – but encompasses acting out events live, using mime objects and environments, cinematic techniques (‘cut to…’) and so on. For improvisers it will feel familiar in some ways to what we normally do, but it can go to very different places and is forgiving of lack of improvisation training.

I played with it twice at the Solmukohta convention in Finland earlier this year, and it was a blast – particularly the first session, pulling off an involving melodrama between a group of people who hadn’t played before, going to emotional places and forming a truly unexpected but coherent narrative, played live before each other. Much credit must go to the other players, of course, but that was the point where I became satisfied that the framework is much more than a set of training wheels for improvisation.

After playing with it I became fascinated with the customisability, and wrote some notes on  comedic techniques that Emily and Matthijs have built into the framework. Fun! They are mostly taken from improvisation and clown training, and simplified as much as we were able. But comedy is only a small part of what we’re capable of, so have a look, and be ambitious with your imagination.

Play With Intent is freely available here.

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Art, play and prayer are the only human activities that are totally meaningless and completely meaningful.

Ken Feitt, clown and fool.