Tag: improv

Last month London kicked off the first of a series of 5-aside competitive impro events, and by all accounts it went really well. This prompted me to muse a bit about the benefits and pitfalls of a competitive format. This got big enough for me to split: here I’ll focus on a useful pointer for competitive impro, and one of its biggest benefits.

I’ve played in competitive formats in Europe, the UK and Canada, mostly some derivation or other of Keith Johnstone’s formats, specifically Maestro and Theatresports. I’m repeatedly impressed by the evolved and considered philosophy that sits under them. There is a lot that could be said – Patti Stiles runs workshops on ‘How to do Theatresports better’; Maestro now has a (very unpretentious, helpful) guidance manual. But the idea that made the most impression on me is really very simple.

You shouldn’t be competing.

I heard this first from Tom Salinsky in the run-up to our first Maestro in the pleasant Cockpit Theatre in Marylebone. (I walked past the Theatro Technis, another occasional Maestro spot, on the way to the bar in which I’m writing the first draft of this.) In the next post I’ll get into why this is so important, but to make sense of a show that is both Competition and Not Competition, it’s worth turning to Keith Johnstone, who recounts how he was inspired to create Theatresports by watching wrestling shows. As we all know, the outcomes of wrestling are fixed, but the experience isn’t fake. Wrestling generates ‘heat’ – provoking the audience into an excited, passionate and even angry frenzy – and that kind of experience is a rare one within a theatre. Fake competition generates authentic emotional results. Julia witnessed a Theatresports at the Loose Moose Theatre that epitomises this.

Performers from Calgary and Edmonton were playing each other in ‘The Battle of Alberta. (In reality, the Edmonton team was topped up by some Calgarians, something you wouldn’t normally see in a Derby match!)

In Theatresports, teams get points from a set of serious judges, who are the grown-ups in the room to contrast with the players. Early on, the judges made a fairly harsh call for one of the teams, docking a point for use of the word ‘Bum’. The team made a show of resentment at the call, echoing ripple of dissatisfaction in the audience.

As the show went on, that team started to act out more and more: running into competing scenes, using ‘Bum’ as a punchline, and provoking the judges, who responded unemotionally by docking them points and giving players time-outs – the Theatresports ‘basket’ worn upon the head for 5 minutes.

Both teams were getting on with doing scenes and giving challenges, both doing good work, but with the misbehaving team taking risks in and out the scene, whilst the other team played up their role in the show – the nice, diligent participants.

The audience started getting furious. “Give them points, that’s so unfair.” “They basketed all but one player – how are they going to do a scene? Oh, you’re making them do it on their own?????”(Solo scenes are actually a gift to a player, but within the theatre of Theatresports, they can appear a daunting challenge.) “What? They are all punished? They are all in the basket? Now they just miss even doing a scene!!!” They yelled, roared together, stood up and booed the judges.

By the time the ‘bum’ player basketed for the 2nd or 3rd time, his run through the aisle to the timeout area was met by audience members leaning out to hi-five him, like wrestlers or a baseball game. Thing is, no-one turned up with a strong desire to support that team and boo the ref – to this day, I’m not sure whether the punished team was the home team or the ‘Edmonton’ one. The game ended at 30-7 – the mischievious team were crucified. But everyone got a story out of the show.

And make no mistake, the players of the losing team would have left the show knowing that they had – together with their rivals and the judges – spent the night winning in every sense imaginable. In the next post, I spend a little time exploring why this spirit is so important.

With Patti Stiles in town this past week, reinvigorating tons of friends with the fun agenda, I thought I’d post a little maxim that I’ve been finding useful.

Maxim: Find the fun you can have with what you have right now, rather than worrying about the correct thing to do next.

Not following the maxim:  Start playing a scene: discover I’m low status and they are high. Ok so I know scenes can work by reverse a status relationship, so my job is to figure out how to do that, thus solving the scene and doing it properly.

Following the maxim: Start playing a scene: discover I’m low status and they are high. How much fun can I have with my partner, that high status character? With this relationship? Enjoy that, rather than trying to ‘work toward’ the next step. When what you have feels like it might want to turn into something else, you’ll find it is easier and more obvious to make a change (eg a status shift) because you have immersed yourself deeply in the moment and created a reality that gives you lots of possibilities.

To put meat on the example: maybe I bow when the master makes any request and I discover a ridiculous, pleasing physical quality to my right-angled bows, allowing them to get bigger or more awkward. Simultaneously my partner enjoys using ever-longer invectives to insult me with – ‘you miserable millipede-legged fascimile of an ape’ (he’s not a happy high-status at all!).

These things are fun and we are playing with them, along with adding other details to the scene and messing with each other: what happens when the servant needs to bow with the plate of champagne flutes?  At a certain point though it feels like it’s done, and I find myself saying ‘I’ve been practicing for this moment, sir’ and give him a mighty bent-at-the hip stage headbutt. Or my partner says: ‘I’ve insulted you for years, and yet you are so stoic. I break apart at the hint of criticism… can you tell me how it’s done?’ The thing that is needed, more often than not, just comes from being with what’s already there.

This isn’t to suggest bridging when the scene is calling for a change (see this quote). We don’t want to delay for fear of moving forward. But we also don’t want to press forward with an scene-solving course of action for fear of being present with what we have. We don’t want to be preoccupied with the correct ‘game move’ when that gets in the way of what’s happening right now.

It’s a tonal thing, for sure. It’s not about squeezing every drop of juice out of the current situation – we may want to come back to it. But we want to establish and enjoy things, and not feel pressured to drop things for being ‘not good enough’

Maxims are cheap tricks – they are right until they are wrong, because reality is infinite and cannot be constrained by words.

Maxim Reality. Prodigy dude and a cool guy.

But right now, I’m finding it a handy trick for me, and maybe it will be for you, too.

Western stories aren’t about big hats and chewing tobaccy and slurring. Improv Western scenes often are! And that’s fine, you can have a beautiful scene playing around as cowboys, sending the genre up or, to my preference, sending ourselves up and revelling in the joy of clowning around with a bunch of scene-toys. But it won’t be a Western story so much as a Tribute to, Pastiche of, or Playing About in the Western genre. This post concerns my thoughts on improvised stories in a genre.

Learning genre well involves getting into the guts of what makes that kind of story stick. I believe it’s better to focus on the audience’s experience than the workings of the story itself, which is why I say ‘make it stick’ rather than ‘make it work.’

Noir stories stick with me when they show the consequences of good people making bad choices and how people can be swept up by forces bigger than them. In contrast, adapting something in our given reality and exploring the human condition is how a sci fi story sticks with me. And a Western sticks with me when it shows compromise and hard decisions, underpinned with an examination of honour and how much it is actually worth. (It’s often, but not exclusively, also an examination of masculinity.)
 
You will probably find that some of the things that make science fiction, noir or westerns stick with you are different to what makes them stick with me. Great. This isn’t prescriptive. If you play with a group you will need to hone in on what resonates for all of you, but your Zombie Survival show may – should – have very different priorities than the one playing down the road.

There are also efficiency benefits of learning genre; Katherine Weaver (of Impro Melbourne) spent some time in her Supernatural workshop on honing investigation scenes so they aren’t boring and expositional. Essentially, there are some ‘necessary’ parts of a genre that easy to deliver in a cliche’d or boring way, so why not delve into how to keep these engaging?

For me? I don’t have a yen to do a show within a genre, but I see the value of soaking some genre instincts into these improv bones. In improv, we can go anywhere – any story is possible. But in practice, human beings are heavily bounded in how we think, behave and react. Without knowing it, we’re playing a genre, except it has no name and so we can’t even see that we’re within its limits. Worse, these limits might not even be our own, but inherited from the first ten improv shows we saw, which were inherited from the first shows they saw…

Genre is good because it dictates a specific sensibility for your scenes, your shows. What does it feel like when your ‘mean’ character doesn’t come good at the end of the show, but remains a prick? What does it do for the story, and what does it feel like for you? Difficult? Then it’s worth doing some more, until that choice feels as effortless as any other. Developing human freedom (as Luke was talking about recently)…

That said, at the moment when I start an improv show I want anything to be possible that night. And it’s true that imposing genre gives you rails of a sort. Isn’t there a risk of settling into the rhythm of the genre, and starting to switch off?

It’s possible, I guess. But why not keep moving: learn a genre well, then try something else, as acclaimed Austin group Parallelographophonograph do?

At its best, genre gives you a shared language, and through that a freedom to treat offers differently. You understand that when your partner sighs and says “Jebediah, I loved those horses as much as you did but that fire was 5 years ago” this sentence offers an invitation into a certain kind of territory, of longing and not letting go of the past, exemplified in the Southern romance genre (maybe? Not my genre).

This is the internal promise between players. This is the moment where you and your partner lock eyes and say “ok we’re not going to ignore this, but neither are we going to resolve it just now. This is the thing we can return to in fifteen minutes and boy the weight it will have”.

The marvellous thing, of course, is that this is a Schrodinger’s moment, where multiple possibilities are alive or not-alive. You can look at your partner and say ‘Deke, though, the thing of it is, this newspaper report… it’s the exact same way our stables burned. The exact same way.’ Now we’re in conspiracy, and that’s cool too. It’s a kind of semiotic dance, where each offer is a sign that can elicit many signifiers. Genre gives us some scaffolding, so when we decide to go for one, we understand some of the avenues it opens up (mining themes of isolation and human frustration, or themes of secrets and terrible acts justified), and can play down those avenues for a while, rather than thrashing about in our heads worrying about plot. The less time we spend worrying about plot, the better.

So, genre.

A sensitivity to certain kinds of impressions we can leave on the audience.

A way to coordinate between players especially in a longer piece, so bits of resonant platform can be named and then put aside as potent features to return to.

A way to make every signifier rich: taking one option rather than another presents tons of possibilities, in-tune with one another, rather than a ‘shit, how do I solve this’ conundrum.

And, finally, a choice: we’re playing in a Southern romance until we’re not, until something is there that we want to follow instead, and suddenly we’re in the mad head of one character and it’s Kafka for the last act.

I saw Klancyk perform while I was in Warsaw, so here’s an obvious thing.

I’m on my European jaunt, rootless, nomadic, and drinking in improvisation, and well, it’s handy to speak English, as many Europeans do also, well enough to make it possible to meet, collaborate, teach, learn from and perform with them. Even so, if you’re into improvisation and in Europe you’re going to see shows performed in languages you don’t speak. And you should.

Lacking the ability to parse what exactly is being said in a scene, you find other ways of making sense of the scene. Your attention moves to the manifold ways we communicate around the words, ways to which we should be paying more attention anyway. Tone of voice, rhythm of speech, silences, body language, emotional expression, characterisation, physical contact. You find what you can appreciate.

I’ve seen shows recently where I’ve been impressed by the clarity of establishing a scene, of visibility and consistency of character choices, or of the way that the performers engage with the audience at the top. Klancyk really impressed me by making me laugh out loud, several times, at a show I couldn’t honestly understand a word of.

Go see improvisation you can’t understand, and see just how well you can understand it.

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.

• The next festival occuring for sure is the Amsterdam festival in January. The workshop lists haven’t been named at the time of writing, but with Patti Stiles and Rama Nicholas performing there is some guaranteed quality in the lineup. http://impro-amsterdam.nl/cms/
• March sees the Berlin improfestival http://www.improfestival.de/web/index.php/id-2013-361.html, a sizable one that’s certain to have more than enough to keep you happy. I haven’t been but last year’s lineup http://www.improfestival.de/web/index.php/impro2012-schedule.html (with English language shows clearly ID’d) looked great.
• Not a festival, but an international location for good improvisational workshops, is the Odsherred Teaterskole in Denmark. Steen Haakon Hansen is a wonderful clown who has worked with Keith Johnstone extensively and teaches his work with his backing. And the site also sees an annual Easter mask-work retreat – 2013 will be my 4th year – which involves the most intensive and rewarding work I’ve ever done. http://www.nyscenekunst.dk/opslag.asp?page=29 (listings here)
• May saw the first Finland improfestival http://www.finlandimprovfestival.com/2012/, and from those I’ve spoken to it was a real success. They plan to do it again this year, so watch this space. http://www.finlandimprovfestival.com/

[There must be more stuff going on in summer, but I can’t be speaking to the right people!]

• October sees the annual Würzburg festival,http://www.improtheaterfestival.de/ which I’ve made twice in a row and is great (and tends to sell out). Workshop big hitters included the top flight of the Loose Moose Theatre, Patti Stiles, and many more. Shows (in English) included an experimental longform night, Theatresports cups, narrative plays, the works.
• November is time for Slovenia to rise. http://www.goli-oder.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=40&Itemid=69&lang=en I hung out with some of this crew at Würzburg this year and they are super fun, and the lineup they pulled together for last month’s run was very strong.
• Bringing us full circle, December welcomes the Halle festival. This year it has hit some financial challenges and may not go ahead. Hopefully next year will prove better. http://www.impronale.de/

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.

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.

——-

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.

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).

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