Billy's Improv Notes: Post 4

Be Playful

In my first blog post I wrote that part of the fabric of my improv toolbelt was -Be Playful- and I wasn’t joking around. I bet if you asked hundreds of people what they think being playful means you’d get hundreds of answers. Well, of course you would. But I mean hundreds of DIFFERENT answers. What does being playful mean to you? For me it’s a very serious word, not a synonym to wacky or goofy but instead a word that encompasses an energy of good-natured mischief, a willingness to be foolish, and an awareness of the game (even if there is no game). Are you able to become playful when you want to? Or is it a state of being that comes upon you occasionally and is otherwise elusive? When improvisers warm up before a show, they’re warming up their playfulness. You play improv games to warm up. Certainly, they also get you connected to your fellow players and can help you get present, taking the place of whatever it is in your life that preoccupies your brain, but the most valuable part about getting ready for an improv show is to get PLAYFUL. Maybe for you that means meditating on the floor for 5 minutes, to center you chakra’s and shit, and maybe for me it’s dancing circles around you while you meditate singing an explicative version of Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer (hopefully we’ll both get playful if I ruin your meditation this way).

All these things are inner-connected; when you get playful you become present in the moment and stop paying attention to your head noise because you are just playing. Combining playfulness and vulnerability creates the ultimate improv energy, heightened by the sincerity you bring to the moment. I’ve heard it said that some people just won’t ever be in the category of a good or great improviser and, although I disagree with that statement wholeheartedly, I believe that the people that get put into that category have trouble getting playful. This can be seen in how someone plays improv warm-ups; too focused that you miss what’s going on? too concerned with how other people might view you’re warming up? Also, don’t confuse playfulness with competitiveness. The competitive person who is not playful takes the game too seriously and is subsequently hard on themselves or mad at themselves when they don’t win or angry at the winner for winning. They should focus on taking the play seriously. Especially in improv warm ups, there is nothing to win or lose, and accepting that fact frees you up to win or lose the best you can (yes, this is even true in the improv games that have a clear winner). Improvisers who warm up aggressively and trying to be the BEST at the warm up game invoke a feeling of mistrust in their fellow improvisers because they are saying, “I will do anything to be the best at this game.” rather than “I will play this game the best I can.” One of those ways of thinking is supportive, the other is not. I am way more interested in improvising with people who are being playful and trying to do their best versus improvisers who are being competitive and trying to be the best.

Be playful, seriously, and be serious, playfully. All else will be fun.

Billy's Improv Notes: Post 3

Sincerity.

Here’s a quick post about Sincerity. In whatever character I play or whatever situation I find myself in I want to react from a place of sincerity. Sincere reaction is noticed and appreciated by an audience. (To react sincerely an improviser must be vulnerable!) Keeping in mind the improv tenants of saying yes and accepting the reality and supporting your scene partner, reacting sincerely adds realism and weight to what’s going on. I often think that what separates a “naturally talented” actor from someone who “tries real hard” is the amount of sincerity the actor brings to their work. An example is when an improviser makes a BIG offer to a scene; something like, “I want a divorce.” or “I’ve been sleeping with your sister.” Regardless of the choice you make in responding to this offer, if it’s done with sincerity, drawn from your emotion, it’ll be the right choice.  A common impulse here is to be funny and offset the depth of meaning in the divorce offer with a nonchalant response like, “Okay, who is going to get the dog?” This bypasses the strength of responding sincerely, never touching the emotion it may bring out in you. I’m not saying that to respond to this offer with sincerity you need to be an emotional wreck, but caring that your wife/husband is telling you they want a divorce will lead you to discovering how to respond. Caring about what your scene partner is telling you is the key to reacting sincerely. Don’t assume that I’m saying you should care more or less in relation to how big or small the verbal offer your scene partner makes, rather everything your scene partner says to you has meaning so it is up to you to determine how much you care about any offer. By that, I mean even an offer as simple as “I saw that the mailbox was empty.” is something that you, in your character, could care about hearing and be affected by. I try to open my ears to my scene partners offers with the thought why is it important that they are telling me this. This is a gateway thought to caring about what my scene partner is saying to me.

Get sincere people, it’s much more engaging and REAL. Be vulnerable, start to care, get sincere, enjoy what happens!

PS And as fake-Alastor Moody once said, it takes "CONSTANT VIGILANCE!" 

Billy’s Improv Notes, Second Post.

Blocking.

Blocking is saying ‘No’ and accepting is saying ‘Yes’, right? Well, hold on now, partner. I’m going to go ahead and have to… disagree… with you on that one. As I wrote in my last post, blocking is the negation of an established reality in a scene. So what does that mean? The reality of any scene changes as quickly as 24 frames a second. If we accept, which we should, that making an offer is doing ANYTHING at all on stage, AND we accept that offers define the reality of an improv scene, which they do, THEN the reality of the scene is being molded ALL THE TIME. A quirk of an eyebrow, a change of direction in movement, breaking or creating eye-contact with a scene partner, throat clearing, being too pre-occupied with a physical task to respond to your scene partner’s verbal offer, all of these things are offers to the scene that affect the reality that is being co-created moment by moment. To BLOCK an offer is to ignore or disregard or shut down or negate what’s been given to the scene. This frequently occurs with improvisers who are not present in the scene, instead being elsewhere in their mind wondering about where the story is going to go or what on earth they are going to do if they actually have to improvise climbing a mountain or something.

I’m going to switch gears here and interject on my own thoughts because I’d like to clarify that I don’t think blocking is evil and totally destructive to a scene. Frankly, some offers deserve to be blocked. BUT, the point of this post is to bring blocking more into conscious awareness, so that we may make informed decisions while improvising. It’s like driving a car… there are rules of the road which should be followed and you shouldn’t flip a U-ey or turn brodies in the parking lot or speed or drive the wrong way on a One Way street… BUT SOMETIMES THAT’S FUN TO DO and more importantly sometimes it’s necessary. Have you ever driven the wrong way down a One Way? Did you do it on purpose or was it on accident? When you drive the wrong way on a One Way on accident, I think the tendency is to feel like an idiot… this is largely due to the fact that there are other drivers honking at you or looking at you like you’ve farted in their personal elevator. Who likes that feeling? It’s pretty similar to the feeling you get when you’ve blocked a scene or offer in a BIG WAY. When you’re going to be late getting to an interview and you can see your destination a half a block away on the wrong end of a One Way street, and no traffic is coming, and your alternative is to loop around the three city blocks it’ll take to go the LEGAL way and be late for your chance to get a job, you might drive the wrong way and feel AWESOME about it. Seriously, though, follow the rules of the road people; there are enough bad drivers out there. Point is, blocking doesn’t end a scene and sometimes it serves the scene by giving it forward progress or adding crucial information. I love this (paraphrased) quote from Randy Dixon about offers and I think it applies to blocks too: There are no bad offers, only bad follow-throughs.
 

When I had been improvising for about 5 years I took a big ol’ Tour and traveled to a bunch of cities and sat in on workshops and watched all sorts of teachers teach and students improvise. At first, I was really bothered by the amount of low-level blocking being done (Why can’t you just accept that you wrecked the car?), but then I had a conversation in Winnipeg with a good friend of mine, Mr. Sim, and he reminded me that regardless of what another improviser “does to me” on stage with their offers or blocks, it’s up to me to choose how I respond. It’s the follow through that is important. If I’m in a scene and I make a sweet-ass offer to my scene partner and their head is elsewhere and they absently block my offer, the audience is either going to hate them or love them based on MY RESPONSE. If I react with anger and call them out for blocking me, I’ve made them look bad (and sure, they may have deserved to look bad) but if I ACCEPT that their block is the new reality of the scene I have no time to make them pay, only time to exist in the new reality.

So here, let me get back to the example I gave in my previous post:

P1 walks out on stage and sits on a block and begins whimpering while holding their hand. P2 walks out and stage and they strike up a conversation. P1 tells P2 that they’ve slammed their hand in the door and it hurts real bad.
P2: That sounds horrible, here, let me cut it off for you.
P1: Yes, and after you’re done I’d like my stub wrapped up real nice with Toy Story bandages.

And I asked the question: If P1 had said: “No thank you, I’d prefer to keep my hand.” would that have been a ‘Yes’ or a block?

 “No thank you, I’d prefer to keep my hand.” Is an acceptance of the reality of the scene; which is that someone, in this case a stranger, has offered to cut off a perfectly good hand that has only been hurt in a door-slamming. There is no ‘and…’ involved in the line, but it certainly accepts the reality. To further the example to a ‘Yes, and…’ the line could be, “No thank you, I’d prefer to keep my hand. I’m just waiting on my pain medication.” This could inspire the psychopath (P2) to slam his hand in the door to get some pain meds, or maybe indicate that he is here for a job interview and he only asked to severe the hand because he wanted some job experience. Accepting moves the scene forward, blocking stalls the scene… generally. If you are in a scene and it feels stalled, rest assured some blocking has happened.

 

Trust.

Trust is wonderful and lack of trust is terrible. Most often I see improv trust in the relationships between performers, determined, of course, by past experiences that no longer mean anything. Someone who trusts me as a fellow performer will improvise with me differently than they improvise with someone they don’t trust as a fellow performer. I will let that person down, from time to time, but because I’ve built a lot of “past performance” trust, it’s “That’s cool man, didn’t work this time.” The person they don’t trust, however, just can’t do anything right. Every time they are let down by someone they don’t trust, it’s “OF COURSE they just destroyed that, OF COURSE they did.” This is all just personal judgment, and my preference is to not allow that to come into the equation at all. Every scene is a new scene.  Every show is a new show. Every moment is a new moment. A decision shouldn’t be made on how much to trust the people you’re improvising with, you just keep your set point at full trust. And if you are let down again? Just full trust again. And again? Full trust again. Does this sound difficult? Impossible? That’s all on you, bro. It’s all up to you to give trust, it’s not up to your fellow improviser to gain it back. And what if you don’t want to? Well, that’s the problem.

For me, my toolbelt is made up of  -Be Present-  -Be Playful-  -Be Confident-    and my improv suit is made up of  -Trust-
 
Trust in improv extends WAY beyond just interpersonal trust, it extends to trusting that the lights will come down when they need to, to trusting that the scene won’t be victim to an ill-timed edit or trusting that the scene WILL get edited when it needs to be, or trusting that the audience will “get it” and you don’t have to over-explain yourself, or trusting that the audience is with you even when they are quiet, or trusting that the scene doesn’t need to be saved by a crazy 3^rd character entry that’s super funny. My bottom line here is that as improvisers it serves us to trust and it limits us to distrust. It can feel risky to trust so unconditionally but I promise it pays off huge in possibilities for the scene, show, on-stage relationship.  
An improv game that trust is consistently on display is Freeze Tag. This is the game where 2 people are in a scene and they go about their business and get frozen by an offstage improviser who comes in and takes a player out and starts a brand new scene. Sometimes this game will be a collection of scene snippets, lasting no longer than 3 lines before another FREEZE is called and a new scene snippet starts. (Sidenote: 3 line freeze scenes are FINE, but not if every freeze scene is 3 lines. Variety is key here, people. I’ll post about variety in a future blog post!) So what happens to make all the scenes 3 lines? Individuals in the group start to believe that if they DON’T call FREEZE early in the new scene they won’t get a chance to get into the game, because EVERYONE is calling FREEZE to get into the game. There is no consideration for the fact that maybe the audience was really enjoying the beginning of that scene and maybe it had some legs to run on, instead the trust deteriorates and it’s every improviser for themselves. This doesn’t happen all the time. Hardly. But when it DOES happen, it’s glaringly obvious that no one trusts anyone else to allow a scene to progress. This can happen in longform improvisational pieces too, but the Freeze Tag is a great example of a shortform game where you can SEE THE TRUST. Beyond just the editing from scene to scene, you’ll see distrusting improvisers initiate even when they aren’t the ones tapping into the scene. “They didn’t say anything when I thought they should have, so I just started talking.” TRUST that the scene isn’t going to play out like you expect, and be okay with it. I said something cool once in a workshop, on accident I bet, and I’ll put it here because it ties into trust. Don’t have expectations, have anticipations. Anticipating what your scene partner may do is a wonderful tool and mindset, while expecting what they will do sets you up for continual disappointment in your scene partners.

How is it, do you think, that some improvisers who have never met can take the stage for an improv set and come away with an inspiring piece of theatre full of moments of deep trust and support? Are they just that good? Maybe they have learned to trust unconditionally and it leads them to being able to improvise with anyone.  
Mutual trust, shared between scene-partners in improvisation will lead to magical, glorious improv moments. Unexpected beauty in silence, only achieved through the trust that silence is okay, is not possible if one of the improvisers is distrusting. Trust opens up the doors of possibility; distrust prevents the scene from leaving the room. 

Again, any questions, comments, debate topics, are welcome. Happy improvising.

Billy’s notes on Improv for people who improvise, or have thought about improvising.

Improv: The Beginning

Ever taken an improv class? Yeah, but have you really ever taken an improv class? I’ve seen students and improvisers with the attitude that they “got through” the first couple levels of an improv curriculum to get to the good stuff. The good stuff being long form improv or advanced techniques/narrative/environment or blah blah blah. This is a bit of a shame, because the first couple levels are packed with good stuff; stuff that challenges your comfort zones and teaches you subliminally how to be a good improviser. Teaching early level improv classes is a great learning experience for the teacher, too! This is because there are layers of insight in the exercises and absurd warm-up games taught in beginner level improv classes. Learning improv is like reading a book. You can finish the book and if you like it then you can read it again and again and get more out of it every time. Of course, this is up to the individual as much as the environment they find themselves in. What kind of individual are you? Do you re-read every word, or just skim through to the good parts? In improv class, there are people who are sponges for every word, who find the content so interesting they can bypass their inherent discomfort at playing silly games to be present in the moment, and there are the people that, regardless of interest in the content, are only partially present (due to one or several of millions of possible mental distractions – Does my hair look good? What does this guy think of what I just did? Does that girl have a boyfriend? Is this instructor judging me? My cats don’t make me do this. Do I smell like alcohol?), which of course means they are generally not present. DING DING DING. This is important.
Being present leads to attentive listening and empathic communication (sidenote: this brings improv groups to a state they call “group mind”). You have to consciously work on being present, easier for some than others, but everyone can work on it.
 

TANGENT. I must mention my improv toolbelt. You see, I have this improv toolbelt that I use when I’m improvising, and on it I’ve got all these different tools that I’ve picked up from instructors around the world during my time studying the craft. I use these tools for creating characters, dynamic relationships, interesting choices, character backstory, relationship backstory and etcetera, etcetera. Without the belt, I could use one or two tools at a time during a scene, but my play would be limited and my scenes would not be as good as they could be. I bring it up here because I’m talking about being present, and that is one of the core states of being that comprise my toolbelt.

Billy’s Improv Toolbelt is comprised of 3 states of being.  -Be Present-  :  -Be Playful-  :  -Be Confident-
These are the foundation of my improv. Being present is me being conscious of being in the moment and aware of what’s going on around me. I think everyone should try to make their own toolbelt out of these same three core states of being. -Be Present- is a skill to work on and the end goal is similar for every person, either you get conscious of being present and can control it at will or you are in varying degrees of being able to or unable to get present. The other two, the playful and confident aspects, will be different for every individual and will allow them to find their own particular individual improv ‘style’. Your playful will be not exactly my playful; your confidence will be not exactly my confidence. BUT I DIGRESS. BACK TO THE BEGINNING.

Among the first things introduced to a new student, typically, is the concept of ‘Yes, and…’ – the golden rule of improv, a mantra to survive the improv stage by, words to ignite positive creation and scene momentum. This is a crucial concept, and I believe that most people familiar with it have not harnessed its FULL POTENTIAL. That’s right, lots of improvisers drive their “Yes, and…” car around without taking it out of second gear; these are improvisers who subscribe to the concept quite literally and have trained themselves to say the words, “Yes,” when an offer is given to them and then they follow it up with the word, “…and…” and then they add their own idea to the scene. A scene with a player who is trained in that way may look like this:  

P1 walks out on stage and sits on a block and begins whimpering while holding their hand. P2 walks out and stage and they strike up a conversation. P1 tells P2 that they’ve slammed their hand in the door and it hurts real bad.
P2: That sounds horrible, here, let me cut it off for you.
P1: Yes, and after you’re done I’d like my stub wrapped up real nice with Toy Story bandages.
 

Well what was P1 supposed to say to that offer if not ‘yes’? I mean, he couldn’t have said NO. THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN A BLOCK. Incorrect, actually. A block negates the reality of the scene, as offered by an improviser. Saying NO doesn’t mean blocking. If P1 had said: “No thank you, I’d prefer to keep my hand.” would that have been a ‘Yes’ or a block? More on that in another blog post.
To unlock the FULL POTENTIAL of “Yes, and…” it is essential to understand that the concept really has two parts, the ‘Yes’ and the ‘and…’. The ‘Yes’ is an agreement; it means ‘I agree with the reality we’re creating’ and the ‘and…’ is your own personal addition to the reality, your contribution to the scene. The more an improviser buys into the reality of the scene, as it’s being created moment by moment, the easier it is for them to provide a productive and awesome ‘and…’ to the scene. Understand that ‘Yes’ is a mindset rather than a word, a mindset made up of allowance and acceptance of an ever-changing reality. Getting into that mindset 100% means that it doesn’t matter who you are improvising with or what offers they are giving you or not giving you. The reality is bigger than the improvisers. It’s half Zen and half Creationism, you know? What is, is. And we can make it whatever we want.
This is a PARADOX. Paradox is everywhere in improvisation, there is no Democrat and Republican there is only Depublicrat. You can’t change the established reality, and yet you establish the reality. OK OK OK, so BACK TO THE BEGINNING.
 

Everyone know the clap game? The basic, stand in a circle, one person has the focus and they clap at someone in the circle and then that person has the focus, game? The most basic improv warm up game? It teaches the most basic sense of these concepts, about making offers (looking at someone and clapping at them), ‘Yes’ing (being aware that you were clapped at and now have the focus) and ‘and…’ing (continuing the game and clapping at someone else in the circle). Even though the game is simple it takes time to become masterful while playing it. Some believe that the goal of the game is to go as quickly as possible, but that’s just a byproduct of being present in the game and playing it to the best of your ability. This is a key concept, because even when the game has no end goal, it can be played to the best of your ability. You won’t win, you won’t lose, but the game teaches you to play.

An unmentioned aspect connected to everything I’ve written in this post is TRUST. I mean trust in yourself and trust in your scene partner and trust in the scene itself and in the show and in the audience and in the tech and in the offers within the scenes and so on and so forth, onward and upward into the great improvised unknown. An improvisers trust must be unflappable! Because it will be dropped time and time again, but it doesn’t have physical properties so it really truly really is OKAY for it to be dropped. And it doesn’t have true, sincere roots into your personal life. It has fake, sincere roots into the personal lives of your characters. In your real life, at home with your family or at work with your coworkers or hanging with your friends, when trust is dropped its really hard to pick it back up and dust it off like nothing’s happened, I mean, it’s basically impossible, right? When someone in your real life breaks the trust, that shit needs to get sorted out or things just won’t be the same. That doesn’t need to be the case in improv! The impermanence of the craft should allow us to accept that our trust will be raised up and honored or dropped and shattered and either way we should be able to continue on with trust in our hearts. I could do a whole blog post on Trust, though, so I’ll save that for later.
 

Actually, I plan on bringing many more of my improv thoughts/notes to the blog, starting with the couple things I said I'd talk about in future blogs, namely Blocking and Trust.
 

If you’ve read this and it’s inspired a question or comment or debate topic in you, please post it!