Satellite Session 02-16-13

This week in the satellite jam session the ensemble members worked in two groups of six on Harold openings, and each group played an open free form 25-minute improv set. The rest of our time was spent warming up and discussing the improv. No names are mentioned so you are more inclined to be objective and empathic.

I had the groups working on a “static line” free-association opening. The goal of the opening is the players will popcorn words and ideas back and forth for 45 to 75 seconds before morphing into the first scene of the set by someone stepping out of the line and initiating the first scene. Challenges in this opening are to stay connected by keeping eyes up off the ground and on their fellow players.  Words should be spoken with decisiveness and clear enunciation. The purpose of the opening is to litter the stage with offers, that they may be picked up as in-the-moment inspiration throughout the improv set. The pacing of the piece is greater than that of bringing a good or creative offer to the mix. Hit the beat when it needs to be hit, and try not to overlap. That's the whole game, the content is secondary to the flow. 

1^st Set Notes:

A scene starts and a player sits typing with determination, the second player immediately kneels beside them, watching over and concerning themselves with their scene partner’s task. The kneeling improviser will enjoy more success and momentum in scenes when they think before acting, not just following their first impulse. Their initial direction of focus when the scene starts should be in agreement with the co-created reality of the scene. Say to yourself I agree with what's going on here. And then the only decisions needed to be made are in regard to how you'd like the scene to progress, choosing the paths you are interested in taking, and then developing opinions about the offers that come up in the scene and being surprised and changed by them. All other energy goes to being playful and scenes thrive.

A couple scenes started interestingly with fun, productive, scene moving offers and as they walked the path, progress fizzled. They experienced a sense of, “Well, what do we do now?” The note here is that the offers given at the beginning of the scene are integral to the scene as a whole, and as long as we are paying attention in the moment we will give ourselves gifts to use later in the scene. Follow through with the games you create for yourself! A scenic example of this opens on two players huddled behind a block at center stage. They concernedly discussed and gossiped about what was happening around them, referencing people getting shot instead of just fired. A third character entered and joined the two behind the box, asking for a Sprite. At this point the scene fizzled and ended oddly. There was no need for the scene to fizzle. The world they had created had two major things going on. The severity of the world outside of their bubble was contrasted with the childlike nature of drinking sodas and gossiping while hiding behind a mini-fridge in an office. In these moments players need only play and heighten both sides of the world to follow the productive, wide-open path. The world around them becomes more severe and their bubble becomes more innocent. Rinse, rather, repeat.

The set ended with a lengthy callback scene about a couple who, in the first scene, had been about to get married and the Groom had walked in on the Bride and they ended up having brown-chicken-brown-cow relations right then and there, mere minutes before the service. In this second scene, the Mother was laying into the Daughter about the state of her wedding dress during the service, and the Daughter eventually confessed to making love with her Husband before the ceremony. The Mother was shocked and outraged and a third character entered with the wedding tape, which, as he described, was mainly just thirty minutes in the Bride’s quarters before the Wedding. The Mother was outraged and furious and then the Husband comes in and the scene became heated between he and the Mother. The Father of the Bride entered the scene and, oblivious to the facts, became quite eager to see the wedding tape. At this point the Mother was trying to stop the Father from viewing the tape and the Husband wanted the Father to watch. This pattern looped until I side-coached the Mother to stop arguing (1) and then we got to see the Father turn on the tape and have a reaction. After he turned on the tape but before his reaction, a player swept the scene yet I side-coached to have the scene continue and ignore the edit. The Father could have chosen any honest reaction and it would be the best response, and it was, he was okay with it because they were both adults.
The notes for this scene are  the two side-coached moments.
1) Roadblocking forward movement in a scene is fine, momentarily, if a character disagrees with a course of action; support, though, comes from allowing the scene-partner to make up their own minds about what they want to bring to the scene after the roadblock has been expressed. A player should be opinionated with their character points-of-view and allowing of space and time for response.
2) The scene edit happened to come right as the journey was finishing, which would have disallowed the audience a chance to see a moment that was being built up to. Regardless of the length of the improv set, if you cut the scene now to come back to it later the audience will never see the Father's particular response; they may be informed of what it was but the don't get to be in on it. Let them be in on it. We drove all the way to Disneyland and right when we got inside the gates BOOM. Edited. And we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to view the Father reacting to watching the tape. Put in the work to buildup an idea, and then enjoy the spoils.

2^nd Set Notes:

A scene starts with a nervous character being welcomed into a Disney Tattoo Parlor by a confident tattoo artist. The scene was a negotiation of what type of tattoo was going to be given and whether the artist was capable or not. The tattoo artist made a couple of bold offers in the scene but did not revisit them. One of the bold offers came after the customer claimed to want a tattoo of Mickey and Minnie, to which the artist stated, “Dirty.” The setup the tattoo artist immediately provides for themselves with this offer is for any time the customer makes a choice the artist can state their judgment of said choice. The second bold offer came after the artist drugged the customer. While describing the tattoo procedure and noticing the effects of the drugs in the customer, the artist stated that she was a man. The setup here is that the artist has given herself the go ahead to reveal secrets to the customer while the customer is drugged. These things should be continued. The artist will enjoy more success and momentum in scenes when they play along with the tune they’ve created for their own scenes.

Another scene took place between a Mother and Daughter. At one point, the Mother turned to her daughter and, although she was several feet away, the Daughter said, “Don’t touch me!” The Mother agreed and continued along with the story. The note here is to be aware that the “Don’t touch me!” offer is bigger than face value, and implies subtext that doesn’t so much need to be addressed as respected. If the Daughter is saying “Don’t touch me!” she is either over-dramatic or has real concern because of things that have happened in the past. The awareness of the undertone is key for the success of the relationship between the two improvisers. This lesson was echoed in another scene, where a child flinched when their parent arrived to take them away. The parent character can continue to act nice and kind and doesn’t need to address the flinching but being aware of the possible truths behind it, without selling it out as nothing, is paramount. Awareness brings choice-clarity.

I hope the notes are helpful to your own improv. Thanks for reading!

Improviser Metaphor

Prepare your offers as if you were a chef preparing the ingredients of a meal. Your carrots, for example, represent an offer you are about to make, and the meal is the scene. You get to decide how you should prep your ingredients before you present them. What kind of thought do you want to put into your offers? With improvisation you can become a chef who, while following the right path, may be able to chop more and more swiftly and precisely until eventually you just look at the carrots and they fucking cut themselves into perfectly cubed pieces and you didn’t even mean to. The trained improv mind will minimize the time needed for choice consideration and impulse checking before the line is delivered. This minimization relates to the time it takes to cut the vegetable; the time needed to be safe cutting near your fingers while holding the tool steady. The untrained mind is erratic displaying various levels of severity, which could range from the chef slashing the carrots wildly to throwing them in whole without rinsing to slicing their finger and giving up on the offer or the scene or themselves.

Your scene partner is your co-chef in the kitchen, occupying the same level of hierarchy with no difference in status. You build the meal together. Of course, in the scene you would have characters that would have varying levels of status, sometimes similar sometimes not, but person to person, regardless of skill level or experience, the players, as people, as chefs, should be equal in status. Line by line you build the scene, you cook the meal. 

Your combined outspoken lines of dialogue make the scene; they are your meal finalization and delivery. Playing a show is like creating many different meals for many people with, depending on the show, a plethora of co-chefs.

Also, this metaphor is not recommended for permanence as having a healthy variety of processes for thought and action while improvising will positively impact ones play and ones heart. Experimenting in your kitchen, finding new recipes and improving your ingredients will yield new lines, new laughs, and renewed interest. Find ingredients that are satisfying, that people appreciate and avoid the stale ingredients or the ones that taste good immediately but eventually make you feel like shit.

How do you want to operate in the kitchen? What’s your process? 

The secret to improv, believe it or not

The secret to improv is to believe in what you and your scene partners say and do and feel. Bold statement, right? Well, dernit, I feel it in my heart.

In short, belief brings sincerity. Sincerity makes people care about watching and when they care about watching a person they laugh delightedly.

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.