Okay, so it's a bit of an inflammatory title, but Maria Peters (who’s awesome) floated the question ‘in improv, what’s the difference between a coach, a director and a teacher?’
At first I watched the conversation on Facebook with passing interest. Then when people had different ideas, I started writing a response. It was far too long for Facebook, so now it’s this. First of all, the question is all semantics. It doesn’t really matter what you understand those words to mean as long as you and the person you’re getting in to coach/teach/direct have a mutual agreement of what’s to be achieved and how. My semantics are as follows: Director If you’re directing, you should direct the SHOW and not the people. I learned this from Rich and Rebecca Sohn last year. The Maydays are all at a similar level of improv, so it can feel weird if your peers are telling you how to improvise or vice versa. The Sohns had learned a lesson that it’s not okay to give notes to your fellow players, it just breeds resentment. We all make different choices in improv and they’re all good. When I directed Oh Boy! The Quantum Leap Show for the Maydays, I was careful to make sure that I wasn’t critiquing anyone’s improv, but honing the sort of choices that would produce a Quantum Leap feel and story. For example, Quantum Leap is the most anti-improv show ever. We didn’t realise till we started but the protagonist, Sam, has to ask a shit ton of questions and pretend he has no idea what’s going on. In improv, you mostly need to look like you know exactly what’s going on and it’s a stronger choice to be an expert than for it to be your (yawn) ‘first day’. It’s hard for Sam to drive the story because he has no idea why he’s there and what he has to put right*. We also didn’t want to be hampered by narrative, so it was about finding tropes that fit the feel of the show instead of telling everyone what was about to happen. Al can be WRONG, offers can be DROPPED and the show works. Hell, Al is only ever seen by Sam, children and pets. Most of the cast spend the show ignoring one improviser! The driving force of the show is that Sam follows his heart and his moral compass. Another example was a show I directed called ‘Silly String Theory’. Though I was directing, I brought in Ryan Millar and a few others to coach us during rehearsals. The show was my vision, but there were skills we all needed to work on. In that show, we discovered that because it was a slice of life form, we didn’t want to have anything extraordinary happen. For example, you couldn’t have a bunch of Gods chatting, unless you justified that that was a novel someone was writing, or a play that someone was in. Again, that’s a narrowing of choices to fit the form, not just raising everyone’s general skill level. Teacher If I’m going to be taught by someone, I expect them to be better than me, or to have a set of skills that I don’t have or am not as good at. Sometimes you get good teachers that are bad improvisers and bad teachers that are good improvisers which makes it a little confusing. A good improv teacher will support you in failing, so that you can push yourself. Normally the teacher would decide what to teach and students would come along who wanted to learn that thing. I know that’s obvious, but it’s different than coaching. The teacher will be the authority, they CAN say ‘do it like this, not like that’. At the end of the day, it’s the student’s choice whether that autocracy works for them, whether the teaching style makes their work better or gives them something to head towards. I’ve had some exceptional teachers and some terrible ones. I always learn something though, even if it’s ‘never teach like that’. The course/class/drop in/workshop has a remit and that is either fulfilled or not at the end of it. I came to learn improvised rap/music/object work/long form. Am I better at that now? Good. Then I got taught. Coach This is the sticky one, that role that people are split on their definitions of. My experience of coaching is that there is a group or cast that brings someone in to raise their game. The group has already decided what they want. Sometimes that is as vague as ‘get better at improv’ and sometimes it’s as specific as ‘we want to do a rap game in our shortform show’. The word is the same as it is in sports because it is the same role. There is a team and it’s your job to make them win. An improv teacher supports failure (makes you comfortable with it, so you can get better) whereas an improv coach supports success (we are going to nail this). You can still say ‘do it like this, not like that’ but the group ultimately has the choice. You really need a discussion about exactly what the group want out of the coaching. And that’s different to the teacher role. Afterwards the group can decide what parts of that coaching fit the show or the team. In that aspect, it’s different to sports. Perhaps the difference between coach and director is that the director is making a product and the coach is honing the product. I believe that the coach should have the authority in the room. They are not one of the team, they are the disciplinarian. You do what the coach says, that’s what you’re paying them for. Collaborator I’d also agree with Joe Samuel and say that there is a fourth kind of person you might want to get in to your process which is what he calls a facilitator and what I would call a collaborator or an ‘outside eye’. This is someone whose work you like. You might get them along to one or all of your rehearsals to help out. They will watch runs of the show and offer notes, solutions to stuff, perhaps even exercises. The group take the notes and ideas and decide what they want to do with them. The difference between this and a coach is that a collaborator would be one of the team. They don’t have to control the room when it gets rowdy, they don’t need to make any decisions, they just have to have their own opinion and some possible active solutions. That’s my tuppence worth. I have no idea if my definitions are useful to anyone, but it’s helped me to pick apart the roles I have on different projects. My advice would be that if you are getting someone in to help with your group, make sure you know what you want out of them. Even if that changes after the first rehearsal, it’s going to make you more productive and it saves time to know who has the authority in the room, who has the final artistic say and who you welcome taking personal improv notes from. In the last year, I directed Oh Boy! The Quantum Leap Show, coached Jinni Lyons is an Only Child, All Made Up, Constantine’s One by One, The Science of Living Things, collaborated on Countdown to Doom, various podcasts and taught for the Maydays and Hoopla. *Don’t know what I’m talking about? Go watch the Quantum Leap TV show, it’s brilliant!
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I’ve just gone through my whole diary for 2014 to see what actually happened last year. I’m glad I did, it’s reminded me of all the cool stuff that happened. Out of the crazy big list, some highlights that made me smile were:
· Opening for and training with TJ and Dave. · Directing Oh Boy! The Quantum Leap Show and taking it up to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. A particular highlight was playing Sam at our Maydays improv residential, Osho Leela. · Geekeasy, our Project2 comedy night for nerds. I’m so proud of how it’s gone so far and it’s lovely playing with my besties Chris Mead and Jon Monkhouse. · The Liverpool Improvathon was just incredible. I didn’t believe that improv could be that good in such a context. I learned a lot, had a really, really fun time and made some new chums. Nell Mooney and Ed Croft were particularly awesome. · The Hoopla Panto was also a total surprise highlight, I wasn’t a fan of panto, but I’m a huge fan of that team and that show. Steve Roe is ever the antidote to me being in my head. · I’ve started podcasting improv shows with my husband, Tony Harris and that’s a total joy because we’re both learning so much new stuff. We even did an improv show as a podcast first and a stage show second. · I’ve had the pleasure of coaching some really good shows including Jinni Lyons is an Only Child. · I’ve had some super gigs with Who Ya Gonna Call? We beat our Edinburgh take from 2013, played the Albany and did a Ghostbusters commentary at a Picturehouse cinema with Cine Fringe. We have clocked up more than 50 gigs and I’m still thoroughly enjoying the show. · I played a time travelling Rimmer-type character in Theatre Delicatessen’s Spaced 2014 Forked Path show The Baker Street Butcher and had a real blast. · It’s been lovely teaching longform for Hoopla and seeing all the new talent growing. There were so many things. I did various bits of filming and voiceover stuff, saw some terrific shows, made a solo show, went to Croatia on my hols and generally had a pretty great year. 2015 is the big launch year for Yes Ampersand, the new night for two person improvisation. I’m excited about that, about doing more Maydays, Project2, Katy & Rach, podcast shows and getting my USA fix in the summer. Venn and the art of Two Person Improvisation I’m launching a new improv night celebrating two person improvisation. I am working on this with my improv wife Rachel Blackman and my real life husband Tony Harris. I have enjoyed how much the longform scene has flourished in the UK, particularly in the last 4-5 years and am excited that so much other TwoProv has blown up even more recently. Yes, Ampersand is an attempt to share the joy via a new exclusively two person improv night above the Priory Arms in Stockwell. We hope to build to a festival in the Autumn of 2015. At Yes Ampersand, people can work up their forms, enjoy watching the new performers as well as the masters at work and have fun jamming with some strangers in two person scenes. We have some super headliners such as Breaking and Entering, DnR and Folie a Deux. Rachel and I will be celebrating our 10 year TwoProv anniversary in 2015. We have been doing regular one hour two person improv shows together since spending a summer in Chicago in 2005. We studied at Second City that year and watched a LOT of shows that inspired us at IO. In contrast, Tony is embarking on his first two person show with team mate Mark Rawle, so we’re both excited about TwoProv from different angles. My attraction and revelation with TwoProv was that you get so much stage time that you learn a lot of stuff really quickly. In Katy and Rach, neither of us ever leaves the stage, so that’s a solid hour of experience every time. If you drop or forget something, that’s a bigger deal than if a whole team have your back, but you also have the benefit of super-connecting with this ONE other person on a much richer level because that’s your only option for doing a good show. Katy and Rach feels a lot like TJ and Dave because that’s the first TwoProv we saw and we love it to distraction. But slow burn, subtext and deep listening is not the only style that I work with. I have also performed full length two person shows with Chris Mead and Jon Monkhouse as Project2. We are a three person company but 90% of the time, only two of us play a gig. Jon and I tend to produce haunting and slightly surreal 70s type science fiction stories, whereas playing with Chris is a bit more like a fast paced Futurama episode. I also headlined with Maria Peters at the Talinn improv festival. We had played together before, but not with regularity and not as a two person show. We tried a 15 minute show in London before jetting off to Estonia and pulling a 45 minute longform out of the bag. We were both used to TwoProv so it was lovely to discover the ways we played in common as well as all of the surprises. Our show came out a lot like a Harold with three story strands and a variety of characters. My discovery from these shows is that you can be any type or grade of improviser, but your two person show will be something else. It’s not about you, it’s not about the person you play with, it’s about where the Venn diagram overlaps. There are some amazing twoprovisers out there and I just wanted to mention a few that really rocked my boat. Not just because they’re good (I’ve seen a lot of good two person improv shows) but because they are aspirational. Neil Curran (Neil +1), Dublin Strictly speaking, Neil’s show is not a two person form because he is the only improviser in the show. He takes his +1 from the audience – someone who hasn’t even seen improvisation – and plays with them. He interviews them at the beginning and builds the show around their real life and experiences. It’s an amazing piece of work. I would be terrified to do it. Marc and Brent (Action Movie), Montreal Marc and Brent are Montreal Improv. They improvise an action movie and I had the joy of training with them. They had a lot of similar teaching to TJ and Dave - eye contact, subtext, mutual discovery instead of invention - but the show was wacky and fast with a narrative. The thing I enjoyed most of all was the level of agreement. The edits were immediate and flowed into one another. Sometimes it was difficult to tell which person had edited because you were immediately in a different scene though the stage picture may not have moved an inch. TJ and Dave (TJ and Dave), Chicago These guys are my first longform crush. In 2005 I had never seen a play that good, let alone an improvised play that good. Nothing happens and everything happens. I saw them again (was lucky enough to open for them) recently and it still looks like magic. It’s like I’d spent 10 years learning card tricks only to see them make the Statue of Liberty disappear. They play regularly in Chicago, but they also have a very interesting DVD called Trust Us with a full length show and insightful documentary. Yes, Ampersand starts on 4th February at the Priory Arms, Stockwell at 7:30pm. With Breaking and Entering, Make Shift, The Homunculus and a chance for anyone to have a go a TwoProv in our jam. By Katy Schutte I’m a teacher, which means that I’m also a learner. Since I got back from Edinburgh, I’ve learned from a bunch of really great teachers. I have so many notes, so many ongoing goals and I just want to share with you some of the wisdom that I’ve taken with me. I’ve met some of my total idols and I’ve found some new inspirational teachers too. Because there is so much, I’ve popped it into a cute little 8 Things so that your Buzzfeed mind can eat it along with your breakfast. 1. Good is as good as bad in a workshop. Kevin McDonald (Kids in the Hall). It was an offhand remark, but one that really resonated with me. If the people just before you in a workshop totally nailed a scene, it’s nice to know that there is no pressure for you to do the same. You are learning, the more you fuck it up, the more you get to learn. 2. Suck My Dick. Shannon O’Neill (UCB). We started Shannon’s workshop by sharing problems, thoughts and ideas. The whole group would shout back ‘Suck my dick!’. It’s a lovely way of minimising the general noise of your brain. I think un-fun day jobs would be a lot more bearable if everyone started the day shouting ‘Suck my dick!’. It’s doublethink: I care enough about you to listen to your gubbins/who gives a shit about their gubbins when we can improvise? 3. You can afford to tell the truth, no one will believe you. Del Close, but brought to my attention by my absolute heroes TJ and Dave. It’s sometimes much easier to start with what you genuinely think and believe and it’s safe being confessional because you are in a fictional environment. I told an absolutely true (and secret) story in a recent show which my husband jovially berated me for afterwards. I pointed out that no one would ever know it was true and we smiled to ourselves. 4. Lose. Tom Salinksy (Spontaneity Shop). This was really a personal note that I now find myself giving to other people who need it. Tom was coaching me and Chris Mead for Project Two and I found that I was trying so hard to nail every exercise that I was forgetting to let my characters fail. Failing as a character is not failing as an improviser. I don’t need to be in control, I don’t need to know what’s happening and losing is often the funniest, strongest position to take in a scene. 5. If you know the genre, you know the climax. Anthony Atamanuik (UCB). I was learning The Movie with Tony and this advice was a bit of a revelation. Freeform long form is my favourite; it really makes me happy, but I do play in (and direct) genre improv, so to know that the climax is already there was a great mind-change for me. Without playing any preceding scenes, we jumped straight to the climax of any given genre. They were perfect, that IS what would happen. Only the specifics change. 6. The emotional connection is more important than the facts. If the emotional connection changes, it’s like walking through an object work table. TJ Jagodowski & Dave Pasquesi (IO Chicago). You know that moment in improv when someone spends a while establishing (wiping down, putting a drink on, scratching their name into) a table and then another improviser walks straight through it? Unless it’s justified as a ghost, a hologram or whatever, the audience is left unsettled. In this class, we worked hard on recognising emotional connection and I see that it is just the same. If we as an audience felt like there was underlying sexual attraction at the beginning of a scene and it disappears - unexplained - by the end, the scene seems like a total lie. 7. What’s the about about? Kevin McDonald. Another one from Kevin. This was a sketch writing workshop using improvisation, but this question is equally applicable to pure improv. Sure, Spinal Tap may be about a band on tour, but the about about is the friendship between two characters and how it falls apart. What are the larger themes at play in your improv? 8. It’s better to be inspired by people than in competition with them. Shannon O’Neill. ‘Nuff said. Osho Leela Diaries: Katy Schutte
Day: Thursday Time: 5pm Class: I Need a Hero This was my 6th Maydays residential in Dorset. Like most of the Maydays, I teach several days a week, but there is definitely something unique about Osho Leela. I love to be out in the sticks, walking to my class across dewy grass, past last night’s still-smouldering bonfire and always a short walk from a privet maze. At Osho Leela, every class needs to be self-contained so that – like a Choose your Own Adventure book – students can take any journey through the program and it will still make sense. Big group warm-ups happen at the start of the day, so each 1.5 hour class gets right down to it from minute 1. On Thursday I wanted to offer a class that would equip the students for the rest of their time at Osho Leela. You are sometimes in a class with people that have a very different style to you or have a lot more/less experience. I decided that the best thing to teach was a toolbox of ways to deal with that gap. I Need a Hero, then. It’s the first time I’ve taught this class and it’s a bit of an experiment. We start by playing some group story games, doing scenes where the crazy person is a genius and over-agreeing with everything because everything is brilliant. We’re enjoying it, but I’m suddenly worried that I don’t know where I’m going with this. What’s the big headline for this class? Everyone knows that they need to support the other person, that’s all improv IS, right? We try some scenes where one person does whatever they want and their scene partner tries to make them look great. It’s hard work. One of my class asks a question. Apparently someone in their troupe bulldozes them all the time. I have someone play the Bulldozer and we work out some solutions and tactics. They’re bulldozing because they’re scared, because they don’t trust you. Reassure them, mirror and have a high energy scene. It works, I learn stuff too. Another hand goes up. “There’s someone in my troupe who hardly says anything”, “I work with a guy whose body is totally closed off”, “This girl always plays negative”. We keep on like this. What do I do when I get denied? I justify. What do I do when I’m getting nothing back? Make nice big inclusive offers. How do I stop this one girl walking through my furniture? Put your set somewhere that doesn’t interrupt the whole stage/make her a ghost or a hologram/make sure she sees what you’re doing. I realise the point of my own class. It’s not about tactics, it’s about respect and trust. It’s not ‘dealing with inexperienced improvisers’, it’s that every offer your scene partner makes is the right one. Rather than being annoyed that a total beginner stepped into your scene, you get to practice even harder at being the best support in the world. If you handle it that way, they will look great, like a genius. If they do the same for you, improv is the best art form in the world. As I’m walking over the dewy grass to join the dinner queue (still smiling about some of the scenes), I realise that my class was doing for me exactly what I was trying to teach them; support. I wanted to offer them a way of helping their buddy, I got lost and they just showed me what they wanted to learn. I needed a hero and we made each other look like geniuses. The Maydays will be celebrating a decade this May. As we approach our 10th Birthday we present a series of blogs dedicated to the various side projects we are each involved in from improv to West End musicals to business improv. Katy Schutte and Joe Samuel are both members of the Maydays. They worked with improvisers Jonathan Monkhouse and Chris Mead (also a Maydays swing) and theatre maker Tom Frankland to make ‘Who Ya Gonna Call?’ It is a fan tribute show to the best film of the 1980s and an original musical comedy. It received a 5 star review, standing ovations and a sold out run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe least year. Katy chatted to Jon, Joe and Tom about the writing process, the live show and the differences between working on a script and an improv show. What’s different about working on scripted stuff? KS - Improvisation is just the first stage of scripted or devised work. It means that you have the luxury of going back to those ‘should have/could have’ moments and making them even better. The difficulty as performers is in keeping the spark that you have in an improvised show. We have some specific points in the show where the script is pretty loose (normally during monologues) and we have one song where we totally improvise the lyrics every night. Playing with other improvisers means that when something goes wrong, or something strange happens in the room, you are not afraid of it, you fold it into the show and the audience really enjoy that. JM – We spent a week working on the tiny little details of WYGC, tipping our hats to the film and being meticulous. We have a montage sequence for instance that is like a shot for shot physical comedy piece to music. In rehearsal it’s the same song over and over again, who was walking in which direction and how many paces they would do. We spent a day on that. The level of detail was so high; we even have a cardboard car going in the right direction. KS – Writing the montage song was a crazy process. Chris mead wrote the lyrics, I had an 80s rock style idea for the tune and Joe jammed with me until we found something that was perfect. That’s now the song that gets the biggest applause in the show. JS – It was a different approach musically to a live improv show. When you get an audience suggestion for a style or genre, if they want something that sounds like Oklahoma, it has to sound like that. If Katy says cocktail jazz, it doesn’t have to hit the parody bits of the genre, just use the bits that are relevant and powerful, not the bits that obvious. Tom is a theatre maker who also improvises and we are improvisers that also make theatre. Is that tangible on stage or during the creation process? TF – When I am making a theatre show, I normally end up following a really similar process as we did on Who Ya Gonna Call. That means a period of making through improvisation, a short period of rehearsing and then just getting it up in front of an audience. I try not to say no to ideas, you just have explore everything and then ditch the bits that don’t work. Partly led by financial restrictions we don’t have the luxury of rehearsing for ages as with a devised piece, day one of “rehearsal” doesn’t come with a finished script! JM - Tom wants to know details of things beforehand. Jon & Katy fuck around a bit more. We forced Tom to do an improvised song & taught him how to set up rhymes. I have learned that when I am totally allowed to improvise, I will just go on forever and it’s really boring. Tom has helped me be more precise. When we were putting stuff together, we used an improv mentality. Improv solved a lot of problems. We’d just trust an idea and see what worked. We didn’t decide beforehand whether something would work. We play with it and when it works, we write it down. KS - There are a few bits that we lie about and pretend they’re spontaneous on stage when they’re not. They came out of shows where one day someone adlibbed and it got a laugh. We’d try it again for a few days and if it kept working, we’d adopt it into the script. We actually did a rewrite after our Edinburgh run last year that was just adding all the stuff that had become part of the show. TF – More often than not, the shows where we got slacker were less successful than the ones where we stuck to the script. There’s a certain amount of momentum that we need to maintain and the well crafted jokes are just better. JS - The creative process was joyful all the way through. It never felt like ‘oh, God we have to do this’, or you’re up at 2am worrying about it. It was just getting together and seeing what happens. After the improv, you can knock it into shape and that has more value than sitting in front of the piano and sweating. To me it’s separating the creating bit from the editing bit. You need to get it all down there on the page and then you can weed out the stuff that you don’t like or whatever. Too many people try and do the creating and the editing at the same time. Working with improvisers can be a bit too loose at times! KS – Yes, because we’re all used to working with nothing at all, there is no fear about whether it will work and the danger is that we won’t take the time to perfect it! Tom was a good guide for that and so was putting early scratch shows in front of an audience and getting feedback. I found it scary to ask people what we could change to make it better, but it really helped form the show into something much stronger. TF – I suppose the big difference is that because you are forced to revisit the material every time you perform, and the audience know that you have done it before, so there are less excuses for moments not landing or for the quality of the material being more varied. You don’t have the get out clause that improv provides. KS – Yes, general notes are the only things we can take forward in improv rehearsals; ‘make more positive choices’, ‘vary your characters more’ and that kind of thing. After the initial song writing, you didn’t really get to see the show until it was up and running in Edinburgh. What was it like hearing your tunes again? JS - It was incredibly weird; one, I had forgotten half the tunes – did I make that? Also, I suppose not knowing how it had all changed and morphed. The writing processes were very focused on little bits. I wouldn’t recognise the songs if they were on the radio. I only came across them 4 or 5 times, an initial idea, some changes and then a better recording. I didn’t know the flavour of the whole show until I saw it. I don’t often get to hear stuff I’ve written back. It’s nice to know it has longevity. Joe, didn’t you have some Bristol folks sing the songs back to you? How was that? JS - Ah, man that was a good moment. They didn’t know that I’d written the music. They started singing ‘Dark Afternoon in the Library’. This was on the second day of a music workshop. I thought they were doing it because of the workshop. I said ‘That’s very sweet, you don’t have to sing my songs because I’m here!’ They were like ‘they’re your songs!?’. It’s like they were meeting Andrew Lloyd Webber or something. That’s the first time I experienced that. What’s next for Who Ya Gonna Call? We will be doing previews around the UK in July this year and then taking the show back to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. To find out more and to hear about our next show as it emerges, go to www.whoyagonnacall.co.uk It’s definitely worth spending a lot of time getting really, really good at improv. Those 10,000 hours take a while though, so it’s nice to have a couple of tips. Watching a lot of new improvisers I notice the same tells over and over again that broadcast them as such. There’s already a lot to think about up there and then there’s abandoning all of that to get out of your head. But anyways, even if you just work on one of these at a time, you’ll come across like a more experienced improviser.
1. Comfortable In Your Body Be purposeful in your movements, even if your purpose is to be a loose, nervous or random character. Exercise: Practice silence scenes. Not ‘gibberish’ talk, but scenes that don’t require dialogue. You’ll be listening much more closely to your body and the bodies of your fellow players. 2. Stagecraft Take care to make an interesting stage picture and make sure everyone can be seen. Exercise: Oh Mighty Isis! Make single objects, animals or machines as a group without talking. Look for symmetry and beauty. Support your team. 3. Straightforward Be open, honest, real. You will get laughs from authenticity. Exercise: Get a one-word suggestion and tell any real life story or memory that comes to mind. 4. Be Heard Make sure you can be heard. That means enunciating as well as projecting. Be aware of the farthest person at the very back of the room and say everything so that they can hear. Exercise: Wheel out all those tongue twisters you know. Perform them loudly and confidently with exaggerated mouth movements imagining you are in a huge theatre. Try “She stood upon the balcony inexplicably mimicking him hiccupping and amicably welcoming him in.” 5. Taboo There is no pressure on you to create ‘shock’ laughs. What a lot of people feel is pushing the boundaries of art and being risqué is often just mentioning cancer, rape, paedophilia, racism, scatology or violence. Trust what’s already happening in the scene and heighten that. More often that not, you’ll find a more satisfying scene there. Exercise: Mapping. As truthfully as you can, act out a scene with a couple breaking up. Now play the same scene again, but make it all about chess instead. See if some of the same phrases will fit (“we just don’t play together like we used to”, “since when have you been playing chess with Charlie?” “I think I need some space”). 6. Variety Vary your character and emotional choices. Exercise: Emotional Rollercoaster. Play a scene as a director calls out different emotional directions for the scene to take. 7. Meta Stay inside the reality of the scene. It will help the audience come with you. Exercise: Ordinary/Extraordinary. Play a scene as mermaids/ghosts/werewolves etc., but keep all the dialogue real-world. How would mermaids chat if they were just having a normal day? 8. React Play a scene where you emotionally react as your character would. Look out for offers that will give you this opportunity and create them for yourself. Exercise: Have your scene partner reveal a secret and choose a strong emotional reaction (not necessarily the logical one). 9. You’re Great Even if it feels like a mistake, make it look good, justify it and sell it. Exercise: 8 Things. Get the title of a list and very quickly name 8 things on that list. (Types of fruit, Things you find in the sea etc.) Have everyone cheer at all 8 things whether or not they make sense or should be part of that list. 10. They’re Great Even if it feels like a mistake, make it look good, justify it and sell it. Exercise: Justify. One person steps into the centre of the circle. One of the others makes a ludicrous proposition (“Cats should be in charge”) and the person in the middle - using only reality and logic - justifies the proposition (“They have a lot of views online, most people like them, they seem to be happy, people are sick of the currently government.”) Enjoy playing with these ideas. Who are your favourite improvisers? What do they do on stage that makes them your favourite? What makes them come across like pros? Is it something you can try? It seems to me that there is sometimes quite a disparity between how much an audience enjoys a show and how much the performers enjoy a show (or how good they think it was).
For me, there are three broad reactions I’ll have after doing a show; · Recriminating myself and/or the group for being awful (sometimes out loud, sometimes in my head) · Fairly satisfied, but analysing the crap out of the show (“Mr Muscle was a funny character, but why didn’t we have any depth to our relationships?”) · An air-punch where it was so great that I love my life and the show and everyone I’ve ever met (Bill Arnett has the term ‘way-homer’ for these; where you keep remembering a great moment from your show, all the way home) There’s also a reaction around the ego where you personally feel you did or didn’t do good work. Sometimes it can feel like you’re the only one who dropped the ball, or the only one who kept it together. Interestingly, in improv, if the show as a whole fails, you feel like you’ve failed, because it’s a team game. Conversely, sometimes a show can fail because one person stood out and the whole team game fell apart. You’ve got to make other people look good. With short form at least there are in-built safety nets; if you are brand new you will likely succeed because; · The audience are probably your friends and family. · Games are built around letting the audience know when to laugh and automatically generate jokes. For example, New Choice means that you are regularly given a set up, set up, twist that always works. · Also, the audience love to see you die just as much – if not more – than they like to see you succeed. In ‘Die’ for example, the competitive storytelling game where the audience shouts die when you mess up telling the story. If no one died, the game wouldn’t be fun. With long form it’s a little harder because there is less tolerance of bad improv. There aren’t built-in safety nets (unless you count a form you’re using, but that’s really just a structure). If you are just truthful and listen well, the audience are much more keen to see that than you being clever or funny, but it does take years and years for people to feel perfectly comfortable doing those simple things. Coming off stage it’s sometimes confusing having the audience really love a show that you thought was bad or okay. When someone comes up to you to tell you how great your show was, don’t tell them that they’re wrong! Telling a fan of your show that they are incorrect or that your show is poor makes them feel bad and rips on your work, neither of which have a good outcome! Just say thank you and work on your craft. Also, they may be right, and you may be wrong. There seem to be a couple of reasons for the disparity between the audience and improviser’s viewpoints. Audiences may not have seen as much improv as you. For some people, they are pretty amazed that you can make up a show as you go and thoroughly enjoy the magic unfolding. For me, I feel like a show fails when I am consciously working hard on it on stage. Improvisers call this ‘being in your head’. My favourite of the shows I have done are where my characters feel like they are being channelled and have a life of their own, that the beats or chapters of the narrative naturally fall out one by one. I am perfectly in the group mind of the company and we all have similar ideas and initiations, or immediately enjoy and jump on board the surprises. So, what’s the difference between one of those shows and one where I am standing on the side thinking ‘I haven’t really done many characters, maybe I’ll do a character’? Well, here’s my revelation; nothing. Nothing from the audience’s perspective anyhow. For them it’s a great show. They enjoyed everything about it. It just happens that today, your auto-pilot didn’t kick in as well and you had to fly on manual. It’s sometimes difficult to know which way to fly. I had a show after Christmas where I hadn’t done a show for a few weeks and just thought ‘ah, it’ll be fine – I’ve been doing improv for years’. Even if you’re an Olympic diver, you can’t just fall off the board and expect it to work, you have to use all your awareness and training and make that dive happen. That show was a belly flop. If you have a show where some other part of your brain is doing all the work; lucky you. I’m not suggesting you spend all your time on stage consciously planning and analysing, but I am suggesting that you need to be alert and open the whole time, you can’t just sit back and expect it all to happen. There’s also another kind of show where you loved it, but the audience didn’t. It was your best work, you did great. These shows tend to disappear after you’ve done a fair bit of improv, but the causes are mostly vanity and in-jokes. If you’re doing all your best schtick and having a super time but not listening to the other players, you may feel you did a great show, but the audience probably felt the gap between you and the other players. In-jokes are also a problem. You may have something that you do in rehearsals (we have some 8-year callbacks in the Maydays) but the audience are not only going to miss the joke, but will feel distanced by it. It’s great to know what you’re working on, it’s the only way your improv will get better. Enjoy the things you did well just as much as you notice the stuff you want to build on. You are doing this because you love it (no one chooses improv as a sure-fire career path) so notice the great bits. I used to keep a ‘Creative Arnica’ file on my laptop; every time someone said something nice about my or my team’s improv, I would make a note of it. That way, if I had a shitty show or thought my work sucked I could have a look back and realise that I was probably just forgetting to give myself positive notes as well as constructive ones. Creative Arnica; what can I say? I lived in hippy Brighton for 10 years. Remember that improv is a team sport. Everyone has your back. The team win – you win! Hell, that’s why I ditched stand up to do more improv. And it’s okay to fly on manual sometimes. It won’t feel quite as magical as those autopilot gigs, but unless you show it on your face, the audience can’t tell the difference. Over years of teaching improv, I have begun to notice that many students at one point or another appear to have a crisis of confidence and dips in their skill sets. There seems to be an ongoing cycle that starts with enthusiasm, becomes more of a serious work ethic and then turns into a mini freak-out. I have always advised these students - based on observation - that a dip in confidence seems to come along at the same time or just before a big jump in skills. I had no evidence or explanation for this apart from my own observations. Until now.
I was working in Chantilly, France recently, coaching improvisational thinking with leaders and was struck by something one of the other coaches mentioned. If you work in the corporate world, this is probably not news to you, but it really lit up a light bulb for me. There is a scale that runs like this: Unconscious incompetence Conscious incompetence Conscious competence Unconscious competence So: we don’t know that we can’t do something, then we know we aren’t doing it right, so we learn to do it, then we forget that we’re even doing it. For me, these are very clear levels within our improvisational learning. The most important of which is conscious incompetence. When you are a total beginner in improv, you can often hugely enjoy performing; there are no nerves, no stress, you know you can do whatever you want and there’s nothing important riding on it. You perform, you get LAUGHS - which is amazing - and then you’re done. Fun. After a while, you realise that you are maybe hitting on similar characters and gags because you know they work and because they feel easy and comfortable. You begin to realise that there’s more to improv. Where is the initial spark you had, why has it gotten harder? There is more to learn. You look at the people around you and see that they have skills you don’t, or that you’re not as good at. So you work on those skills. You increase your range, you take more risks, you are starting to enjoy the work again. You get a lot better, then it’s easy, then you are slightly disconnected. You’re maybe the best person in your company and you start to feel frustrated that others can’t keep up, or that the beginners class is too easy for you. So you are consciously competent. You join a more advanced class and really enjoy the scenes, they are rich, you are all listening to each other and the audience likes your shows. You believe that this is the norm. You are no longer stressing about your skill level because it is comfortable. You have forgotten your struggle. You are unconsciously competent. You are GOOD. Oh wait, another group came to town. How the hell are they doing the improv they are doing? What is long-form? Is that monologue genuinely from real life? Their physicality is incredible. They sing! Then here we go again. Alexis Gallagher always maintains that it is best to be the second worst person in a company. I think that’s a nice way to aspire to good improv. That way, you are always consciously incompetent and trying to learn the skills you see around you. But you’re not the worst, so you’re not going to feel like crap. And confidence is a key part of successful improv. This is by no means an experience that is only applicable to beginners. I come across these blocks in my work every so often when I’m working with amazingly tight companies, strong singers and improvisers that never forget a name or drop a ball. Just remember, whenever you know that you are terrible, that your improv is stale, that your work sucks, that you are the least funny/interesting person on stage; that is the point where you can go up a level. That is the point where you’re challenging yourself and taking risks. If you know you’re the most funny, interesting, talented, spontaneous person in the room, change rooms. It’s important to feel good about conscious incompetence. It’s the point where you’re most likely to surprise yourself, to take big risks and to push up your skill level. Your degree of competence is important to different people in different ways: The audience. Audiences love to watch people that are at their ease, even if they are enjoying their own incompetence. Your peers. Your fellow improvisers, employers and teachers; they all want you to be good. They want you to step up and they want to help you achieve great things. They also have your back. Yourself. No one is a harsher judge than yourself. Enjoy it. Let you be the harsh critic of you. Just don’t let the critic get in there when you’re playing. Love a show, get out of your head. Then sit down after and watch the video, see what you did good and bad and set yourself some goals. A side note on notes; I was shocked the first time I had two improv teachers contradict each other. It’s not like maths, there is no absolute right. Do what you think is more interesting. Just make sure you’re not doing it because it’s safe. Push your own boundaries and take advice when it speaks to you as the right advice. Try everything you get taught and keep what works for you. Always go in with an open mind, then jettison stuff afterwards if it doesn’t help. Now stand up and declare “I am consciously incompetent” and enjoy how much you can improve every time those words ring true. by Katy Schutte
Improv is largely about the suspension of disbelief. This is a blog to look at how we can hold the audience’s attention and how we can take them with us wherever we go. It’s not about short form where there is always a nod to the fact that you are improvising and there is a level of enjoyment where you are always meta-aware that the improvisers are messing with each other. I’m talking about improvised theatre. How can we create comedy or straight theatre through improv that hooks the audience as deeply as a well written play? Objects versus object work: When I first saw the two-man improv show TJ and Dave, I remembered it as if it was a film. This was due to their amazing accuracy with mime, or ‘object work’. I could tell which bills and coins were going in the till and which sweets were where in the DVD rental store. Object work is a skill that’s worth spending time on. To achieve this effect in your work there are a few tips: Treat everything you hold as if it has weight and depth. Make space between your fingers even if you’re holding a pencil or a comb, show the work of your muscles if you are moving something heavy. And make a clear decision in your head; what is this bowl made of, what colour is it, does this drink have ice in, how hot is my tea, how big is this coat? Specifics are super useful in improv and you can be specific with everything you touch. The audience love it when you agree physically about where things are and what things feel like, just as they do when you ‘yes, and’ in your language. I have been on tour with Fluxx this year and it’s the first improv company I’ve worked with where we have used physical props. At first I found it very difficult because your choice is hugely narrowed down from ‘anything’ to ‘these things’. This worked in a different way, meaning that the choices were made for you and the audience was easily on board with anything you used. I had a scene where I took a pack of cards on stage. I played Snap with another character and it was perfect that his character won the game. For performers and audience members this is a very accessible form of improv. The Showstoppers use costume, set and props to make their show look more like a familiar musical so the audience doesn’t need to make such a big leap to believe them. Personally, I’ll always be married to object work over objects, as – once you’re specific enough – there are a lot of beautiful moments that come out of it. Rachel and I had a fun show where we were a group of magicians in the Magic Circle. We had a great scene where one guy could turn his wand into anything at all. That’s the sort of stuff you can only do with object work. Clothing/costume: This is a difficult one. There’s really no way of looking neutral. You can choose show colours, a t-shirt with your logo, a genre costume, suits, or anything uniform, but everything will have the audience form an opinion. You just have to decide what you want the audience to think. What I don’t think works is skirts, dresses, and high heels and that has to do with the Male Gaze. I’m not well read enough to give you a Feminist discourse, but I know that when I am watching a woman improvise in a dress, she is limited in what she can do. In shows, I find myself doing handstands, performing dance moves, being animals, banging and a million other physical abominations. If you’re doing that kind of thing and you’re wearing a skirt or dress, it’s doing to ride up and no one is going to be thinking about how hilarious/interesting this scene is, they are going to be thinking about your c**t. Thick tights and leggings don’t do anything to solve this. I saw a girl at the Priory Arms recently wearing skin-tight wet look leggings and that created the same problem. I just kept looking at her arse and ignored her improv. If your improv is a bit crap and you want some glorious male producer to hire you, it’s totally a good idea, but otherwise, put some trousers on. Heels are a problem in another way in that they restrict how you move (and there are other clothes that do this). It’s going to be tough convincingly playing a man if the way you walk is changed by your shoes. Playing a woman who wears heels when you’re an improviser in flats is a lot easier. There are of course exceptions like Austentatious where the women always play women (in long dresses) and they never play animals or do anything physically crazy that’s gonna get their bits out. I for one always want the choice of playing any gender or age by suspending disbelief and being able to do a handstand whenever it seems like it might fit. This is not meant to be a dig at women (though it reads this way). I feel the same about guys wearing baseball caps or having hair in front of their faces. I could write a whole blog on when I think it’s good to wear your glasses on stage and when not, but I’ll spare you… Kissing: Let me start by saying that I don’t have a solution for this one. Whenever I see improvisers kiss on stage it pretty much throws me out of the show. Even some of the best shows I’ve seen totally lost me on this point. In a scripted show, the writer has decided that these two characters will kiss, so the actors do it. In an improvised show, the actors are writing the show as they go along, so there’s some odd self-interest at play in the pleasure (or not) of kissing. I always wonder whether they are loving or hating that moment and forget who they’re playing and why this moment has happened. I’m not saying it shouldn’t happen, but I am searching for a way to keep these intimate moments from bursting the bubble. The same goes for simulated sex and any other strong physical intimacy. I suppose the only thing to do is for the moment to be played truthfully. Avoiding a kiss that has to happen would probably destroy the moment just as much as doing it apologetically. There is a responsibility for the improvisers off stage during these moments to edit the show where it has the most power. Tune in to what seems okay for your fellow performers so that they always feel safe to explore these moments. They will save you if it goes too far or they will make it worse if the show needs that to happen! Summing up – I think there are broadly two types of shows; one that simply gives you appropriate props, costumes, set and maybe a narrator or director to steer the show. It holds your hand and does the imagining for you. The second is visually neutral and minimal so that it can go absolutely anywhere. The improv itself is steered by the whole group, not one person, so that you are not distanced by one authorial voice. If you are doing a genre like musical theatre, Austen, Shakespeare or science fiction, having a visual hook may help your audience get on board. If you want to have the world at your fingertips and the audiences’ imagination as your prop store, learn how to: Do object work well. Be open to playing anyone. Anyone. Be so comfortable on stage that anything can happen and have your other improvisers’ backs when they put themselves out there. Play to the top of your intelligence and allow the audience to do the work with you. The best improv I’ve ever seen has let my imagination and belief play a big part. |
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AuthorKaty Schutte is a London-based improviser who teaches improv classes and performs shows globally. Recent Posts |