The Denver Improv Festival (DIF) is here at the Bovine this year. It is going well. I see a lot of people in classes and at shows.
The DIF this year feels like a local festival. It’s friendly. It’s almost folksy. It has no pretension.
If you have ever wanted to see some great improv or wanted to try an improv class the DIF is your ticket.
Improvise!
We have a syndrome in long form called ’sticky feet’. It is the player who is thinking on the side so much that they don’t jump into edit the scene. The thinking stops the body and shuts it down. It can paralyze players.
What a lot of people don’t get is that the body and the mind are one. When you are thinking your body stops. It’s sort of the same reasoning behind body language showing us what you are feeling. Thinking on stage is usually accompanied by no object work or where work and sometimes no movement.
But if you move your body it will unlock your mind. Just move. Break out of your head and into your body and you are free again.
Get into the where and you are into the moment. You stop thinking if you are actively doing something in a scene. If you are doing something repetitious you may fall back into thinking. If you are doing something that requires attention, emotion then you are free.
Try it next time on stage. Get into an activity that requires your attention. Explore the where. Move your feet without knowing why. You will make your time on stage much more fun.
Improvisation is about being connected in the moment. There is no right or wrong way to be in the moment. But if you are not in the moment if you are not present on stage then you are trying to get it right or trying not to get it wrong and you are thinking and not playing.To get past this you must have a honest reaction to every moment on stage. Actors call it listening. You must hear what is said and react to it honestly. If you don’t you are not improvising you are thinking, planning. plotting, but not playing.
There is only one way to play a scene and that is to react to your partner in the moment. You can make any emotional choice you want (or your character wants) as long as it is authentic, but once you try to manipulate the audience or try to get the laugh or push plot or give us exposition, you are in the wrong mind set, you are not playing.
My favorite Spolin quote is “Approval/disapproval is keeping you from a direct experience. Success/failure is a side product of the approval/disapproval syndrome. Trying to succeed or giving to failure drains us.” I would go one step farther saying that giving into the approval/disapproval syndrome almost always guarantees failure in improvisation. This does not necessarily mean failure in front of the audience, you may get laughs, but you are not improvising anymore. Thoughts that are not generated out of the scene, they are from the actor, which means you are no longer present in the scene you are ‘in your head.’
“So how do I get in the moment?” Listen on stage. React to what is said in an real manner. When I play a gay character who is in love with another man on stage, I try to be in love with that person. I look at them and want to touch them and hold them. I love them. My character loves them. I will do what lovers do, because I am there.
Next time you’re playing and you start thinking, planning, plotting, excusing, just shut your mouth, look the other player in the eye and listen with your body and your heart. You will get back into the moment fast and then you are in a field playing.
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.” Rumi.
I sometimes get hung up on the word “player” (see last blog). We are players! We play, but we also must remember that we are doing improvisational theater. This means we are also improvisational actors.
The first thing about being an ‘actor’ is character interpretation. Actors play characters, interpreting characters motivations and emotions. We put on a mask and become someone else. When we improvise, we must have a character! If we don’t we are not improvisational actors. We are not even players. Without characters we are just folks trying to get laughs. We are stand-ups without the discipline to write, re-write and rehearse. We are at best quick witted buffoons.
Characters allow us to be in a different place and time. They let us be someone else for a moment and say and do things that we would never do in real life. They give us a chance to take things emotionally in a different way. We can let our characters get hit and deliver emotional slings and arrows. They can allow the player to drop their defenses. Characters are a, if not the, critical element to what we do as improvisational actors.
Another thing about the word ‘actor’ is a person who acts. A gear puller. Someone who makes things happen or things happen to them. A person who can push someone off the subway platform or gets pushed. Someone who gets in the middle of things and makes things happen. A person who can create change.
Too often I see scenes where nothing happens. Where players are talking about someone or something off stage about things that don’t effect the characters on stage. There is no emotional transaction. No change. Theater is about change. Every good scene is about change. Every (non-experimental) play is about change. Good improvisational actors know that every scene is about change. About change being inflicted or attacking the relationship or character on stage.
A scene where there is no relationship (of importance) and the laughs come from a pattern or a joke I call those ‘games’. Games are great and I think they are what most players are good at performing. I love them, even in long form, but only in moderation. To be an improvisational actor you need to be able to act in any type of scene; relationship, comedy, serious, game, etc, you need to be able to let the character be moved and be able to act upon other characters.
I may be a player, but I also hope that I am an improvisational actor too.
Dearest Readers and Improvisers,
I want to start by informing you that I have been hacked! During the chaotic two weeks of mid-terms at Metro, I have been stuck in my books, studying for various tests. I did not have much time to write any blogs or even check out what was going on at the Bovine website. Now that the mid-terms are over I’ve been able to return to the website only to find out that a recent blog had been entered under my name from Moo, the Bovine Metropolis cow.
True, Moo did write some nice things about the theater and promoted its many shows but may have made some remarks toward hamburger eating, milk drinking, leather wearing viewers. For that, I apologize. Everyone is welcome at the Bovine.
~Ryan, fellow Angel and improviser
Moo.
As your above-average Denver-based cow, I’m inclined to recommend that you put down your hamburgers, glasses of milk and take off your leather jackets to listen to what I have to say. I understand that it isn’t everyday you have a cow giving you orders but this is an especially different kind of time we’re living in. I want to get the word out on the Bovine Metropolis Theater (the only cow friendly theater in town!). Not only is it a laugh riot almost nightly but it is stationed at events regularly around the city. I hope you saw me up and down the 16th Street Mall at the DNC or most recently Single’s Mingle 5K Walk/Run in support of the Colorado Chapter of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. You’ll see me everywhere. I hope to see some of you on the streets of Denver but more importantly at the Bovine laughin’ it up!
Until later, keep on mooing!
Sincerely,
The Moo
“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” Rumi
So often I see improvisers trying to be cleaver or define the scene before it has had time to take root and blossom. They are not comfortable unless everything is labeled on stage or made fun of. That is not fun, that is safe.
When I see good improv I know the players have no idea where they are going. What is thrilling about it to me is that, even as an audience member, I am on that journey with them. I don’t know what is going to happen next. We will all find out together. That’s what makes improv the most magical of theatrical performances.
Once you label or define something on stage you diminish it. You make it smaller (and unfortunately easier to control) for you and the audience. If you say, ‘It’s a husband and wife scene and I have done thousands of them’ you have really missed the boat. Have you ever played this wife with this husband in this place with this issue? Who knows where it could go. Don’t diminish the wave, ride it!
It’s an old axiom that “being cleaver kills a scene” so does defining it.
Bewilderment is a great word, in it’s archaic form it meant ‘amazed’. Onstage you should always be awake to what might happen. Be open to the moment, it matters.
The other thing I like about bewilderment is the sentiment that you are lost and its good. Getting lost is sometimes fun. I used to have a girlfriend right out of High School whose favorite thing was for us to drive into a strange place and try to get lost. We would drive and try to find our way home not know for sure where we were. It was exciting. It was just me and her trying to figure it out, much like improv. And much like improv, when we did figure out how to get home, the adventure was over.
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” Rumi
This is true for improv too. We all have players inside of us. We all have a child inside of us who wants to agree and accept and play. We have all done this, although it may have been years ago or when we are ‘altered’. We all used to pretend that we were someone else and had fun doing it, even if it was so long ago that you have a hard time remembering it.
Most people think improvisation is something you have to learn, but the truth is it is something that is in all of us. When you improvise you are playing. Play is something that most of us have unlearned. We have repressed it. Hidden it away from ourselves and others. We have covered it up and suppressed it.
Improv classes and performing help you connect to that play that is inside us all. We call improvisers “players” because we play. Improv helps you get past the crap that has been put on you and get to that player inside.
To be a great improviser you don’t need to be funny, you just need to unleash that playfulness inside of you.
I love working with groups. The thing about groups is that they are made up of the individuals that comprise them. Duh. But I don’t know if we always see that as so. We see a group as an entity with a purpose, to create better branding for a product, to have a few beers with, or to plan the Holiday party. We make the title of the group, “the group”. But the group is the individuals that comprise it at any given time.
The first part of the group is “me” the individual. You must take care of yourself and you must bring your authentic self to what you are doing. Be yourself. Play to your strong suits and be in it 100%.
The second part is “you”, “me” connecting to “you”, our connection. I have to take care of you in the group so that you can stay centered and bring what you need to bring to the party. I still have to take care of me.
The third part is “us” the group. We all have to have the same overarching goal and focus.
If you are so busy taking care of yourself that you forsake the others and the group, then you are a group of one. If you are so busy taking care of everyone else’s needs then you are not present in the group. If you are bringing yourself and connecting to one or two others, but not honoring the entire group then you will be seen as divisive and building cliches.
Me, you and us. Bring yourself and take care of yourself. Connect with others and nurture their gifts to the group. Include everyone and everyone must have the same goal, even if that goal is just to have fun.
Seems simple, but it is everything.
I have been teaching improv classes for over 12 years. In classes we work on techniques to get people integrated with their bodies. We work on trusting others on stage. On not trying to script, control or preconceive what “should” happen on stage. What happens is that players then want to improvise the “right” way and instead of focusing on fun they try really hard to do it “right”.
They think about starting in the where. They think about having a character. They think about connecting and trusting and accepting. They want to be in the moment so badly that they are removing themselves from the moment. Thinking stops playing. Quit thinking!
The “right” way to do improv is to play hard, have fun, and trust you won’t fall off the edge of the world, and if you do it’s just play, who cares? Get out there and have a blast. Try to make your friends break character by playing your character so well. See how much your character can take over your body. Get crazy!
Practice in classes and rehearsals and then trust yourself and play on stage. If you are having fun, the audience will too.
And as you do this more more and more technique seeps into your play without forcing it.
So Play On Stage!