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Archive for September, 2008

Stepping Out (from classroom to stage)

Saturday, September 20th, 2008

Dearest Improvisers and Readers,

  As as student of the art of theatre (more specifically improvisation) I find my education at the Metropolitan State College of Denver more and more useful in the “real” world of making things up. Studying under the teachings of Christy Montour-Larson, I was taught improvisation and how to pull it off successfully. Who knew there was an improv world beyond Whose Line Is It Anyway?

  We were taught in class the basic games, a base for everything else to come. Whether it is “Freeze” or “Word Connection”, they were just a jumping off point that we could always turn to if needed. Even learning Meisner and his techniques (which many of my classmates detested and scowled at) taught us that something so simple can become a segway to something greater. Whenever we get into trouble on stage; under the hot lights; in front of judging eyes who expect to get their money’s worth and an escape, we fall back to the basics.

  From the basics we flowed into long form. Whether it is “Bus Driver” or “Cocktail Party” we made the connection, we progressed the scene and we were truthful. As Christy told us, the truth is always interesting; funny and captivating.

  My classmates and I came out of the class with a new respect for the sub-genre of theatre. Not only that but many of us found a new way to love the theatre, in a way that didn’t give us the elements of preparation and blocking. The few that had that passion bursting from them formed a troupe: Christy’s Angels.

  Four other classmates and I took the stage of the Bovine to work that passion, to scare ourselves, to have fun, to feed the improve monster and to make Christy proud. Though the “real” world of improv expects different values from the classroom stage at Metro, I feel confident from what I’ve been taught there to take that world head-on.

  Be young, gave fun, drink Pepsi and make some stuff up!

  ~Ryan, a fellow Angel and Bovine Intern

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Workshop

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

I attended the Bob Dassie workshop this weekend and had my improv muscles streeeeetched, son. 

Couple things we worked on: 

Declaration and Justification:  Make a statement and justify it.  I chew gum because it keeps me from smoking.   We also flipped the exercise to lay-ons; You don’t eat apples because you’re allergic to fruit.  Then we combined the two to declare and justify about yourself and the other person in the exercise.   

This exercise worked the muscles that provide reasons for what comes out of our mouths.  If you say something in a scene – why did you say it?   This was very hard because it dealt with facts and information as opposed to emotions and relationships.  We had to be concrete and specific.  Again it was an exercise and not meant to be a scene, just to get in the practice of justifying with facts any declarations made.  Statements like I like bubbles because they make me happy were eschewed for rephrases about circular translucent floating liquid. 

Emotional variance:  We all know that emotions and relationships are among the fundamentals of good scenes.  We worked on playing a variety of emotions and the spectrum of these emotions.  Most people don’t go from ecstatic to livid in an instant.   

I took notes but can’t seem to find em.  What a dumb-ass right?  So for anyone else who took the workshop it’d be nice to share anything you learned or mainstays of which you were reminded.  

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Ramblings from a Bovanity Fair sketch show cast member.

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

While in college at the theater department, when we had to present a scene that we weren’t sure about, we used to say it was brought to you by “De La Manga Productions” (Spanish for “Off-The-Cuff Production”), and most of the times, we would wing it.  For the more traditional professors, this was an outrage.  For others, admittedly, my favorite professors, this was perfectly fine.  These breed of instructors firmly believed that improvisation is the basis of all work, even if doing Chekhov or Shakespeare.  In order to discover the nuances of the text, you needed to play with it and find new layers, not just deliver the lines, yell “STELLAAAA!!” and be done.

Maybe what we do at the Bovine is not as intricate as Tennessee Williams’ exploration of sexuality.  But even when doing 2-4 minute sketches, you can find a new layer that at a first glance you may have completely missed if you hadn’t played with the text.

That’s where Improv and Sketch, in my opinion, go hand in hand.  Many may wonder why an improv theater has sketch comedy shows.  Live improv puts actors in the right here, right now, thinking on their feet, listening to each other, connecting.  We all can agree that some of the moments or things said in an improv show, both long and short form, you can’t help but wonder, “where in the world did that come from?!?!?”  (Read some of the postings for the Improv-a-thon, you’ll see what I mean).

A sketch show, on the other hand, is the ultimate improv process.

A script may start as the result of an improvised scene, an idea someone had lurking in their brain, or as a script that someone banged out.  Then we start playing with it:  why is this particular moment in these characters’ life so unique that anyone else (i.e. the audience) may be interested in?  This is the fine-tuning process.  You play with the text and find out what’s working and what isn’t working.  Rewrites.  You take the characters and let them go for a while and see where they end up.  More rewrites.  Then you choose what’s in the show and what isn’t.  Sometimes a sketch on the 7th draft gets cut.  That’s the nature of the sketch show.  Keep working.

You find that something that worked two weeks ago is not working now.  For example, Casey has a one word line - “Spaghetti”.  Two weeks ago, she was a Jersey guy delivering the line, and we all laughed our heads off.  Today it doesn’t work.  After some direction and improvisation, the line is delivered in a sexy, sultry voice…  It’s funny again.

Sometimes while rehearsing you get so in character that you say something that is not on the script but it would be obvious for your character to say or do, and you hear the director in the background say “keep it!” - yet again, improvisation has taken the script to a new place.

As an actor, I THRIVE in this process.  I love seeing the beginnings of an idea evolve into a fully fleshed out sketch.  It is my favorite part of putting together a show.  The rehearsal period is almost like an improv show, except that the audience is the cast and directors.  Part of me wishes the audience would be able to see these “weekly improv shows”, but alas, the audience only gets the final product.  And as hilarious, polished, and professional as it may be, the audience, in this sense, only gets half of the story.  A sketch show has about 22 scenes.  Every scene has its own background, its own storyline, its own improvisational process, its own voice.  And yet it cohesively fits into the main storyline of the show.

And even when the show is in its “final form”, then we run for two months, allowing us to keep finding nuances and surprise each other while staying true to the final product.

That’s why I love working on sketch shows - it’s a three month long improv process.  But don’t feel cheated out as an audience member.  Come see the show at the beginning of the run, sometime during the middle, and then towards closing weekend.  You will see what I mean about finding new surprises and nuances while staying true to the final product.

Bovanity Fair opens this Friday at 8pm and runs Fridays and Saturdays until Nov. 1st.

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SansScript, The Elements, and Uncle Louie

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

The Democrats who incame have outgone, except for my Uncle Louie. Louie and me, we stopped by the Bovine Saturday for a late-night set improv set to see the Elements and the Sansscript Players, two house groups, close their two-week run.

Louie lives in Pascoag, RI, and was a Hillary delegate to the convention. (He’s doing OK with the switch, now. He’s all about unity.)

“Look,” Louie said after the show. “Look, I sat through meetings for months. I sat through planning meetings for our primary, and selection meetings, and — well, you get what I’m saying. I know when nothing’s happening. And tonight, nothing happened.”

Louie’s a harsh guy. He saw a lot of scenes: a player saying he’d walked into a restaurant accidentally, players building a huge Jenga tower without every playing the game, players arguing about whether a trip to Beijing or Blackhawk was more worthwhile (drunk women and exhaust were points in favor of Blackhawk), players who assiduously avoided dealing with the story lines they introduced (child abuse (twice), murder, recurrent blindness, etc.).

I tried to explain the whole “Yes And” concept, and Louie got it. Except for walking through a couple of tables and such, everybody was very agreeable. He just thought that with all the possibilities (did I mention divorce? concerts? intercultural families?) somebody might have done more than crack a joke.

“Y’know, I go to the movies. I watch TV. Hell, I’ve been to my kids’ plays. People move around, lights go on and off, people — characters, right? — pick things up and put them down, they pretend to be somebody else.” Louie’s got culture. “The guy who announced everything said it was gonna be a night of improvised theater. Was that theater?”

Well, it’s improvised, see, improvised theater. So it’s different.

“So they get to act stupid?”

Ouch.

Louie told me about the time he saw a high-school show and didn’t recognize his daughter’s best friend in the show. There was no fancy costume, he said, she just moved and sounded different from her usual self, and still seemed real. Her acting wasn’t rooted in a weird accent or funny voice, she just became somebody else. It was weird, he said.

“So why’d they just act goofy? Is that theater out here?”

Louie and I had a good night. He laughed a couple of times, stayed awake, and we went out for a beer afterward where he got to complain. Sunday, he went home to Pascoag. There’s no improv in Pascoag.

And I got to thinking about a couple of lines heard from the stage that night:

“I haven’t really moved from this spot,” said one actress.

And another, “I want to just have a real conversation with somebody.”

Me, I’d’ve liked to have seen people move. And to have seen a real conversation would have been a pleasure.

The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and are not attributable to the ownership of the Bovine Metropolis Theater. This series may address specific dosages and administration of drugs in combinations not included in current prescribing information. Readers are advised to improvise at the top of their intelligence.

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