I was lucky when I first started improvising 20 years ago, the first school I went to was Players Workshop in Chicago and they didn’t stress rules, form or performance. We would move very slowly and do exercises over and over (often we would only do three exercises in a two and a half hour class). Whenever I felt like I “failed” an exercise I would do it over when given a chance. I wanted to get it “right”.
Player’s Workshop didn’t teach right or wrong. They just had an exercise that you did and what you got out of it was what you were supposed to get out of it. The beautiful thing about this method was it was coupled with ‘no results’ philosophy. Which meant that anything we did on stage wasn’t applauded or criticized. I was in a Spolin school.
Being a male raised in the U.S.A. I wanted to do it right. The school didn’t allow right or wrong to be based on what an outsider said what was right or wrong. It was left up to me to figure out what worked and didn’t.
What this gave me was a sense of ease. Not an ease that comes from knowing that anything I do will be accepted, which does put one at ease. What I mean was that anything that was ‘easy’ on stage became a better method of doing it for me. What ever took me more time and energy to do was less gratifying and just harder. If I was on stage and doing something that was easy, it was fun, and usually funny. This is something I still teach to this day.
Just because you are taught in a nurturing atmosphere does not mean that you will not pander to the audience. After going through a year of Spolin Games in a slow, nurturing atmosphere I started improvising other places and going for the joke. Removing my character from the scene so that I could get the laugh. If a scene were slow or quiet I would think that the audience was not along for the ride, but judging me. So I would do anything to get laughs, make fun of the situations we were in and sabotage the other actors and ours scenes.
I took more classes. I played more and more to the audience. Make them laugh at any price. I got rewarded for it by coaches and audiences. I got good at it after a while. I got to know what made the crowd laugh and the things that bombed got eliminated. Soon I had an extensive repertoire that I could pull out for any occasion and get a laugh.
There was a moment when I felt like I could get any response out of an audience. Like a person playing an instrument, I could get the audience to laugh, chuckle, sigh, moan. I knew what their response was going to be and to what degree before I ever opened my mouth. I had become the quintessential bad improver. The tough thing about knowing what response you will evoke before you say it is the fact that it is not improvisation.
At some point I was playing in a show that was all games. I grew bored and I wanted to challenge myself. I remembered a moment in Chicago where I created a new character on stage and I was gone and the scene was amazing. I wanted more moments like that. I started to focus on character. I revisited my Spolin Games. I started having fun again. I started studying books, teaching and taking classes.
I played for years and never fully realized the wealth of benefits that I gained by participating in this art form. I learned to improvise in the moment. I learned to mine intangible moments of truth to yield comedy. I learned to avoid the status quo more than the unknown. Anyone can learn the true nature of improvisation and finally I saw it. Once I understood what it was all about then I went back to the basics and realized that even the little exercises that I was taught or discovered have a meaning that I never imagined.
Each moment on stage can be a revelation and improvisation has more benefits than just the immediate gratification of laughter and applause.