Two links I mentioned in the intro:

• Submissions are due soon for the Chicago Improv Festival.
• Come see Kevin in Will Act For Food‘s production of Jack’s Precious Moment.

For example:

Failure is a skill everyone has to learn. Get good at it. Encourage your students to get good at it by making your classroom a place where they know failure is ok. That being said, make sure they understand that integrity comes with failing for the right reasons. Don’t fail because you’re being lazy or unfocused. Don’t fail because you’re bailing on your scene to go for the cheap joke. Fail because you are pushing yourself to take chances you haven’t taken before.

photo by illustir from flickr.com

I also remember being confused about Keith Johnstone including so much material about masks in his book on Impro. What could possibly be the value in spending so much time working in masks?

Things started to change a few years ago when one of my friends in New York, a woman whose creative impulses I greatly respected started talking about how the improvisors she knew needed to learn how to use their bodies more. I don’t know what kind of classes she was taking, but she ended up involved in the clown community out there. I was open to the idea that improvisors needed to do more than stand on stage and say clever things, but I didn’t investigate it much at the time.

This summer I went to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe just to see shows and think about what kinds of theatre I wanted to produce. Many of the shows were very physical in ways that I hadn’t ever seen before. The staging of the plays was much more than simple blocking. Often the actors moved in ways that were not the naturalism that I’m used to. One show in particular, the show at which I laughed the hardest, had no words at all. It was just a guy on stage, by himself, doing things and looking at us. It was hysterical and I couldn’t begin to figure out why. He was a clown, a clown without makeup or a red nose or silly clothes, but definitely a clown.

So back in Chicago, I decided to study this thing people called physical theater. I started taking classes with Paola Coletta, who studied at Lecoq and teaches here at DePaul and Colombia. In the first class, we began by learning to be present on stage, to be energized but still neutral. We learned different kinds of movements and then married text to those movements, letting our body determine how we said the lines. We began working with masks, tried to embody different elements like fire and water. We adapted fairy tales as solo pieces. And we started using other masks, some called larval masks and others that were more clearly defined as characters.

And something mysterious began happening. Quite often in class, someone would do something and it would be hilarious. It would be funny in a way that few things are. We would be laughing so intensely, it was sometimes hard to breathe. Often the simplest thing could spark this laughter. One person would walk on stage with a mask on. Another would join them and they would simply look at each other and then look out at us and we burst out laughing. What the hell was going on? Some of these interations were more funny than 99% of the improv I’ve seen over the years and I’m at a loss about how to explain it. It’s spooky and little unnerving.

It’s also frustrating sometimes. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all. Two people are on stage with the same masks that doubled us over before and we feel nothing. Instead of being interested, we are bored. It can also be frustrating because the work seems so subjective at times. I’m the kind of person who likes his training boiled down into practical guidelines. It’s how I learned to improvise and how I taught it for years. This is much more the kind of work that you have to simply get on stage, let go and play.

It’s about fully engaging your body in specific ways. When your wearing a mask, all you have is your body. You can’t express anything on your face, so you have to use your body. Often, you can only barely see the other people on stage. You have to listen much more carefully. You have to trust what you feel is going on. It’s a bit like learning to use a light saber with a blinder on, or swing a bat with weighted donut. Take off the blinder or the weight and you can now play in a much more energized and full way.

It’s something I now wish I had explored much earlier. I suspect that many of the people we think of as natural improvisors, the ones who walk on stage and are instantly funny may simply be people who are more naturally in tune with their body. Perhaps, on a subconscious level they know how to be a clown so no matter what comes out of their mouth, we laugh. At least, it seems worth exploring.

Research on the effects of cardio vascular health on neurobiology seems pretty clear. The fitter you are > the fitter your brain will be > the better you will be at learning and the better you will be at the kind of executive functions that make good improvisors. So get your ass out there and exercise every day.

Exercise also has immediate short term benefits in learning environments, which means I’ll be starting rehearsals that I coach with active warmups that get people moving and their heart rates up. Be ready for it.

Keep things simple and focused. Work one muscle at a time in rehearsal. Repeat exercises from rehearsal to rehearsal or class to class. A student must practice a given skill many times for it to become second nature and useful on stage.

Also, you can’t really practice two things at once and certainly not three. Let students practice something over and over and until it becomes at least partially unconscious, before you add other layers on top of it.

Let students practice things slowly. Too often we are pushing people to do things fast before they have succeeded in doing them slow. In fact, force them to go far slower than they are used to sometimes. Then speed them up. Then slow them back down again.

For the first time in my life, I’m doing movement/physical theater classes. It’s silly and ridiculous and queer, but it’s also fun and playful and ultimately quite useful. I recommend it.

It was the middle of the show, and we had long since picked the low hanging fruit from the opening. Joe, an improvisor with whom I go back nearly 20 years, walked on stage and started making an action like he was feeding bread to ducks. I walked out and matched his activity. At this point, neither of us had much of an idea of where we were, or who we were to each other or how we felt about each other. He edited because it was time to edit, and I joined him because somebody had to.

Here was the part I loved. When we checked in with each other the beginning of the scene, we both knew that we had nothing. But I didn’t see any panic in Joe’s eyes. He was perfectly happy to be in a scene where we had nothing to start.

And so in the next few lines we calmly figured out what was going on and what we felt about it and each other and scene turned out pretty well. And it was because neither of us panicked. We were both completely comfortable starting a scene from almost nothing.

Sunday Punch hosted by Joy Joy Tragedy

Every week a new spiked fruit punch to sample!

WHERE: Upstairs Gallery, 5219 North Clark Street, Chicago
WHEN: Sunday nights at 7:30pm, October 18th through December 18th
HOW: FREE and BYOB (suggested $5 donation)

The first week will feature Ever Mainard:

And then some music by Daniel Byshenk:

And sketch comedy by RAM Chicago: Matt Mages, Kate Cohen, Mike Girts and Robert Reid.

When: Thursday, September 22nd, 9:30pm
Where: Stage 773, 1225 West Belmont, Chicago IL

Tickets are $10 at the door. Be sure to tell them at the box office that you were invited by Joy Joy Tragedy.

Joy Joy Tragedy opens for Improvised Jane Austen

The first couple of shows will be at the Underground Lounge (952 West Newport Avenue), Tuesday July 12th and Tuesday July 26th, at 8pm. I’ve sent out some invites for the initial shows, but I’m still working on lining up the guests. I’ll announce my guest performers here and on my twitter feed when I have them confirmed. I hope to do many more of these shows in the coming months.

Oh! And those shows at the Underground Lounge are FREE!