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.

Amrita Dhaliwal

Like me, Amrita is also an improvisor and she had a slot in a show that weekend to do some improv. She suggested we do a two person form which used the scene as a starting point. I suggested that we drop the rehearsed scene into the middle of the piece, that way the audience might never be sure which scene was from a play and which scenes were improvised. When we ran out of lines from the play, we would just keep going, improvising the rest of the scene.

I was excited to improvise with someone who had some of the same acting training as I did. We share a vocabulary and a desire to push our improv in the way we push ourselves as actors. We did the show and it was a great time. It was great to have a scene partner who is willing to play using all the same tools that I want to use.

So we decided to do a run of the show and we are calling it Joy Joy Tragedy. Each show will be about 80-90% improvised, but at least once per show we will drop in a scene from a great play (or TV series or film). For each show we will have a selection of scenes we have prepared to choose from, so we won’t even know for sure which scene we will be doing on a given night.

We are doing three shows at the Upstairs Gallery and six more at Second Stage (formally the Stage Left Theatre), all on Wednesdays in June, July and August. We also hope to do the show at the Del Close Marathon. If you want to get info about upcoming performances of Joy Joy Tragedy, you can follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

What is the program?

Like a lot of programs in Chicago and elsewhere, they start with exercises used in Meisner classes. You learn to observe your partners behavior. You do repetition. Repetition is something that I’ve done for years. I thought this part of the curriculum would be old hat for me. But I certainly did learn new things.

My favorite lesson was how important it was to fight to see your partner. In my previous acting classes, there were often moments of vivid emotional life in the exercises. Sometimes people would be overwhelmed with feelings sparked by the exercises. I certainly had experiences like that. What was new for me at Black Box was how important it was to fight when you start to feel overwhelmed. That is the moment to push yourself to see your partner, and to know how they are behaving. In the past, I would just allow myself to get lost in my own emotional experience. I’ve certainly seen others do the same. I’m betting at some point, someone else gave me a similar note, but Black Box is where I first really heard and understood it.

By the second level, you are doing improvisations. These aren’t improv scenes where you create dialog, these are scenarios which you choose beforehand and spend time imagining the circumstances. The words you use are limited to repetition. They are similar to the independent activity exercises that Meisner pioneered. This is a particularly interesting class which forces you to really stretch your imagination. It’s a tough class. I remember agonizing for days over whether or not my activity would work, but it definitely gets easier with practice.

The third class really switches gears. This is when things start getting very physical. Here you get an introduction to viewpoints and a few other tools, and it’s where you begin to work with text. It felt a little crazy at first, all the things they were throwing at me. But as I used these tools with text in different combinations, as realized how powerful things like gesture, body shape and tempo were for grounding me into the circumstances of the text.

The fourth class is where things come together. You do a variety exercises, mostly with text. I worked on three different scenes and a monolog. We did mock auditions and rehearsals and used different tools from the previous classes to prepare. It really brought things together and gave me a sense that I was ready to tackle a show in ways that I never have before.

Why study at Black Box?

The program is fairly new. Laura Hooper and Audrey Francis, the owners, started the studio about two and half years ago. Most of the other teachers have been added in the last six months. I’ve met and worked with most of them too. I don’t think there is a bad one in the bunch. I’m been impressed with them all.

There are a couple things they do which I love and I hope they continue. One is team teaching. Every class I’ve taken has had at least two teachers. They don’t switch off. They both show up, they take turns running exercises and giving notes. In this last class, there were four teachers (three in training I believe). It was an incredible luxury to have that many eyeballs watching you work and thinking about how to improve your performance.

The other thing is that their teachers take classes there too. They are encouraged to be students and take the classes again periodically. In the class with four teachers, there were also two more teachers taking the class with us. So on most days teachers outnumbered students. That probably won’t happen again soon, but it’s an added perk when the person with whom you are doing a scene is a teacher.

Lastly, they listen. From the first class, I had the direct email addresses of my teachers and whenever I had a problem or question, I could contact them. They were very generous with their feedback. They were also very responsive to feedback about them. At the end of the second level, I was loving the program, but I had a couple issues which I wanted to discuss with them. I sent a long email with my thoughts. In the third level, Audrey approached me and thanked me for the feedback, saying that they had made some adjustments based on my feedback and they were working well.

Is it a perfect program? No. I wish it were longer and more intense. I’m sure some of my classmates think it was intense enough, but I wish I could train like that everyday. I’d like to learn more about viewpoints. What they taught me was very useful, but it’s obvious there is much more to learn about it.

I am very happy I went through it. I got two key things from it. First, I have a set of tools from which I’m putting together my process. I didn’t have this before. I feel like I could use these tools every day for the next few years and continue to learn. Second, I am ready to get out there and audition for shows here in Chicago. Last fall, when I returned to the theater, I didn’t quite know where to begin. Now, I feel ready to get back in there.

One solution that I’ve advocated for years is just do something, anything at the beginning of the scene. Don’t think about it, don’t talk about it, don’t make the scene about that activity. Just do that thing so that your scene partner can join you and you can blow past the who, what and where. Start talking about anything else. This tends to work reasonably well.

But when you can do that, there is a whole different set of muscles to work on. They are acting muscles. You should be able to answer a bunch of questions in the beginning moments of a scene. How do I feel? What is my partners behavior? How do they feel? Do I like it? How do I feel in response? What do I want from my partner (in terms of behavior)? I like scenes where there is a whole dialog between the players not in words, but in behavior and emotional responses.

I wish a lot more of my scenes started that way, where I can ignore the who, what and where and simply concentrate on the how. How is my scene partner behaving? How do I feel in response? How far away from me are they? How fast is the tempo of this scene? How is my body shaped? How am I using the stage and the architecture of the space? When I focus on these things, the why comes automatically and the who, what and where just tumble out on their own, as if there were there all along.

You might ask, why am I here? I’m here to get better. I feel out of shape as a performer. As an actor, I never really nailed down any particular process. I’d get a script, memorize it, go to rehearsal, try to absorb the blocking and direction, and try to figure out the best way to say my lines. It’s not a great process and it doesn’t seem to take advantage of all that early training which encouraged me to work off my partner. So the first priority was to find a studio, go back to class and figure out a process–a real process that starts with a script and ends with a full, dynamic, grounded and improvisational performance.

I’m in my third class at Black Box Acting Studio and I feel like I’m on my way to that goal. In the first two classes, they use exercises that are drawn from Meisner training, mostly repetition and independent activity exercises. In the next level, they bring in viewpoints and punctuation walks. Their process is a hybrid of things. It’s good practice and I feel a lot closer to that goal of a repeatable process.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve gradually fallen out of shape. I’m still well below my New York average weight, but I had lost enough ground, that I decided I had to do something about it. I’m back on a diet that is similar to the one I used a long time ago, when I first exercised seriously in my 20s. And I’m back in the gym. I’m reading the Four Hour Body by Tim Ferris and taking ideas from there. For instance, yesterday was my first day doing kettlebell swings, an exercise he recommends.

I’m doing other things too. I completed a few classes at the Annoyance, and now I’m in writing classes at Second City. I’m also taking guitar classes at the Old Town School of Folk Music. This upcoming year, I’m thinking as my DIY MFA project. My longer term plan is to start focusing on getting cast in some plays by the summer or fall. I want to get through one more class at Black Box and find a good scene study class that I can use to practice my process.

As usual I’m having trouble fitting everything in. I want to work on everything at once. I realize this is not the optimal way to do it. Eventually, I might narrow things down to writing or acting or improv again and focus my full force on that for a few years. But for the next 3-6 months, I’m going to continue down this path. It gets overwhelming if I try to think too many moves ahead. I want to keep focusing on what is the very next step and put my energy there. I’m going to trust that it will take me somewhere interesting.

Years ago I took a series of acting technique classes. The instructors didn’t mention Meisner, but it was obvious that the exercises and methods were similar. We used repetition. We improvised scenes using imaginary circumstances. It was exciting and visceral and raw.

I took those lessons and tried to apply them to my improv. It taught me to be present, to pay close attention to the emotional life of my scene partner and to act on my gut impulses. For years, I’ve taught workshops that try to bring those ideas from Meisner to improv. I’m teaching one of those workshops this weekend.

But I’ve always felt that I didn’t know enough about those techniques. I never fully integrated the lessons into my acting. I felt like I needed to start again, to study those ideas more deliberately and most importantly, practice them over and over until I could achieve those raw, exciting, visceral performances in scripted work. So that is why I’m back in Chicago and back in class.

I settled on Black Box Acting Studio, in part because I had heard some good things, but mostly it fit into my schedule better than the alternatives. I’m in the middle of my second class and it’s exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. The instructors are good and have created a good head space to do these exercises. The work is challenging and tough and the results so far have been quite satisfying.

The first thing I noticed is that the exercises seem to be a bit more connected to Meisner than the previous technique classes I had taken. They resembled the exercises described in Meisner’s book more than the ones I had used before. This isn’t necessarily better. I loved the technique classes I had taken in the past, but it did mean that I was going to get a different angle and learn new things.

I would think that if you were to observe the classes, you might think the class was about having emotional experiences. There certainly is a lot of crying. Emotional outbursts of all types are common and encouraged. But one thing I find particularly interesting about their approach is how much they force you to fight through your emotions at the point when you feel most overwhelmed. If you are hurt or upset or happy or angry, you can’t just wallow in your emotions. Feeling something is good, but it’s just the beginning. Instead you have to fight.

That fighting might be to hold on to your circumstances–the work you have done with your imagination before the exercise. But more likely, they want you to fight to put your focus back on your partner. It’s not enough to create circumstances which evoke deep feelings in yourself. It’s not enough to have the guts to reveal that emotional life on stage. That’s not acting and it’s not great theater. But watching someone who has achieved that and then is willing to fight to get what they want, now that is interesting.

I’m not sure if I was taught that before. I probably was, but I think I missed this particular idea. It’s that at that moment when you feel most overwhelmed, that you must push your focus outward and at your partner. How are they feeling? What do you want from them? And now what are you going to do to get it?

I’m not going to be satisfied with performing once a week. I’d like to perform six nights a week, and on my night off, I’d like to perform. I don’t want to be in four or five groups to accomplish this, although in the short term, I may do just that. I’d rather work with one ensemble and do one main show.

I’d like to rehearse often. I’d like to rehearse three or four times a week, especially at first. But even after the show opens, I’d like to rehearse more than weekly and try new things. I’d like to identify where we can push ourselves to be better and smarter and more interesting. I’d like to tape the shows and review them later, looking for ways to improve our craft. I’d like to borrow great ideas from other types of theater and art and bring them into our shows. I’d like to work harder than I’ve ever worked before.

In the near future, I’ll be returning to Chicago and dipping my feet into the improv pool again. I’ll be performing where I can and perhaps teaching here and there. But I’ll also be cornering people in bars and telling them my ideas and looking for people who share my desire to be a part of a group that works as hard as I’d like to work. I’ll be visiting New York and maybe LA. I’ll be traveling to a few improv festivals and interviewing more teachers and directors for my podcast. I’ll probably do some projects along the way which approach my ideal, where we rehearse in a concentrated fashion and perform multiple times a week. It might take me a while before I can put all the pieces in place, but barring some amazing opportunity which takes me down a different path or some unforeseen tragedy which interferes with my plans, this will happen.

Why write about this? Why put this in my blog? Because, I’m curious whether there are enough good performers out there who could commit themselves for a year or two or three to making this happen. I think you might be out there. I just haven’t found you yet.

And then I began to teach. I liked teaching, a lot. I learned much about how to improvise when I started to coach it and then later when I taught it. There is something powerful about having to think deeply enough about something that you have to explain it to someone else. Still, during these first couple of years in Chicago as a teacher, I performed as much or more than I taught. I had some balance and I continued to grow as a performer.

When I moved to New York, this began to change. Once there, I had to worry more about how I was going to pay the bills. I really didn’t want to take a day job, but that meant I had to teach a lot more and coach more than I had in Chicago. I started teaching four classes a week. I did perform, but not as much as I would have liked. I got myself on a Harold team, but instead of playing weekly, like I had in Chicago, we played every other week, sometimes every third week. I put together shows, but those would only last for a few months. I probably spent at least six hours teaching or coaching for each hour spent performing. Even if my goal was to be a great teacher, this was not a good setup. Like anything else, being a great teacher requires that you recharge often. By the end, I did not feel recharged at all.

When I left New York, I had become a teacher. I was a pretty good one, but in my seven years there, I only became a marginally better performer. My confidence as a performer had waned and my love for performing had definitely bottomed out. This is no surprise. I spent all my energy teaching (and running the school where I taught), and I got better at it. It wasn’t that, “Those who can, do. And those who can’t, teach.” It’s more like, “You become what you do.” I taught, so I became a teacher.

In the years since, when I’ve mostly been away from the theater, I realize that this was a mistake. Although I love teaching, my first love is performing, and my second love is directing. I’m not sure teaching is even third on that list. It might be fourth or fifth, if I’m honest. I love it, but it’s just not my highest priority. I want to be the best performer I can be, and that will mean that I’ll have to devote the lion’s share of my energy to performing. I want to improvise and I want to act and I want to develop original theater as a performer, writer and director. There’s no secret to getting better at these things, except that you must do whatever it is you want to master. I let myself get distracted from that in NYC.