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.

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!

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.

This is an example of a scene with a game.

The Game of the Scene is a term we use in improv (and sketch comedy) to describe what is funny and interesting about a particular scene. In order to describe the Game of a Scene, you typically should answer three questions:

• What is the basic situation?
• What is the first unusual thing?
• If that, then what?

What is the basic situation?

In this scene, a patient is visiting a psychiatrist. Most of us have certain expectations about how therapy works, even if we have never been in therapy ourselves. A psychiatrist asks patients questions and tries to get the patient to open up about their emotional life, their relationships and other aspects of their inner life. In some forms of therapy, the psychiatrist virtually never speaks. The patient does all the talking. Also, therapists don’t typically share intimate details of their own lives during a session.

What is the first unusual thing about the scene?

Since it’s probably rare for doctors to share details of their own private life, when the doctor talks about his truculent child, we can treat this as the first unusual thing. It’s not an extremely inappropriate thing to say, but it should strike most people as a bit strange.

If that, then what?

Once the doctor has shared one inappropriate personal detail, he continues to do so. First, the patient brings up her child and so the doctor bring up his. Next, the patient talks about her spouse, and then the doctor talks about his. Lastly, the patient talks about her drinking problem, so the doctor brings up his. There is a heightening of inappropriate behavior. Each time the doctor speaks, he is pushing the boundaries of propriety more. But the doctor is also following a pattern. In this case, the doctor’s intimate details are parallel to his patient’s.

Finding the Game

These questions allow us to zero in and explore comedic premises in our scenes. We can translate them into steps that help us create games. First, start a scene and strive to make it normal and real. Do the things that you would expect to happen in that situation. Once the situation is clearly established, pay attention to anything that is unusual for the situation. Often you might need to call attention to the unusual thing by pointing it out. In the above example, the patient might point out that she didn’t think the doctor was suppose to talk about his personal life during sessions. This can help clarify the game for the improvisors. Then, after it’s clear what the game is, you can start looking for variations. Ask yourself, if the doctor is willing to share details about his relationship with his child, what else is he willing to share? Finally, respect any patterns that develop in the game.

This sounds kind of simple, but it’s quite hard to do spontaneously, in front of an audience. It usually takes a lot of practice to achieve each step. Often it takes many months after learning how to play games before players can do it onstage with any consistency.

If this example was helpful, let me know and I’ll try to post more like it.