Tag: game

Relationship in improv: What does that mean?

When I taught at the UCB in NYC, the most important word was ‘game’. In Chicago, the word I hear from students is ‘relationship’.

When I taught at the UCB Theater in NYC, the most important word was ‘game‘. In Chicago, the word I hear from students is ‘relationship’.

Often students are told to focus on the relationship by teachers. It sounds like a good idea, but I think it sometimes trips students up. The reason is that students often equate it with back story. Defining it seems to mean labeling it to these students. They aren’t just a manager and an employee at a McDonalds, but they are also cousins that live next door to each other. This added detail often doesn’t help much, and it doesn’t actually say much about the relationship.

How much back story do we need? Just enough for us to understand who these characters are and how they might behave. If you want to create a compelling relationship in an improv scene, focus on behavior and not back story. For instance, when you ask someone about their romantic relationship, it matters if they are dating, engaged or married. That can tell us something about how they relate. But what matters much more is how they treat each other and how they make each other feel. That’s the relationship!

A little back story helps. But if you want interesting relationships, focus on how your partner is behaving and how it makes you feel. This may lead to discoveries about the characters back story, but what keeps an audience engaged is how characters treat each other. And unique and specific behavior leads to compelling games in your scenes.

This was originally a thread on twitter:

You can follow me on twitter at @ircmullaney.

What is first unusual thing?

The best stories and songs and memories all have something unusual about them. Sometimes it’s slightly out of the ordinary, sometimes it’s absurd.

A common concept in improvised scene work is that at the top of the scene, we should be trying to discover the first unusual thing about the situation or relationship and then use that to create a game for the scene. A few questions were recently posed on my message board about the first unusual thing and here was my response:

The first unusual thing has a lot to do with how our brain works. We remember and are delighted by novelty in general. Lets say you shook hands with 20 people today, and 19 of them shook your hand in a way you expect. If the 20th person shook your hand and then pulled you in close and whispered into your ear, “You are the one, the only one who can save us.” You would remember that handshake long after you forgot the other 19 people.

The best stories and songs and memories all have something unique and unusual about them. Some of these unusual things are just slightly out of the ordinary, some are absurd or ridiculous. I would go so far to say that all great theatre is about unusual things. Plays are not about the days where everything mirrors ordinary life exactly and everything happens just as we would expect. It’s about the days when things go wrong or unravel in unexpected ways or about characters whose ordinary days seem strange to us.

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