BagelProv

I used to swear by this  quote when I was writing poetry:

“To base thought only on speech is to try nailing whispers to the wall. Writing freezes thought and offers it up for inspection.”  –Jack Rosenthal

Now that I find expression in Improv, I wonder: do I still agree with this?  Maybe not, or maybe I do, and Improv is, to some degree, the art of trying to nail whispers to the wall.  I certainly don’t think Improv freezes thought.  In fact, I’m not sure I even like the idea that thought can be frozen anymore, because even the written word is changed by the environment in which it’s read.

Monologue: This summer, I took a ton of improv classes.  I spent several hours a week organizing BagelProv (the group, not the blog).  I attended Playground sessions every week.  I auditioned for two different groups (one successfully, one not-so-much).  Basically, I invested huge amounts of my time in Improv.  Did I improve?  At first, yes.  And in the end, yes.  But in the middle?  Yowch!

Here’s my super-scientific graph of this summer:

At first, the more improv I did, the better I felt I was doing.  After a while, though, my expectations kept going up and my performances hit a plateau and then starting getting worse.  Then I went on vacation.  No performances, no classes, no talking about improv, nothing.  And when I came back, I was suddenly much happier with my performances.

I have three (some days more) explanations for this, and they all tie into improv fundamentals.

The Well (Or, Having a Life Outside of Improv)

In any art, we all draw on our lives for material.  I call this the well.  When we’re healthy, its full of worldly goodness.  When I was finishing up my creative writing degree at Purdue, I was having a great senior year: I was prolific, and really happy with my work.  Then I started preparing my chap book, and pretty much shut myself away, writing.  This was fine for about two weeks, and then, suddenly, I ran out of anything to write about.  Nobody wants to read poetry about writing poetry (although plenty of poets want to write it).  In other words, the well had run dry.

In the same way, I hit a point where I was doing too much improv and not enough living.  I lost the ability to connect with audiences or even with myself.  My characters started becoming caricatures of characters I’d played before, rather than caricatures of people from real life.  When I reached for an object, rather than finding an object from my day, I found an object from yesterday’s improvised scene.

While on vacation, the well filled up again.  I came back holding all the experiences and people I’d hung out with on my vacation, all the things they’d told me about, all the things I’d read about that had nothing to do with improv… music I’d heard, places I’d scene.  The well fills up quickly if you just give it a chance.

Everything You Need Is In Your Scene Partner

Del Close said this over and over again, and we always forget it.  Well, I always forget it.  Everything you need, on stage, is in your scene partner.

The more I improvised, the more I kept thinking, “I want to try x!  I want to try y!”  After a while, I started walking onto stage with those thoughts sitting in my brain like eager gargoyles.  “Oh, my scene partner just said ‘fruit’, time for that great idea I had about eating my own hand!”

I don’t think I need to go into why that’s not a good mindset on stage.  We all know we want our scenes to come from the group mind, our scene partner’s offers, and the audience.

The hard part about that is really removing all agenda from our brains as we walk onto stage.  I can do it best when I just happy to be out there.  I’m worst when I’ve been over-thinking my own performances and have a million things on my mind.

Which, conveniently, leads into…

How To Deal With Failure (Or, Why The Mets Screwed Up)

I heard a sports psychologist talking on NPR the other day, and the interviewer asked him what advice he’d give The Mets.  The psychologist answer was basically that, when people fail, they start trying to accomplish their tasks while trying to avoid screwing up again.  This sets them up for further failure, because when they found success before, they were simply trying to do their best, not trying to avoid failure.

Just before vacation, as I’d already noticed my performances start to slip, I walked out onto stage with a whole list of things to work on.  “Don’t ignore your scene partner!  Do a better job of naturally establishing CROW!  Don’t take your pants off this time!”  And that didn’t work.  My characters became lethargic, neutral shells, without quirks or surprise.  I was never surprised by anything I did, and neither was the audience.

My take away in this area is: work on all this stuff in classes and in exercises, drill it into your head, etc.  But when it comes time to go out on stage, I’d better not be trying to avoid mistakes or nervous about falling into old traps.  I think that when we’re in a healthy, happy place, we walk on stage, full of faith that all our work and worry will pay off unconsciously.  Our subconscious is going to do a pretty good job leading us away from those traps we’ve been worrying about off-stage… and if it doesn’t, there will be plenty more off-stage time to worry about them later.

A friend sent me a link to this article from Sunday’s New York Times. (Go to bugmenot.com for an existing logon id and password for nytimes.com in order to see the third page of the article.)

For me the most interesting part of the article was in this discussion of finding the game of a scene.

An analysis of game played out in Mr. Delaney’s classroom after the students read through a script about a relentlessly peppy office worker who insists on seeing the bright side of life, however horrible her experiences. “When I was 10,” she says, “my father took my ear, held it to a stove and burned it. He died in a car wreck later, but joke’s on him because I turned out awesome!”

The scene’s game was not the woman’s suffering, but her absurd refusal to acknowledge her unhappiness. The script seemed to run into trouble, however, when the woman revealed that she had been raped; the problem, Mr. Delaney said, was that the revelation came in the midst of a series of jokes. “I don’t think we can treat that as a joke,” he said, “or the audience will resent you.”

I don’t actually find this particularly insightful regarding finding the game in a scene. I did, however, find it interesting to think about how to approach often-taboo subjects like rape and abuse. Anything from the mundane to the outrageous can be the content of the scene, but the humor, the insight, or the commentary come from how characters react to that content, not the content itself.

I’m probably not going to ever make rape funny because people don’t want rape to be funny and they’re not comfortable letting it be funny (not that making people laugh or keeping them comfortable is the ultimate goal.) However responses and reactions to an object and how I express who I am through an object can be funny (or insightful, or satirical or many other things.)

Check out the Minisodes at Myspace.

Episodes of shows like Silver Spoons, Starsky & Hutch, and Different Strokes have been edited down to just a few minutes each (including full opening and end credits.) After I watched a couple, I realized this was a great opportunity to study plot techniques.

Here are some takeaways from my viewing of the pilot of Silver Spoons

Characters existed for very clear purposes

Everyone knows who the main characters are and let them be the focus

Important dialog is very concise

The Resolution comes fast

Props are more than props they’re symbols

So go enjoy a jaunt back to the 80’s and pay attention to the plots if you remember…

Here are some of my notes from my styles workship, taught by Randy Dixon… at least the parts I had time to write down!  There was a lot I wanted to absorb!

Styles can come from all kinds of things.  Playwrights, genres, and movie directors are common.  More esoteric styles (for improv) might include painters, musical styles, “-isms”, and philosophies.

We’re interested in Style as the fingerprint of the author: if all stories are basically the same, its style which sets one author apart from another.  We want to learn to recognize that style and figure out how to inject it into our own acting and storytelling: in other words, we want to embody the style.

Some improv may reference a style rather than embody it.  An example of referencing would be improvising Shakespeare and introducing somebody as a merchant, you know, from Venice.  Good study of styles should allow us to embody it. 

One of the best ways to absorb a style is to see the best examples and the worst examples.  The worst examples has the advantage of being much more obvious–especially since you’re not too engaged to pay attention to the style.

Learning the little facts that your audience will never know can be very helpful.  The example Randy gave is that Shakespeare put a lot of Greek and Roman mythology into his plays: not because the British were particularly savvy about mythology, but because it was illegal, at the time, to talk about God on stage.  As such, mythology was a bit of a code, so that Shakespeare could still talk about religion with the audience.  Todays audiences won’t know this, but if you, as an improviser, ask for a blessing from some Greek god, it will sound Shakespearian to the audience.

Many genres have sub-genres, and knowing the time and place in which they were set is useful.  Another example given by Randy is the Paranoid Science Fiction of the 50s, set against the backdrop of the second Red Scare.

Finally, many styles have more basic styles in which they’re set.  Theatre has its own style, with careful blocking, directing, and scripting, in combination with a stage-friendly set, producing a certain feel.  Film, on the other hand, has its own feel (or feels, since film has changed so much over the years).

Finally, there’s the question of audience perception of styles.  Early silent film was hand-cranked, and sometimes only appears sped up today because of the standardization of film speed.  Most audiences will  recognize sped up action as a part of silent film.

The following comes from Jane Espenson’s great scriptwriting blog

“…remember that your readers don’t necessarily know who the star of the show is. Help them out. Let your main character have the last line in a lot of the scenes. Give her the big jokes, too. Tell the readers more about her expressions and reactions throughout a scene than the other characters. All this stuff will make her seem to sparkle. And you won’t run the risk of having the readers focus mistakenly on some character you kill off in act two.

This might seem obvious, but it’s often the case that a secondary character, because he can be more broadly drawn, has the funnier point of view. It’s easy for that kind of character to get the last word all the time, and to highjack the script. Let them be funny, but make sure the spotlight stays on your star.

I think this can really hold true for long form improv as well, especially musicals.  I find it more fun to play the supporting characters or villians of musicals, because the main character is often pretty much pushed through the story by the other characters.  Because of this, I think those other characters have a responsibility to constantly set up the “hero” to actually be a hero.  When you get the audience’s attention, use it responsibility to put their eyes back on the character who really needs it, or to set them up to take the focus back themselves (the latter is especially fun to do as a villian).

I’ve continued asking myself the question of “why improv?” lately.  Why am I so drawn to it, and at such a spiritual level?  The best way I can describe it is this (and I promise, if you read past the first part, I’ll bring this back to improv)…

We humans put things in mental boxes.  Its how we cope with a complex world.  When I learn something about, say, pigs, I take down the pig box, add my new understanding to it, put it back in the box, and put it on a shelf somewhere.  If you tell me you’re thinking about buying a pot-bellied pig, I don’t think, “Hmmm, okay, pigs are mammals, they can be pink or brown, and it’s likely this many pounds, and let me try to remember some more facts about pigs.”  Instead, I just grab the pig box and go with whatever’s inside.  In this case, my half-second impression is “filthy and gross”.  If you’re my roommate, I immediately begin trying to argue you out of it.

Boxes are great for simplifying the world enough so that we don’t go crazy, but at the same time, they’re limiting, and we need our categorizations constantly challenged or we begin to have a very narrow view of the world we live in.

If I could make a very general statement about the value of Art, it’s this: Good art takes those boxes down from the shelf, un-boxes whatever it is you’ve boxed up, and forces you to take another look at it.  The best art doesn’t have an agenda behind it, it simply holds up the contents of your boxes and makes you take another look at it.   An deceptively simple example is this William Carlos Williams poem:

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

If you read it carefully, the poem hopefully unboxes your image of a wheel barrow and makes you look at it, in this case, glazed with rain, beside some chickens, and depended upon by… by what?  You decide.  The poem simply takes it out of the box, it doesn’t try to rebox it for you.

Of course, there’s a lot of art that takes something out of a box, and immediately tries to jam it in a specific box.  Political art sometimes does this, when the artist has a specific agenda, and doesn’t trust that if they’re simply true to themselves, the truth behind their political beliefs will be unveiled.  Imagine a Hallmark card that says, “Babies are the cutest of precious things.”  Argh!  Why not just show me a baby and let me experience my own feeling about it being cute and precious?

Anyway, the thing about most art is that the artist opens up the box in the privacy of their own solitude and explores it, trying to communicate that exploration to an unseen audience.

But improv is more direct.  In improv, the performers pull down boxes willy-nilly from their minds and from the minds around them, rip them open like Christmas morning, and hold them up for everyone, artist and audience, to see.  Lets get some suggestions from the audience!  Roommates, Cuba, Ninjas.  Great, say the improvisers, lets rip those open, along with the Fidel Castro box, the martial arts box, the people-who-don’t-do-their-chores box, and the country bumpkin box.  Every single person in the audience has some version of these boxes.  (Even the drunk guy who doesn’t know who Fidel Castro is and keeps shouting “lesbians” for every suggestion has some vague box that the Fidel Castro character will fit in, even if its “Political Figures” or “People Who Smoke Cigars”)

Improv, to me, is about opening all these boxes up and playing around with what’s in them.  Sometimes its big picture stuff.  Maybe it’s a scene about an Iraqi boy, once, afraid of being killed by machines from another country.  Played true, its just an exploration of what it’d be like to be that boy and the world that put him in that position.

But this is where its hard to explain, because sometimes its really really unimportant box that you open up and share with the audience, and it just feels good in the moment, in a way that can’t be described in
another setting.

I was once in a scene in which our prize pig had escaped by climbing up into the loft, and I became angry and opened my mouth: “Pigs shouldn’t do that, they’s down-low animals!”  That’s not a particularly funny line now, but in the moment, it was like this weird connection opened up with those listening, and I could tell that somebody out there thought the exact same thing.  And if that doesn’t feel good, well, I don’t what does.

I still don’t think you should buy a pig, though.  Maybe a rabbit instead?

Improv is an exploratory art, and as such, this is going to be an exploratory blog.  I’m going to make declarative statements that I hope are challenged and proven wrong.  I’m going to miss the point.  I’m going to contradict myself constantly.  I’m going to say stupid things.  After all (I remind myself), that’s what blogs are for.

Anyway, I’m Tony Beeman.  I have no credentials that suggest you should listen to anything I have to say.  I do have a degree in writing poetry, which is suprisingly connected to improv: something I’m sure I’ll be exploring.  I really into Musicals and storytelling in improv, so I’m sure I’ll be talking about that.  And I’m very interested in connecting things that are not normally connected, so I’m sure I’ll be doing that.

Most art involves an initial explosion of creativity followed by a long period of refinement.  If the process feels successful to the artist, the art is released to a few.  If the few feel it successful, it is released into the world.

In Improv, the explosion happens right in front of the audience.  The only refinement is additive: never able to undo anything that has come before, it must explain, add-to, or move on.  The successful improviser even learns to turn off the refinement we all do between idea and speech: that thing that Friedrich Schiller (and, later, Keith Johnstone) called the ‘watcher at the gates of the mind’.  Regardless, once something lands on the stage, its there for good.  The audience has seen it.

There are comparisons to be found, I suppose.  Watercolorists destroy the purity of the original paper with each stroke.  Sculptors of stone must accept finality with every chip.

Improv, though, thrives on lack of refinement, on the audience discovering the scene at the same time as the improviser.  I want to explore what that is.  I want to explore what the audience gets out of improv, what the improviser gets out of it, and where they intersect.  And I don’t want to do this alone: I hope I can convince others to explore here with me and fill in more sections of the map.  There are some other great improv blogs out there, too, and I’m sure I’ll be linking to them from time to time.

Here’s a starting place for me.  Call this point one on my empty map.  Dave Barry once said, “A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge.”

In my favorite moments on stage, I’m hurling into that void too quickly to grab on to my anxiety.  As often as this place we live has hurt me and hurt the people around me, I can’t help but love the absurdity and unpredictability that makes it a world worth exploring.