Because long-form Improv lends itself to being funny, we do a lot more comedies than tragedies (in the dramatic sense of the two words).  When we’re improvising a comedy, we work to throw obstacle after obstacle into the path of the hero, so that his or her final victory is all the more triumphant.* In film noir tragedies, though, this is almost inverted.  Each moment where the hero has moment of hope makes his or her defeat all the crueler.

In “Double Indemnity”, the protagonist and the femme fatale have a moment where, having just dumped the body, the car refuses to start.  Everything has gone perfectly until now, but suddenly everything is almost over.  The hero reaches over, and suddenly, the car starts.  Its this great moment of hope, except that we, as the viewer, know that they’re not going to get away with it.  (In fact, the code that movies abided by in the 40s required that nobody get away with murder).  After the moment of elation, for me, there’s this sudden realization that there was some relief in the resolution of, “Oh, this is how they get caught”, and then I experience the opposite of relief: suddenly, I realize this is going to go ever further before everything is undone.

In “Detour”, the protagonist is traveling across the country to join the woman he loves when everything goes horribly wrong.  The man he’s hitchhiking with dies, and he realizes he’ll be accused of murder.  He gets rid of the body, and it seems he’ll get away with it until he picks up a hitchhiker, our femme fatale, who knew the driver, and immediately blackmails him into getting into ever bigger trouble.  Several times he calls the girl, or imagines her singing somewhere, and each time, even though he’s physically closer, we’re more and more aware that he’s never going to be with her–or even see her again.  In fact, in the narrative frame, the hero is being driven mad by hearing a song they used to sing on the jukebox: the reminder of her turned into an instrument of cruelty.

It’s interesting to tell stories tell like this.  In many film noir and pulp stories, the whole plan goes off perfectly (albeit with a lot of close calls) until the very end (or after the plan has ended), when some unexpected event or unknown fact derails the whole thing.  All the past successes make the final failure seem all the more cruel (deserved or not).  Most supporting characters in film noir spend a lot of time either raising the negative stakes (you make one misstep and it’ll be the gas chamber for you) or raising the positive stakes by giving false hope (you do one more job, and you’re free–you can go back to that girl of yours and you’ll have enough jack to keep you both comfortable for life!)

* One of the joys of improvisational storytelling is playing the villain–playing the character based on his or her desires, but, as the puppeteer, recognizing that you’re really helping the hero by presenting something for them to overcome.  A big part of playing the villain is to pursue their interests for as long as possible, and then to lose to the hero at the last moment.

Something…
…you’d buy for your mom
…that makes you feel sick
…you keep out of sight
…you cherish
…that smells good
…good to eat when you’re hungry
…you’re allergic to
…you always forget
…you’ve borrowed from a neighbor

A location….
…not everyone can enter
…you’d find buried treasure
…of your first kiss

Occupation
…that would be bad for a blind person
…you’d be proud of at a class reunion

A moment…
…you cried
…that happened during a nightmare
…when you fell in love
…memory from (specific) grade

Phrase…
…friendly reminder people tell you
…you’re parents said that embarrassed you
…non profane that you’ve said while driving
…that you’ve said while drunk
…poorly worded compliment

Word…
…C is for cookie what is R (or any other letter) for?
…a loud word
…that reminds you of a season

Misc…
…bad theme for a party
…urban legend
…something you’ve apologized for
…last request of someone being executed
…chore your mom asks you to do

I love that one, because you really can’t go more than three lines before you’re forced to really start defining relationships.

Before:

“Frank, can you help me get my head out of this hole?”

“Sure, boss, let me get the crow bar”

Okay, sure, it sounds like it might be a funny scene, but I don’t really care about the characters.

Now:

“Frank, can you help me get my head out of this hole?”

“Its important to me that you said that, boss, because I’ve been waiting for you to need my help!  Let me get the crowbar!”

Okay, already, we have a second level to the scene, and one that has a lot more staying power than the crow bar story.

Anyway, doing one scene in that style was enough to really get me in the mind-set of listening to my partner before going into my head for new ideas, something that I see way too many of us do all the time.

The gist of the latter post was that instead of saving (and storing) “stuff” to use later, we should just use it up now. This seems to also be true in the realm of ideas and improv.

I for one am too often guilty of saving ideas for some future prefect time. Most often this means ensuring that my *awesome idea* isn’t wasted in a rehearsal or workshops with no audience to appreciate it and where it might even get interrupted by a teacher who GASP! has their own agenda that fails to include basking in the genuius of my idea.

Lately I’ve been challenging myself with the mantra “use it up.” When inspiration strikes I want to act on it immediately and completely without plans to save even a little bit of it for later. I wish my motivation was located in maintaining the integrity of the art, but alas, more practically I’ve found that when I keep the ideas in my head for later, new ideas stop coming.

I wonder what it is about the storing of ideas that acts like a dam to the flow of new ideas.

Ingredients: 6 (or some multiple of 3) improvisers.

Persons E & F leave the stage, shut their eyes, hold their ears, etc.

Persons A & B perform a scene from an audience suggestion while persons C & D watch.

E & F return and C & D perform the first scene for them, but in deconstructionist Dada style.  To us, that means using words, gestures, and movements from the first scene in an attempt to have no meaning whatsoever.  Since Dada is anti-art, this is usually done in a way that mocks the first scene a bit as well.

Persons E & F then perform the scene they imagine inspired the Dada scene.

We’ve gotten some great scenes for that 3rd scene, and the 2nd is often a lot of fun as well.  I’m often surprised at what the 1st and 3rd scenes end up sharing, and what is interpreted completely differently by the 3rd.

You’re afraid because you’re thinking about the end, not about what you’re doing. –Helen Van Wyk

Nothing is as poor and melancholy as an art that is interested in itself and not its subject. –Santayana

A golfer rarely needs to hit a spectacular shot until the one that preceded it was pretty bad. –Harvey Penick

The amateur is afraid of boldness; the professional is afraid of timidity. –Ed Whitney

Exactly right is all wrong! –Ed Whitney

If you don’t know how to say it, say it loud. –Will Strunk, Jr.

Painting is founded on the heart controlled by the head. –Cezanne

The painting is usually finished before you are. –Rex Brandt

Anything is intensified by its opposite. –Ed Whitney

A painting is good, not because it looks like something, but because it feels like something. –Phil Dike

Some musicians are not great technicians, but they give you a rich point of view. –Nathan Milstein

Devotion to the facts will always give the pleasure of recognition; adherence to the rules of design, the pleasures of order and certainty. –Kenneth Clark

If you don’t see the wonder in the most ordinary phenomenon, you’re not going to resonate very much. –Artie Shaw

It’s not what you paint. It’s how you paint it. You don’t have to paint elaborate things. Paint simple things as beautifully as you can. –Helen Van Wyk

The audience is astonishingly friendly and tolerant of even the slightest dab, but is limited in its willingness to look either deeply or at length. –Rex Brandt

The wonderful becomes familiar and the familiar wonderful. –Edward R. Tufte

The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards. –Anatule France

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by all eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking about what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by increasing the number of important operations we can perform without thinking. –Alfred North Whitehead

Time and rest are needed for absorption. Psychologists confirm that it is really in the summer that our muscles learn to skate and in the winter, how to swim. –Jacques Barzun

“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.

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.

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.)

The more accurate, long version:
Last year a few folks (all of us students taking classes at Unexpected Productions) started putting together a group to jam outside of classes.

During one organizational email thread, this transpired:

Lynn: …Oh, and I like anything that combines eating–eg. bagels and cream cheese before a morning jam.
Tony: I’m pro-bagel as well.
Erin: I stand in staunch opposition of bagels unless they are served with cream cheese (or toasted with butter) in which case I am in favor of them…
Sean: I love lox.

Tony put finger to keyboard and created a mailing list for us named “BagelProv” and the name was born. Besides just jamming there was a desire to spend some time just talking improv. Our initial plan was to spend time playing together and then go out for bagels and talk about improv. A lack of nearby bagel shops changed that reality as we just brought bagels to the rental space and had some minor discussion as we went.

A few months later (probably in part because that desire to just talk improv wasn’t being quenched) Tony put together this blog and invited several of us to join him as contributors.

Tada: BagleProv the blog.