BagelProv

Here’s a game that BagelProv has been working on, and in tonight’s performance, I felt like we got it just right.

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.

I’ve been reading Charles Dunn’s Conversations in Paint.  Its full of great quotes for painters, but so many of them apply to improv as well that I had to post a few here.  In fact, I like the enough to have retyped them after losing the first set to an accidental reboot!

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

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.