BagelProv

Tonight, in an improv play group, we were having trouble with establishing relationships that anyone cared about, so we ran an exercise where every line except the first began with, “Its important to me that you said that, because…”

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.

On my personal blog I’d written a little over a year ago some thoughts on the recycling lobby and just last week some revealing theories on the Reuse lobby.

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.