What I Didn’t Do On My Improv Vacation
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.