learning when to say yes
July 15th, 2008 • improvisation, theatre
One of the rules drilled into me when I was first learning to improvise was near-unconditional acceptance: build scenes by saying yes, early and often. Like many other improvisers I’ve worked with, I’ve spent time working out when to ignore that advice. It’s not bad advice, per se, so much as conditional advice.
Reading Paul Clements’ account of Mike Leigh’s use of improvisation, I found this little gem:
There are circumstances when, as a theatre game, it might be useful to run an improvisation where the actors have to accept whatever information they’re given in the interests of developing their spontaneity or acceptance but where an improvisation is an investigation of content [...] it will kill it stone dead.1
There’s a distinction here between improvisation as instantaneous, disposable live performance, and improvisation as a medium for developing theatre; in Leigh’s rehearsal-room work, blind acceptance runs contrary to the process of actors creating individual characters with personal (and private) biographies and motivations.
So while in short-form or live improvisation, saying “yes” can be way of rapidly building content; in rehearsal or in the devising process, relentlessly saying “yes” can interfere with the exploration of that content.
There’s obviously the possibility of mixing and matching such those priorities - moving in live short form, for example, from establishing a scene (generating content) to building a narrative through reincorporation (exploring content).
The snappy capsule lesson here, then, is that the strategies we use to improvise should recognise what kind of outcome is desired (with the rejoinder that we should perhaps be sceptical of any claim to basic, infallible rules for improvising).
After the jump, Clements’ quick summary of Leigh’s process, which wields improvisation in the pursuit of realism.
All action is the result of the characters’ motivations. In order to create action, therefore, work has to be done at the level of motivation and not of action. This is the difference between saying to the actors “Have a row!” and investigating the circumstances of potential conflicts. The former is close-ended and descriptive, the latter open-ended and free.
In order for motivation to exist, the characters’ individual and collective reality must be credible. Changes in motivation, therefore, if they are to occur must must always make sense within the bounds of the reality. [...]
Each improvisation, as a real event for the characters, must grow organically out of what has gone before. There can be no introduction of sudden, arbitrary factors for the sake of effect. [...}
The actors must not know the motivations of each others' characters. This would really mess things up, because if the actors knew what was going on in the sub-textual worlds of each others' characters the focus of the improvisation would change completely and the result would be a kind of theatre game rather than improvisation for a play. And anyway, it would be a violation of the reality, because the characters would suddenly be privy to each others deepest secrets, dreams and yearnings in a way that people rarely are in life. [...]
The improvisations are always discussed in terms of real events and never as ’scenes’. The pre-rehearsals are not form-orientated, they are an investigation of content.2
