“I’m not emotionally secure enough to do this”

July 26th, 2008 • comedy, improvisation

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. Read more »

1. The Improvised Play: The World of Mike Leigh, Paul Clements, Methuen. p.48 [↩]

the runt in the theatre litter

May 30th, 2008 • improvisation

Brian Logan’s claim that improvisation is “finally catching on in Britain” seems to step over a rather substantial history of companies and performers using the form in this country.

At the very least, any company working with forum or playback theatre forms is heavily dependent on the skills and conventions of improvisation. I’m thinking here of companies like Playback Theatre York who’ve been active since the early 90s and Cardboard Citizens who have been using Boal’s forum form to explore homelessness for a similar amount of time.

While there has been a cult of celebrity built around the solo artist (as actor, director or playwright), that cult has not stopped other kinds of work from being popular and successful - even within a London-centric hierarchy that has oftentimes tended to look down on community and theatre-in-education work.

I do agree, though, that improvisation is often treated as “the runt in the theatre litter,” “bracketed with comedy or ghettoised as glib tomfoolery.” Leaving aside the implicit ordering of art that puts good comedy below “proper” theatre, part of the problem is that some reviewers have no idea how to deal with improvisation as a performance form.

It’s really not so many years since The Stage accused Keith Johnstone’s group of faking it - performing scripted work as though it were spontaneous. The patterns of invention and reincorporation onstage weren’t just unfamiliar, but seemingly impossible.

As Logan suggests, that kind of confusion persists due to narrow expectations about what constitutes theatre:

The main problem is that theatre in the UK is still seen as chiefly a literary art form - but improvised plays emerge as if by magic, without any author.

It’s perhaps not that improvisation isn’t popular or hasn’t existed, but that it hasn’t always been recognised when it’s actually taking place.

I also think that the link to Who’s Line Is It Anway has been propagated by lazy reviewers and lazier companies with little regard for how live theatrical improvisation relates (or rather doesn’t relate) to carefully edited televised improvisation. It might be an easy point of reference for audiences, but it’s shorthand that hinders rather than helps. It’s a sales-pitch, and that’s the limit of its usefulness.

You’ll also forgive me for getting all high-priest-of-the-art for a moment to conclude, but knowledge of rehearsal improvisation exercises does not equip anyone for live performance based in improvisation; similarly, the tools amd skills used to devise work using improvisation are not identical to those in improvisation as performance form in its own right.

Yes, they’re strongly related, but one doesn’t guarantee knowledge or ability in the other. In other words, crappy improvisation (like any other kind of crappy performance) results from a lack of respect for the form as a discipline which involves specific skills and effort.

reading (without) comprehension

May 28th, 2008 • comedy, improvisation

A brief twitch before my brain caught up:

If, like me, you’ve been to all previous 10 years of the Chicago Improv Festival, you might have been wondering what happened to the annual April confab of spontaneously funny people. Isn’t it now almost June?

Well, this year the writers’ strike got in the way.

That’s the recognition that a number of very talented comedy writers are also talented improvisers (or the other way around, if you like) not the inadvertent admission that improvisers need scripts. : )

I’d be interested to find out if the change of month is a permanent decision or if the festival will switch back next year, fresh strike notwithstanding. Incidentally, where was I in April when the improv festival wasn’t happening? Chicago. Where am I now? Safely back in Scotland. Now that’s timing.

activist theatre and clay shirky’s “here comes everybody”

April 1st, 2008 • improvisation, research

I’m reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, and his schema of different kinds of participation gels pretty closely with different species of collective and collaborative theatre companies (students who took my honours course last semester will easily spot some obvious parallels). So here’s Shirky:

Sharing creates the fewest demands on the participants. [...] Cooperation is the next rung on the ladder. Cooperation is harder than simply sharing, because it involves changing your behaviour to synchronize with people who are changing their behaviour to synchronize with you.

And there’s a neat account of two common, initial stages of performance devised in groups - in improvisational terms, moving from simply listening to accepting, building and (re)incorporating.

Shirky again:

Collaborative production is a more involved form of cooperation, as it increases the tension between individual and group goals. The litmus test for collaborative production is simple: no one person can take credit for what gets created, and the project could not come into being with the participation of many.

Think Red Ladder, active in Leeds in the 80s, a company - amongst others - determined not to name individual members in posters or programmes as an attempt to resist traditional power hierarchies and avoid privileging one kind of creative activity over another.

Collective action, the third rung, is the hardest kind of group effort, as it requires a group of people to commit themselves to undertaking a particular effort together, and to do so in a way that makes the decision of the group binding on the individual members.

And in the case of political or activist-oriented companies, it’s a common or shared ideology which can (and has been shown to) provide the underlying motive to commit.

I’ll have more to say when I’ve finished the book - particularly in relation to some of the collective performances I’ve been looking at recently.

Edinburgh freeze update

February 24th, 2008 • improvisation

Various forums now report that the pre-game meet for the Waverley freeze will be by the Scott Monument at 2.30pm, with the freeze now taking place on Rose Street or in Princes Street Gardens at 3.30pm.

Apparently there’s concern that too many people are planning to turn up for it to work in the station (which pretty much echoes what I was saying about Trafalgar Square earlier this week).

Hopefully it’ll still work out - planning to be there with camera in hand.