This week's training we did some stuff with 'Controlling Offers', namely in the form of a game whereby any player called out on making a 'controlling' offer, would have to leave the stage. It was bizarre at first, I found it difficult to get my head around what a controlling offer was exactly.
But we persisted and it became clearer - basically when a player makes an offer so excruciatingly detailed that it basically robs their fellow player of the chance to add anything to the set-up. For instance, saying:
"Father O'Reilly, you must help me!" is a relatively uncontrolling offer.
Saying:
"Father O'Reilly, I've got these boils on my hands and I'm sure it's because I ignored your advice last Wednesday and decided to go to the brothel after all..." is, well, you get the idea.
I should stress here that Steve, our teacher, specified that a controlling offer is not necessarily always a bad thing, the exercise here was purely to explore what it is and how it affects the scene.
I found it really challenging putting this into practice, namely because trying NOT to control the scene (something which I struggle with at the best of times!) kinda led, on a few occasions, to being on-stage and knowing that the scene needed to go somewhere, but not wanting to control the other person, thus resulting - at least in my case - into a non-committal kind of mutual hesitation.
Anyway, there were a lot of other things that this exercise led into, which I'll divulge some other time, but I just wanted to throw the concept out there. Some interesting exercises:
- play with NOBODY allowed to make a controlling offer. If they do, they get buzzed off by the team.
- play with ONLY trying to make a controlling offer. The scene will probably be short (namely because you get the idea pretty quickly) but in my mind, once we did this exercise, everybody was on the same page with regards to what it actually means!
Monday, June 2, 2008
Thursday, May 22, 2008
On Solo Improv
There's a pretty kick-buttock looking workshop on solo improv going down in Chicago July 5 and 6, oh how I wish I could get there, but sadly flights are looking not as cheap as I need them to be. Besides, I've got lots of cool trips coming up this year so I shouldn't feel too sad.
But...if you're interested in solo improv at all you should check out this fantastic article I just came across. Very detailed breakdown of a very underutilised artform (in my opinion). I only wish there were some clips of these guys on youtube!
But...if you're interested in solo improv at all you should check out this fantastic article I just came across. Very detailed breakdown of a very underutilised artform (in my opinion). I only wish there were some clips of these guys on youtube!
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
8 Weeks on Status
So we've started an 8-week series of classes on status, which I have never really focused exclusively on before in a training sense. Of course, I've done the odd status game on stage, but it's usually ended up becoming a verbal 'one-upping' competition.
I remember my good friend and former improv coach Anne telling me ages ago that "Keith Johnstone's chapter on status changed my life" and having just read it myself a month or so ago, I can see why! It's so thick, in fact, that it really demands multiple readings just to take it all in. What I love about the work we've been doing so far is that it really applies so much to life - in that we're always engaged in status transactions, even when we're not aware of it. I've even been paying attention to which types of cars are more likely to let you merge in front of them without putting up a fight!
Anyway, this weekend just gone we did a series of exercises (mostly in pairs, when we introduced threes it was still doable, but a lot trickier in terms of paying full attention to every single person in the group and your relationship to them) which involved:
- choosing to play JUST above or JUST below the status of the other player. Note that this is not only a great exercise in status, but a terrific way to make sure that you're putting all of your attention on your fellow player and then adjusting yourself accordingly, trying to get into their head. (I remember one of my Second City teachers saying something to the effect of "If you're not in your team-mate's head, then you're in your own, which is NOT where you wanna be!"
- mirroring the exact status of the other player.
- playing out a status transaction, whereby one player plays extremely high and the other extremely low, then throughout the course of the scene you trade status. The idea here is to get it as smooth and as gradual as possible, i.e. just adjusting your body language, speech, eye contact, etc. by tiny increments, matching the pace at which your fellow player is doing the same, until you've completely swapped status (and if you can physically swap positions too, all the better). We did it in a 'Head of the Company is interviewing a potential employee' setting, but then afterwards tried doing it from scratch.
The other trick here, I've found, is to still stay positive! It's tempting to come on as high status and act aloof, indifferent or superior to the other person, and conversely, to enter as a low status person who is so self-loathing that they blame themselves for everything bad. But that really doesn't need to be the case, it's just remembering to consciously choose the positive way!
Staying positive was basically my number one focus on Friday night's Micetro show, and it helped so much, even just in terms of having an angle from which to approach every offer. For instance, in a scene where we were told 'you're stuck in an elevator', my first thought was 'okay, I'd be terrified!' then 'maybe I could be pregnant and go into labour' but then I thought, 'no, let's just go with a happy choice' and started with "Yes! I've always wanted to be stuck in an elevator!" I'm not saying the scene was outstanding, but it was certainly more fun to play having thrown myself into that unlikely non-knee-jerking and happy start.
I remember my good friend and former improv coach Anne telling me ages ago that "Keith Johnstone's chapter on status changed my life" and having just read it myself a month or so ago, I can see why! It's so thick, in fact, that it really demands multiple readings just to take it all in. What I love about the work we've been doing so far is that it really applies so much to life - in that we're always engaged in status transactions, even when we're not aware of it. I've even been paying attention to which types of cars are more likely to let you merge in front of them without putting up a fight!
Anyway, this weekend just gone we did a series of exercises (mostly in pairs, when we introduced threes it was still doable, but a lot trickier in terms of paying full attention to every single person in the group and your relationship to them) which involved:
- choosing to play JUST above or JUST below the status of the other player. Note that this is not only a great exercise in status, but a terrific way to make sure that you're putting all of your attention on your fellow player and then adjusting yourself accordingly, trying to get into their head. (I remember one of my Second City teachers saying something to the effect of "If you're not in your team-mate's head, then you're in your own, which is NOT where you wanna be!"
- mirroring the exact status of the other player.
- playing out a status transaction, whereby one player plays extremely high and the other extremely low, then throughout the course of the scene you trade status. The idea here is to get it as smooth and as gradual as possible, i.e. just adjusting your body language, speech, eye contact, etc. by tiny increments, matching the pace at which your fellow player is doing the same, until you've completely swapped status (and if you can physically swap positions too, all the better). We did it in a 'Head of the Company is interviewing a potential employee' setting, but then afterwards tried doing it from scratch.
The other trick here, I've found, is to still stay positive! It's tempting to come on as high status and act aloof, indifferent or superior to the other person, and conversely, to enter as a low status person who is so self-loathing that they blame themselves for everything bad. But that really doesn't need to be the case, it's just remembering to consciously choose the positive way!
Staying positive was basically my number one focus on Friday night's Micetro show, and it helped so much, even just in terms of having an angle from which to approach every offer. For instance, in a scene where we were told 'you're stuck in an elevator', my first thought was 'okay, I'd be terrified!' then 'maybe I could be pregnant and go into labour' but then I thought, 'no, let's just go with a happy choice' and started with "Yes! I've always wanted to be stuck in an elevator!" I'm not saying the scene was outstanding, but it was certainly more fun to play having thrown myself into that unlikely non-knee-jerking and happy start.
Friday, May 2, 2008
Residency opportunity for improvisers and UnCabaret
Okay, two cool things I've stumbled upon:
Firstly, this residency opportunity: cool!
Dig it.
Firstly, this residency opportunity: cool!
ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE PROGRAM AT EARTHDANCE
(PARTIAL SCHOLARSHIP/WORk-STUDY)
http://earthdance.net/waystobe.htm#artist
---
This is a call to dancers, improvisers, visual artists, writers,
and creators of all kinds. Do you have a piece that you have been
dreaming of completing surrounded by the quiet of forested hills?
Are you finishing your book or screenplay? Would you like to
spend a month in rural western Massachusetts, surrounded by trees,
land and sky? Earthdance offers artistic retreat residencies and
the opportunity to share your teaching treasures by offering a
weekly class to our residents and local community. In the
residency, we provide room and board and at least four hours of
studio time per day when available. The fee is $400 per month.
We ask for three hours of work exchange and one class per week. We
do not offer residencies in the summer months of June through August.
Of course, there's a million residency programs out there, but this one particularly caught my eye, having specifically put out the call to 'improvisers' - rare!
Secondly, UnCabaret as in the one I mentioned in the last post. Check it out, seriously, not only does the work sound fantastic (I practically drooled over my keyboard reading over it) but they've got a heap of cool - and more importantly, FREE - resources on there.Dig it.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Judy Toll: RIP
Damn, I wish I was in LA just so I could check out the soon-to-screen film about this woman. In particular, the "Un-Cabaret" thing sounds awesome, especially on a personal note as I've been thinking a lot lately about stepping away from stand-up and moving more into storytelling and cabaret-style performance modes.
I don't really know if I can add any profound insight than that, but anyway: what a great, inspiring and poignant read.
I don't really know if I can add any profound insight than that, but anyway: what a great, inspiring and poignant read.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Improv: Being Positive!
So last Saturday's training took two major focuses - one being 'to be positive', the other being 'Shakespearean improv'.
I'm going to stick with my original plan here to remain focused and today talk about...da da da da da da! You guessed it.
Loose Moose especially places a huge focus on trying to start - and where possible, keep - every improv on a positive note. My personal feeling on this is that this is because:
a) it's much more pleasant to watch people having a good time on-stage; and
b) it opens your options up for where the scene can go to (e.g. if you come on with a negative like "How dare you touch my stuff!" chances are the scene's just going to become a fight.)
Moreover, it's good to be conscious about this, as a knee-jerk reaction of some improvisers is to start off with a negative - I mean, you want conflict, right? Well...yes, but you still want to keep it on the positive end.
Hmmm, let me think of some examples. Oh yeah, okay, perfect example was the Saturday night Gorilla show. There was a scene where a couple were in the bathroom together, and the wife had never seen the husband naked (with the lights turned on) before, apparently for good reason which he was trying to hide. Now, while the audience waited to see how she would react once she saw him (perhaps thinking the obvious, 'oh, he's got a small weener', or 'he's a werewolf' and thus waiting for her to scream or recoil in horror), the always-fabulous Rebecca instead chose to burst out in uncontrollable laughter. Turns out he had a tattoo of Mister Dress-Up.
It rocked. It was funny. AND it surprised the audience.
"Am I sure?"
"I'm positive!"
Wacka wacka.
I'm going to stick with my original plan here to remain focused and today talk about...da da da da da da! You guessed it.
Loose Moose especially places a huge focus on trying to start - and where possible, keep - every improv on a positive note. My personal feeling on this is that this is because:
a) it's much more pleasant to watch people having a good time on-stage; and
b) it opens your options up for where the scene can go to (e.g. if you come on with a negative like "How dare you touch my stuff!" chances are the scene's just going to become a fight.)
Moreover, it's good to be conscious about this, as a knee-jerk reaction of some improvisers is to start off with a negative - I mean, you want conflict, right? Well...yes, but you still want to keep it on the positive end.
Hmmm, let me think of some examples. Oh yeah, okay, perfect example was the Saturday night Gorilla show. There was a scene where a couple were in the bathroom together, and the wife had never seen the husband naked (with the lights turned on) before, apparently for good reason which he was trying to hide. Now, while the audience waited to see how she would react once she saw him (perhaps thinking the obvious, 'oh, he's got a small weener', or 'he's a werewolf' and thus waiting for her to scream or recoil in horror), the always-fabulous Rebecca instead chose to burst out in uncontrollable laughter. Turns out he had a tattoo of Mister Dress-Up.
It rocked. It was funny. AND it surprised the audience.
"Am I sure?"
"I'm positive!"
Wacka wacka.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Improv Feedback
I have to tell you, after this weekend just gone I am more in love with the Moose than ever. Be still my beating impulse.
There's so much I want to spill about the way these guys do things, but I'm going to resist the urge to vomit it all out in one setting and try to at least bring a little focus to each of these blog entries. So I'm going to start with something I noticed first and foremost about working with these guys, that being the way that they give feedback.
Now, I should first qualify this by saying that I've previously only experienced two major schools of feedback:
a) Focus on what went wrong during the show (or scene, if it's training) without necessarily being specific. I think harder still is when somebody says something like "I think people are having a hard time with *blah blah*" rather than actually citing a specific example or calling a particular person out on it.
or
b) Ignore all the negative and just give very affirming, positive and uplifting warm-fuzzy stuff i.e. focus on what went right.
Hence my surprise at seeing how Loose Moose operates. I remember when I was at Second City in Vegas a couple of years back, chatting with a chick there who'd previously trained with Improv Olympic. IO, she told me, were so committed to moving the story forward, that if you got on stage and said even one line that didn't achieve that end, you had to go back and try it again.
I wouldn't say that LM are that militant, however they will stop a scene early on if there's been some glaring mistake made. But while I at first found this approach took a while for me to get my head around (and my ego in check for!), several months in now and I am seriously digging it. Namely because:
- stopping the scene mid-way and analysing exactly what's gone on, while it's going on (e.g. "you just broke the promise to the audience", "you just took the option which would make you feel safe, thereby killing the story") is such an obvious, but underutilised way of getting better!
- furthermore, you get the chance to continue the scene (time-willing) or start it again, thereby immediately putting into practice what's just been taught, so you have the chance to really internalise it.
Plus of course, you realise more than ever how while it's sometimes blatantly obvious to identify what's going wrong/right from the perspective of the audience (as that's exactly what we are when we're not physically playing), being up there and in the moment is very different!
That's just the feedback side of training, however. There's also the way they give notes post-show, which, rather than being 'Oh yeah, this went right, this went well, this not so much...' is also extremely specific and with follow-up. i.e. Everybody sits down together and the senior members of the crew give feedback for each and every scene performed that night. Any glowing trouble spots are identified to be followed-up on in training the following day (e.g. a troubled big-group scene on the Friday night show, led to us doing some focused work the next afternoon on big-group scenes. How's that for logic?!)
So there you go. I'd be very interested to hear if anybody else out there has any thoughts on the feedback side of things. One thing I find hard with the LM approach is to get out of my own head once I set foot on the stage! My personal hope is that I'll get to a point where I've internalised enough of the intellectual side of improv to just forget about it onstage and trust that it is engrained enough to come through. Time will tell!
There's so much I want to spill about the way these guys do things, but I'm going to resist the urge to vomit it all out in one setting and try to at least bring a little focus to each of these blog entries. So I'm going to start with something I noticed first and foremost about working with these guys, that being the way that they give feedback.
Now, I should first qualify this by saying that I've previously only experienced two major schools of feedback:
a) Focus on what went wrong during the show (or scene, if it's training) without necessarily being specific. I think harder still is when somebody says something like "I think people are having a hard time with *blah blah*" rather than actually citing a specific example or calling a particular person out on it.
or
b) Ignore all the negative and just give very affirming, positive and uplifting warm-fuzzy stuff i.e. focus on what went right.
Hence my surprise at seeing how Loose Moose operates. I remember when I was at Second City in Vegas a couple of years back, chatting with a chick there who'd previously trained with Improv Olympic. IO, she told me, were so committed to moving the story forward, that if you got on stage and said even one line that didn't achieve that end, you had to go back and try it again.
I wouldn't say that LM are that militant, however they will stop a scene early on if there's been some glaring mistake made. But while I at first found this approach took a while for me to get my head around (and my ego in check for!), several months in now and I am seriously digging it. Namely because:
- stopping the scene mid-way and analysing exactly what's gone on, while it's going on (e.g. "you just broke the promise to the audience", "you just took the option which would make you feel safe, thereby killing the story") is such an obvious, but underutilised way of getting better!
- furthermore, you get the chance to continue the scene (time-willing) or start it again, thereby immediately putting into practice what's just been taught, so you have the chance to really internalise it.
Plus of course, you realise more than ever how while it's sometimes blatantly obvious to identify what's going wrong/right from the perspective of the audience (as that's exactly what we are when we're not physically playing), being up there and in the moment is very different!
That's just the feedback side of training, however. There's also the way they give notes post-show, which, rather than being 'Oh yeah, this went right, this went well, this not so much...' is also extremely specific and with follow-up. i.e. Everybody sits down together and the senior members of the crew give feedback for each and every scene performed that night. Any glowing trouble spots are identified to be followed-up on in training the following day (e.g. a troubled big-group scene on the Friday night show, led to us doing some focused work the next afternoon on big-group scenes. How's that for logic?!)
So there you go. I'd be very interested to hear if anybody else out there has any thoughts on the feedback side of things. One thing I find hard with the LM approach is to get out of my own head once I set foot on the stage! My personal hope is that I'll get to a point where I've internalised enough of the intellectual side of improv to just forget about it onstage and trust that it is engrained enough to come through. Time will tell!
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