July 31, 2007
pissy little litany
Things people did in class today while Bill was talking:
- Talked
- Sang
- Hummed
- Threw a ball back and forth
- Bounced a ball against the wall
- Hit the wall with fists
- Smacked fists into palms
- Clapped hands rhythmically
- Snapped fingers
- Stood while everyone else was sitting (in the audience)
- Sat while everyone else was standing (while onstage)
- Lay down on the floor
- Stomped across the stage
- Continued the conversation they were already having (fair’s fair; I did this at least once)
- Did handstands against the wall
Whenever Bill says “Let’s get started” after a break, regardless of what’s already happening, up to three of these activities will suddenly begin. Thus today after break Bill said “Let’s get going” and within a few seconds there was a handstand competition against the stage wall while he answered a question. As in, God forbid we should sit and wait for someone else to finish what they’re doing.
I don’t know, maybe this is the same attitude toward other people’s time that I demonstrate when I’m late all the time. Maybe that’s why it irritates me so much. My other theory is that we’ve all been operating at 120 mph for three weeks now and we’re all protecting ourselves by retreating into our basic defensive posture, which in my case is the cranky old bastard who resents how everyone else is doing everything wrong. I’m trying with limited success to avoid actually displaying it. I have noticed that Bill has started calling out when someone is doing something particularly distracting while he’s talking by asking, “Are you gonna be all right?”
But this is improv, right? If I can’t learn how to accept what’s going on with my team — and for the next two weeks, this is my team — then I can’t ever get past my own preconceptions to the Valhalla of group mind. I accept that . . . but being me, the lesson I take from this is to make really damn sure I like who’s on my team before I commit myself to accepting them the way they are. I don’t think that runs counter to the spirit of improv, which among other things is a performance in a space where everyone has agreed that anything can happen. I don’t want to do it on the street or in front of a standup comedy audience, because that common agreement isn’t there. By the same token, I want to play with people who share some of my basic premises about what we’re trying to do. It’s not that I’m right and other people are wrong, it’s that I know what I like and if I commit to trying to create something with people who don’t like the same things I do, it might be interesting, but it will almost certainly be frustrating.
Or am I just rationalizing?
July 30, 2007
out for a spin
Some of us in my class attempted a show tonight at a local bar. In general I’m very leery of barprov, since I feel it’s unfair to both performer and patron to subject people to entertainment they didn’t come to see (cf. my jihad against gratuitious live music), but this was an actual show that took place in a separate room so that nobody had to watch improv who didn’t want to.
We stank up the joint, but so did the other people playing, and we did some things right. Again the exact parallel to bands: You can practice all you want, but there’s no substitute for playing live, and it’s always rough until you get the hang of it. Collectively, I think we violated every single basic premise of improv at least once, which is almost comical, because I’ve seen everyone in this group do good work, some of it mere hours ago.
I did have a brief moment of thinking how I looked, the older guy participating in the younger group’s horrible little skit, rendered even more pathetic by the fact that he should know better, but it passed. Fuck the audience.
We really do need to work on our scene starts, though.
the 70
Notes from Seth Thomas’ character lecture a few weeks ago. Seth’s basic premises are taken directly from An Introduction to Human Communication: Understanding and Sharing (7th ed.) by Judy C. Pearson and Paul Nelson. The premises:
- Seventy percent of human communication is nonverbal.
- That seventy percent can be broken down into specific areas.
- You are always communicating, in the sense that even if you’re not actively presenting something you can be read for meaning at any time.
- Any improv character, even if nonhuman, will communicate like a human.
- If you’re not actively creating your character’s 70 percent, you’ll default to your own.
- In most cases, you can set your 70 for the upcoming scene and not have to change it even when new circumstances are introduced. (Seth said that he started thinking about the 70 partly because he knew he was going to think about a scene before going in but didn’t want to be writing it in his head beforehand.)
(At this point I should mention the discrepancy between Seth’s approach, which seems to be geared toward creating a complete character onstage, and the approach of Bill Arnett and Shad Kunkle, which assumes that in most cases you’re basically playing variations of yourself. In other words, there seems to be some disagreement as to how problematic it is if your own personal 70 is showing.)
Side point: Sitting represents submission. In daily life you are paid to submit, e.g., sitting in your seat at work. But in the theater, people pay to submit, which means that they are surrendering not only time and money but also will to be entertained. (Meaning: better entertain them.)
Four categories of choices: mind, body, soul, and sound.
Mind
- Dominant proof: logical, emotional, or personal. The standard by which the character assesses the world. Logical and emotional are what they sound like; personal is based on relationships with other people.
- Life condition: Where is the character at in his/her life?
- Button words: arbitrarily pick words that push your character’s buttons.
Body
- Default: Very important. Seth pointed out that most of us tend to take on the character’s attributes while active onstage but then revert to our own default physical position when not the focus of the scene. Find the position your character assumes when inactive.
- Affect displays: emotional life as expressed physically, e.g., facial expressions, body language, etc.
- Emblem/illustrator/regulator: these are different knds of gestures with slightly different relations to language. An emblem replaces language, as when a throat-slitting motion is subsituted for the phrase “You’re going to die.” An illustrator accompanies language, as when pointing while saying, “The door’s that way.” A regulator modifies language, as when the answer “yes” is modified by a shrug.
- Level of territoriality: How much of the stage is your territory? If none of it, you’re always potentially trespassing on someone else’s. If all of it, someone is always potentially taking liberties with your possessions.
- Personal bubble: How much space do you need to keep between you and other people? (It could vary from person to person.)
- Touch value: How touchy-feely are you?
- Life condition: what kind of physical shape is the character in?
Soul
- Personality
- Message to the world/subtext: what the character would say to everyone if she could say only one thing.
- Purpose: it could be trivial, but it informs everything you do. “Mike Myers’ purpose in life is to surround himself with hot chicks. So look at the Austin Powers movies. He’s achieving his purpose.”
- Life condition
Sound (Seth uses “Persona” but that throws me)
- Silence: is powerful
- Articulation: how your teeth, jaw, and tongue work together to create the sounds that come out of your head. You can completely change a character’s articulation just by physically changing how you hold your mouth or tongue.
- Pronunciation
- Nonword sounds
- Voice pitch and inflection
- Voice quality: mellifluous, guttural, etc.
- Voice rate and volume: fast or slow, loud or soft
Seth also points out that this list isn’t definitive and that you’ll find your own choices to make. He says he usually walks onstage with a physical default position and a message to the world and starts adding from there.
seth saith
Notes from the Friday object and environment work class with Seth Weitberg:
“The degree to which you invest in the realism of object and environment is the degree to which the audience has the opportunity to invest in your character.”
The four steps to creating realistic object work (in order of importance):
- You must show an object’s weight and dimension. You show weight with muscular tension and dimension by handling it.
- Go slower and bigger than you think you need to. “Bigger” doesn’t mean changing the size or angles of what you’re doing, just the emphasis. Give the audience time to catch up to what you’re doing. Be fluid.
- Think of an object as a process. Almost nothing you do is as simple as it initially seems. How easy it is to deal with an object should be a function of character, not of the actor’s strengths or weaknesses. Objects can reflect internal states in the same way that weather does so in pathetic fallacy.
- The UCB question: If this, then what else? Every decision about the object implies other facts about it, and by extension the character and the scene.
“I’m teaching high school kids right now, and mostly they try to come up with ways to hit each other in the balls.”
listen up pt. 2
It took me this long to realize that one of the guys in Cook County Social Club was also in the the D.C.-based trio Biscuitville, who were one of the high points of the DSI Festival. They were so tight and so attuned to each other that I remember being astounded that they didn’t live in the same city anymore; I guess Chicago is where Mark Raterman was commuting from.
We had our first class with Bill Arnett today, and for the first time I felt a serious disconnect between what I’m doing here and what my classmates are doing here. Or, to parse it more finely, how we choose to do it.
I’m pretty single-minded about pursuing improv while I’m here, for reasons already discussed: it’ll be a while before I’m exposed to this much improv or can immerse myself in it completely again, and I’m starting twenty years later than almost everyone else here. These facts sharpen my sense of this as a limited-time offer, and I’ve made a conscious decision to prioritize my improv experience over everything else, including my overall Chicago experience.
My classmates are young and full of piss and vinegar and hormones, and I don’t begrudge them wanting to go out and get drunk and screw each other and enjoy a great city, particularly if they’ve never been in one before. But in class today, they would not shut up when Bill was talking, and for some reason this was really chapping my ass. Granted: he explains things in a sometimes elliptical way, and repeats himself, and has a really interesting verbal tic of holding focus not with the elongated “uuuuuuhh” that most people use but rather with a long repeated staccato “uh uh uh uh uh uh uh” that’s very easy to make fun of. Regardless, he’s forgotten more about improv than I know and I’ve laid down an enormous splodge of wonga to hear what he has to say, and when he can’t get the attention of my classmates because they’re busy doing bits about what just happened, it irks me. Maybe I’m just hypersensitive today. I notice in my last entry that I shushed people at the show last night; I did it in class today too. I’m not really mad at anybody, since when I was their age I was a more arrogant prick than any of them could ever hope to match, but the closer we get to the end, the more I’m going to want to squeeze every moment for its maximum return.
Today we reviewed Levels 1, 2, and 3 and then worked on openings. Level 4 is basically The Harold, and Bill admitted that a lot of what we’lll work on this week will appear to contradict principles we’ve already learned, because we’re now leaving the theoretical for the practical. This is what I think my classmates are missing: regardless of how they feel about Bill’s teaching style, he’s got a ton more experience than we do, and the more work we get done in class, the greater chance we have to benefit from that. Duh. I personally like his teaching style, because he’s clearly jazzed about this stuff, but I’d be listening, or at least quiet, even if I didn’t.
Okay, enough about how much more mature I am than everyone else. Here are a few highlights from today’s class, of interest solely to people who give a tinker’s damn about the Harold:
- It’s not that there are good choices and bad choices. It’s that every choice comes with consequences.
- First beats need to be clean so that the players in the second beat are on the same page about what they’re dealing with.
- The majority of what we do onstage isn’t funny. So it doesn’t make sense to spend all our time focusing on trying to be funny. (What he did not say, but which I intuit from this and other comments, is that if you take care with the nonfunny parts the funny will take care of itself, but not the other way around.)
- “An ounce of behavior is worth a pound of words.”
- The Harold is difficult because it has the potential to be amazing and transcendent. (When I wrote this down, it made sense in context, but now I’m not sure if he meant that it’s more difficult to do it really well or that merely doing it competently is more disappointing than in other forms. I’ll try to remember to ask him tomorrow.)
- The opening needs to be true to the suggestion; the show needs to be true to the opening.
I need to let go of my irritation at my comrades now, because we’re doing twenty minutes at a local bar tonight. I’m going to strongly suggest that we just run a montage instead of burdening ourselves with a structure, but I will bend to the group mind. Because that’s what we do.
anarchy in the io
I did yoga today, which was necessary and overdue. It’s obvious to me that the number one thing I could do to improve my improv would be to practice meditation and yoga every day. Well, that and pick up household objects over and over again until I can exactly replicate what my hands do without the actual object being there, which is what Seth Weitberg recommended for spacework.
I saw seven shows tonight: The Darned, Diplomat Motel, Deep Schwa, Darryl, Teresa & Jason, 3033, and Ghettoblaster, which features Dave Buckman’s friend and former directee Amber Ruffin, who has also been playing in the Armandos I’ve seen. Maybe because it was a Sunday, some of the teams seemed really loose tonight. Deep Schwa, a bunch of heavy hitters, were being very silly and meta, which worked fine. They marked the end of the first show, and the remaining four acts wound up being presented all together to the sparse crowd.
Darryl, a three-woman troupe, won the cool professionalism award for the evening, if only because they put on a seamless, smart set that demonstrated plenty of listening even as the two couples sitting directly in front of the stage talked through most of it. I shushed them, a first for me here. I’m not proud of that, but I’m not ashamed, either.
I wanted to see 3033 before class tomorrow because Bill Arnett, our teacher for Level 4, is in it. Arnett used to be in a group called People of Earth, who are legendary because of shows like the one they did one Christmas season from the suggestion “cataclysm.” No doubt it’s grown in the telling, but they apparently set about destroying everything onstage (including a Christmas tree and decorations) and then turned their attentions to the rest of the bar, playing scenes the whole time but never pausing in their wholesale destruction of everything in their path.
Compared to that, 3033’s show tonight was kind of tame, but compared to any other improv show it was pretty gone. I don’t remember what triggered it, but early on in the set the scene became about moving, and they proceeded to start moving everything in the room that wasn’t sat on or nailed down onto the stage. About twenty chairs, four or five tables (like I said, the show was underattended), the piano, the poster display from the lobby, and the potato chip rack, the popcorn machine, and a keg from behind the bar. It never felt desperate or contrived; it was like, well, this is what we’re doing this time out. By the end of the show they had even incorporated an intern, as well as a hockey mask and an Uncle Sam hat they found offstage. I am not doing this justice, but trust me: It was really funny.
Not everything I’ve seen here has been great, but almost none of it has been actually bad, and I’ve learned a lot from watching even the mediocre shows. Which are also encouraging, as in I think I could do this. If I’d seen only shows like The Reckoning and Bullet Lounge and Cook County Social Club since getting here, I probably would have hung it up by now.
July 29, 2007
the sinker
Friday I saw the Improvised Shakespeare Company, which along with Our Feature Presentation (the improvised movie) is possibly the only longform narrative I’ve seen since I got here. It was quite entertaining, and it got me thinking about plot, which might be a good thing to do some more before I play with GGG the night I get back. I’m actually much more excited and nervous about that show than I am about my class graduation show. I’m sure I’ll be fine once I’m up and playing, but the fact that the GGG show will be my first time onstage after getting back, plus the fact that a lot of my friends will be there, plus the fact that I have very publicly been studying improv (though not plot or music) this whole time creates a certain amount of internal pressure I’d probably be better off without. Liz Allen says “Fuck the audience.” So, um, fuck you, audience. No offense intended.
Later Saturday I saw Bullet Lounge again, and though the show flagged a little toward the end, the first twenty minutes were almost anarchic even as everyone onstage was completely aware of everything else that was going on. Or so it seemed. I hate the fact that it’s impossible to ID individual players on the teams. I have new all-time favorite improvisers whose names I don’t even know.
Yesterday I acted like a depressed person, which I also did last Saturday. I slept for most of the day and then sort of listlessly drifted toward a destination elsewhere in the city. I know this feeling from previous travel: After a few days of vigorous activity, I inevitably hit a point where I lose all motivation to do anything and withdraw into myself like a wounded flower. Well, so be it. I do this at home, too; it’s just more noticeable when I’m someplace I feel like I should be exploring.
I have come to terms with how little of Chicago I will see on this trip. It’s starting to look like I won’t make it to a Cubs game, the Art Institute, or any theater, despite my intention to do all three. That’s okay; I’m here for the improv. Also, I’m running out of money. Stopping my mail back in Austin also means that I stopped whatever checks have been sent to me in the last month, so I won’t be able to access any of that money till I get back.
Which is fine. Being able to concentrate on one thing and one thing only is a luxury, not a hardship. I can’t help but start getting fidgety as I prepare for reentry, but the more I can focus on what’s right in front of me, the better off I’ll be. I feel like I’ve already gotten my money’s worth, but if I can hit a few more licks before I have to go, all the better.
July 27, 2007
work work work
This morning I took a scenework class from Brad Morris, who I’ve seen and really liked in the Armando and in Stubs with Dina Facklis. There were only five of us, so it was pretty straightforward: we ran scenes, Brad gave us notes, we ran more scenes. Once again, it took me a while to get warm, but when I did it was really enjoyable, and it definitely helped that the other four were all solid improvisers. I was even pretty happy about the main note I got, which was to be less of a peacemaker and more of a troublemaker onstage. The fact that I’m getting that note instead of reminders to be more positive and say yes more tells me that I must be getting a little better.
I had further evidence of this in the last scene of the workshop, which I played with J Star. I did a terrible initiation, calling him “Mr. President” and attempting an African accent, which he quite understandably misread as Russian. He started playing Bush, more or less, and he played him as not too bright, but instead of turning him into a cartoon, he kept coming back to how in awe of the stars he was. I called him an idiot and was acting very dismissive and high status, and predictably we hit this point where it felt really stuck. Then he made an observation about how people on other planets would see us as a star, and suddenly I realized that I needed to be changed by this, and instead of arguing with him or commenting on it I decided that this was an amazing thing I’d never realized before and was changed by it, and the scene ended with both of us standing and staring awestruck at the stars.
This sounds moronic when written out, and it was hardly the best scene I’ve ever done (it wasn’t even the best scene in this workshop), but I can’t tell you how huge it was for me to let my character give up his point of view and take on someone else’s without judging it. Along with my classmates’ notes on Thursday, this is the hardest evidence yet that doing this is making me a better improviser.
The afternoon workshop was object and environment work with Seth Weitberg, which was also righteous. Last year at Out of Bounds I took Stephen Kearin’s workshop on the same topic, and it was less a practical tutorial than a spiritual invocation of the glory of improvised theater, which I very much needed and appreciated then. Seth’s workshop was much more focused on the practical problems of spacework, which is very much what I need and appreciate right now. I will perhaps boil it down for another entry here in a minute, but basically I would have taken whatever workshop he taught, and so I was not disappointed. Seth said to tell Erika and Bob hi.
July 26, 2007
annoyance
Just got back from seeing Messing With a Friend, the friend in this case being Mick Napier. Not my thing, really, but I’m glad I got to see them, and the Annoyance (where Jen and Erin are going to be taking classes in a few weeks) is a fantastic space staffed by very friendly people. A ton of iO people were there, including what seemed like about a third of the summer intensive.
Tomorrow I have workshops with Brad Morris and Seth Weitberg, people whom I didn’t know existed when I got here but who are now among my improv heroes. They’re both really good actors, so maybe some of that will rub off.
notes
When we got to class this morning we talked about the TJ and Dave show a little more. Shad made some really interesting observations about it, including the fact that they struggled a little to find the characters at the beginning of the show and didn’t hit their groove until a few minutes in. When he said this, I immediately realized it was true, and wondered if I had suspended my own judgment because it was TJ and Dave and not The Bumfuck Brothers. Then I realized that TJ and Dave “struggling” put most improvisers’ best shows ever to shame. Shad also talked about how the technique of switching characters allows each player to endow and shape the scene from a different angle in ways that they couldn’t or wouldn’t if they stayed the same characters the whole time.
In class today we continued to give notes person by person and then do an interview and scene as a character unlike any we had played thus far. My classmates were very generous with their notes to me, and I think what made me the happiest was that they stroked me in areas that I had been specifically working on, so it was really nice to get that positive feedback from the people I’ve been playing with for three weeks. Just as importantly, Shad didn’t seem to have any specific huge thing that he wanted me to work on. Or maybe he did and I’m in denial, but I choose to believe that I’m where I need to be.
Of course, I blew weaseldick this afternoon when we combined with Pat O’Brien’s class and were then divided up into three teams, each of which ran a fifteen-minute montage. But I know by now that one of my areas for improvement is that it takes me a little while to get warm, and also that when I’m playing with people I don’t know well all my worst tendencies come out. What the hell; onward and upward.