As I emerge blinking from the haze of the intensive into the sunlight of my previous life (migas! driving! walking around the house naked!) a few strands are starting to emerge as the likeliest longterm candidates for What I Learned on My Summer Vacation. In no particular order:

• It’s all in your group mind. Liz Allen’s work with our class convinced me that this is the alpha and omega of improv, or at least of the kind of improv I want to do. It’s not that I don’t care about technical mastery or solid scenework or brilliant thematic unity. I want all of those things. But mostly I want deep emotional engagement and astonishing logic-defying leaps, and I think the quickest way to get them is to assemble a group of people committed to affirming what happens no matter what happens. It wasn’t just Liz. Shad Kunkle told us to love each other and said, “If you’re having a problem with that guy on your team, you’re not honoring and celebrating his ideas.” Pat O’Brien said that giving your teammates negative notes does more harm than good. “If he’s played a little old lady the last three times he’s come out, let him keep playing her another thousand times if he wants to.” In other words: Say yes, say yes, say yes. And.
• Adverbial trumps verbal. A scene is never about the words. It’s about the emotional relationship between the characters, and therefore about how they do what they do. Physicality, as an expression of character and emotion, is far more important than any line of dialogue.
• You have everything you need at the top of the scene. You walk onstage with physicality and emotional outlook, and within a few lines you have what the scene is about. If the scene stalls, don’t panic and add extra information (as I did in my one scene in our graduation show). Go back to the top of the scene. It’s all there. Buckman said this scores of times; I’m finally starting to get it.

My goal for the next year or so is to hit the Harold over and over and over again, because the only way I’m going to learn this stuff is to do it repeatedly. It’s a failing of mine that I want to learn things in order, piece by piece, instead of all together at once, and I’ll have to let go of that, but I can narrow my focus so that I’m not spraying my energy out in too many different directions. By my birthday in February I want to be playing with a group that has at least some of the same priorities. There, I said it.