the Montreal Improv blog

I’ll admit it, I need to read more.  I’m no slouch when it comes to book-learnin’ but I’ve been feeling pretty intellectually stunted these days.  With everything that’s going on in my life recently, I haven’t taken enough time to really sit down and enjoy a good book.

Improvisors need to get out there and find new sources of inspiration beyond what they’ve seen on the stage. If everyone just copies what they’ve seen before then an improv community can become pretty stale.  We need to keep going out and finding new topics to interest us.  These subjects can be found on the internet (wikipedia!!) or in the news, but its good to go back to the source sometimes and explore a few great pieces of literature.

Audience members that recognize the source material will feel smarter for doing so and will love the performers for making them feel so brainy.  Even this post was inspired by some improv book, although for the life of me I can’t remember which one it was.  I need to get into bed and enjoy a nice read.

-mr

My awesome friend Alex (now with Remilio Sheen and Atomic Vaudeville in Victoria) gave me an excellent way to describe the tips and guidance I dispense during my workshops. (aside: I don’t like to call them “rules”. Since when does art have rules?) But the term I have swiped for my own use cropped up in a discussion we were having about teaching and science: The Useful Lies.

As an example, one might talk about gravity being the force between two masses using Sir Issac Newton’s jolly ol’ theory. That’s a pretty good model for how the world works. But Einstein’s General Relativity tells us that there’s a bit more going on and it’s a good deal more complicated. It fixed most of the errors that kept creeping up in astronomy when using Newtonian gravity. Does that mean we should throw out Newton’s ideas? No, even if they are flawed ideas, they are still useful. We don’t usually need the kind of precision that General Relativity demands. Newton’s theory is still pretty darn good for things like building roller-coasters and hanging signs. Thus, The Useful Lies.

I tell beginning students to start their scenes with things going well (aka: starting “positive”) because it gives your scene somewhere to go when things go wrong. I ask them to avoid introducing problems or conflict right off the top because the audience needs to care about the characters for the problem/conflict to have any weight and if you open with the problem, the audience doesn’t yet care. I get them to start “normal” (aka: don’t go to crazytown off the top). I’ll stop people from opening a scene with a rocket full of rabbits or a bottle that dreams of being a barrel. I want to see relationships, people and story, not comedy based in absurdity.

See, the thing is, I tell my beginning students these things even though they are not true. Be positive, avoid conflict to start, be normal: these are just some of my Useful Lies. By teaching these lies (I tell the class they are lies right up front, too), it’s less likely that a starting improviser will feel overwhelmed or uncomfortable with being on stage and performing without a script. (Many new improvisers will try to be negative, conflict-happy and absurd as a defense against having to be themselves or honest on stage. My job is to get them to trust themselves.)

To me these are the training wheels of improv that I find useful to teach (surely others will differ). They ease people into the idea of improvising a story, on a stage, in front of others. Each of those three lies can be jettisoned once you have a certain confidence, trust and comfort level on stage. If at any time you feel their usefulness has been outlived or you want to see what life is like without them, The Useful Lies just become Lies and they should be ignored at your whim.

I already told you I teach failure. Now you know I teach lies.

-fv

I just started teaching a class on how to create scenes at Mainline recently and we were discussing the power of emotions.  I was suggesting that the students try big reactions and emotions but at the end a student expressed a concern that improv can involve a lot of over-acting and melodrama.  Yes, it can.  But, there are a few reasons why I often ask for students to have big reactions.

Most beginning improvisors barely emote at all.  If you ask them to make an emotional sound, it ends up more like a squeak or a murmur than a roar or a sob. The tendency of many players is to stay very small, so to expand their library of choices, the students need to work on the opposite end of the spectrum.  The same would be true of a student who always went really big.

Emotions lead to action.  In periods of intense fury or rapturous joy, we do things that we wouldn’t normally do in our more lucid moments.  Action furthers the story by breaking routines and tilting platforms.

Having an emotional reaction shows that something is important to a character. Improv scenes that consist of a series of unemotional events, even those that are very funny, can grow stale because nothing presented seems to be of any value to the characters on stage.  Audience members need someone to connect and to relate to, and emotional reactions can help create those bonds.

Emotional reactions are important, but ultimately, variety trumps everything.  Try everything from subtle looks to bellowed roars and you’ll find your way to show the audience just what makes your character tick.

-mr

Fiero (Italian): contented pride in achieving something just for oneself.

Amae (Japanese): the sweet feeling of being dependent on someone else.

Naches (Yiddish): the glow of proud pleasure that only a child can give to its parents.

Schadenfreude (German): the feeling you experience when you learn that your worst enemy has suffered some misfortune.

Ennui (French): the sophisticated, world-weary boredom most intensely felt by philosophers and intellectuals.

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