3rd
Dramatic Improv
Warning: this is a rambly, introspective examination of my thoughts on dramatic improv. I’m writing this primarily to straighten out my brain wiggles but maybe it will be useful to someone. Maybe not. Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here.
I started out doing improv in comedy bars- Wait, scratch that. I started out doing improv at a university club, McGill Improv. Then I moved to comedy bars. Short-form was the order of the day and I loved it. I do not have the disdain I have heard in other quarters for short-form games. They’re fun, audiences eat it up and it endures for a reason: it works. I still get a kick out of improv games.
But over time short-form lost its appeal just from sheer volume. I did it for yeeeears. Weekly. Multiples per weekly. So the next challenge was found: The Armando. It’s a great transition form. You can use a lot of the short-form muscles you’ve developed and you start to learn long-form ideas and skills one piece at a time instead of having to tackle it whole. It is the amphibian, emerging from the water to take a gasp at air. Much like evolution, the change is NOT intended to be a “progress towards an endpoint”. It’s simply change. And the best thing to do when improv loses its appeal is to change. So I/we did.
Then on to other long-forms. Having dabbled with improvised murder mysteries, radio plays, improvised plays hybridized with abstract short-form alongside The Armando, eventually, we ended up with the improvised genre comedy. Marc and The Bitter End have successfully made that their bread and butter since they started with an improvised sitcom years ago.
Along the way I’ve learned (what many people knew already) that improv is not only a way of doing comedy but it’s a way of doing theatre (comedy simply being a subset). It took me a while to see it and then another while for that idea to intrigue me. But now it has.
Last year’s improvised tragedy “It’s Not You, It’s Me” went as well as I could have hoped. Working with Dan and Kirsten, we crafted a show that had a nice shape to it, one that told a (sad) story and seemed to resonate with the crowd. It certainly had comedy touches but in the end it was a dramatic tale. Nowhere on the list of goals was to see how funny it would be (really, it was the least funny thing I’ve done on purpose). None of us were sure if anyone would want to see improv if it wasn’t comedy (and doubly so a tragedy). From the feedback we got and it seems there is an appetite for it.
It’s taken me a long time to get to a point where that kind of theatre interests me. Now I think I may be hooked. An idea for another dramatic improv show hit me a few days ago and I’ve been worrying at it ever since, teasing out threads, beating it about the head with an idea bat and I think I’ve got the seed for another show.
I want to explore this space further. I feel like I’ve opened a door and found a great new room full of machines that others have built. But I have no idea how to use them, as though they are from some foreign or perhaps alien civilization. I want to tweak these machines, play with them, use them, misuse them, and see if we can pull an audience into a story that doesn’t have a bread crumb trail of chuckles. I want to use the tools of improv to make the audience feel something other than laughter, to turn the unrehearsed, unpolished nature of improv from a weakness into the strength of surprise and discovery. That’s what I want. Now I just have to try it out on a stage.
- vinny
