2nd
Yesterday was both quiet and hectic. Quiet in the morning to recover from the night before. Other than dropping Marc off at the Hideout Theatre to do a workshop, I simply switched off for a while. Over a five day festival visit, pacing yourself and restoring energy is pretty important.
Took the Adsit & Lutz 3 hr clinic. I’m always looking to improve my improv and was looking forward to getting specific notes from experienced improvisers. And as I do more and more, it gets difficult to find teachers with more experience than me (especially in Canada). With 30 people in the class, we each did two two-person scenes. There was a lot of breaking things down and discussion, so while I might have wanted to do a little more I got a lot of good ideas on how to present notes, a few great analogies and some inspiration to try a few things out on stage in my scenes when I get back. My first scene I got a note to avoid asking questions. It’s simply stalling and in shorter scenes you want to get to the meat, which is a pretty well-known UCB (among others) tenet. The second scene, I got paired up with a fun improviser and we got no notes. Which was disappointing on one hand but encouraging (and a little ego boost) on the other. Adsit said he liked my work when I went to talk with them after the class (Oh yeah. Gonna file that with the time Johnstone said he liked my face because it looked mischievous).
Then I saw Get Up perform for the first time when they opened for Adsit & Lutz (who were unsurprisingly excellent). Marc saw them last year and invited them to Mprov 2012 in October. I’m thrilled that he recommended them. They play beautifully.
Then I saw an improvised kung-fu movie which had improvised fights (well done!) with great accents. They clearly studied the genre and lovingly played in it. And it was paired with Spirited which was a surreal Miyazaki/Carroll dream sequence. I think I’d like to see it again without being so tired (by the end of the show it was 1:30am) because, even though I appreciated the skill on display, I thought I’d like it more than I did.
Ready for the last day of the fest before we leave tomorrow morning. Barton Springs, here we come!
- vinny
(Source: postposterous)
