Last time, I suggested that some things we seek to be free of during performance (judgment, conscious control, any sort of agenda…) might be useful outside of performance. How can we make these horrible horrible despicable awful things work for us?
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Howdy, y’all. My name’s Alex, and I’ve been asked to blather on while the boys are having their European adventure. Blather on about what? Let’s find out…
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I’m going to continue with more thoughts from my conversations with Alex from two weeks ago. At one point, he was drawing parallels between sports and improv and I feel like I’ve finally digested what he was talking about. BJ from Without Annette recently drew up a hockey analogy dealing with the different roles players can fill but I’m going to talk more about the similarities in preparation/execution between sports and improv. I’ve touched upon it briefly in the past but I want to see if I can explain myself clearly here.
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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
