I Haz an Improv?

I mentioned in my previous post, “Crazytown vs. The Real World,”  that I have been appointed the emcee for the Agents of Improv next year. My running platform was education and professionalism, but I feel like I should flesh out my ideas a little bit before actually trying to implement them.

If anyone has any words of wisdom, I would appreciate them. In the mean time, here’s what I’ve got:

For any Agents members reading this: All workshops listed will be scheduled outside of General Meetings. General Meetings will still follow the format of “Warm Ups/ Short Form/ Business/ Warm Ups/ Long Form.” 

1. Open Workshops  I can’t claim to be an encyclopedia, or a coach, or anything like that, but I think that running weekly workshops, open to anyone, to go over the basics of storytelling, characters, relationships, suggestions, and so on would really benefit the newer people in the group. I would also like to workshop short-form games, and go over simple long-form formats, such as montages, though those are secondary to the “key concepts” listed above. 
2. Advanced Workshops  Advanced Workshops will focus exclusively on Long Form improvisation. We will begin by briefly covering Montages, then move on to Armandos, then to Harolds. I would like to also experiment with Monoscenes, but I haven’t yet decided where they fit into the schedule yet. The basics that were previously covered in Advanced (storytelling, characters, object work, etc) will now be covered in open workshops, which everyone is encouraged to attend.   
3. Notes  I am going to make every effort to take notes at General Meetings. My freshman year, Alfonso did this all the time, and it was wonderful. Basically, the emcee (or another interested party) observes the improv with a critical eye, and makes note of areas in which he or she sees potential for improvement. If you want your notes, you go ask the note taker. If you don’t want your notes, you don’t ask. Simple as that.

My biggest overall goal for the group is to improve our understanding of fundamental concepts, which will form a solid base for exploring more complex/ advanced concepts along the road. Having a firm grasp on basics will also improve the overall quality of our improv. Improv is most fun when the improvisers are confident and competent in what they do, and I believe these three broad strategies will help get us on the right track.

Again, any advice, questions, comments, or concerns, would be greatly appreciated. Wish me luck.

I recently won position of emcee of the Agents of Improv next year, which was a very pleasant and very surprising surprise. That is my news, on to my point.

Something that happens in Agents, and that I may have mentioned previously, is trips to Crazytown. The reality of the scene is something completely bizarre: a strange location, with fantastical characters, doing absurd things. In these kinds of scenes, the improvisers aren’t really too invested in the idea of a reality, and so it becomes less of a scene and more of a conglomeration of things.

The incongruity between the things makes the performance entertaining, but it doesn’t have longevity. The audience’s attention only holds to chaos for so long before they get bored, but the improvisers will milk Crazytown for all the laughs they can get before boredom hits.

Yet, people cling to Crazytown. The ability to say and do whatever one wants, regardless of what “physics” or “biology” say is very liberating.

There is also a mindset that real life is boring. When we ask for locations, without fail someone will suggest “inside a whale.” No one wants to see a scene in a kitchen! Kitchens are boring! Let’s see them inside a whale! Relationships? What do you mean “Siblings?” Recently divorced cyborgs, man! I want to see THAT scene! And so on.

But real life is hilarious. Everyone has stories about some hilarious thing they, or their family, or their friend did. Everyone has improbable, hilarious situations that they would love to tell you about. Sure, sometimes the story is a letdown, and then your friend tells you, “I guess you had to be there.”

IMPROV IS YOUR CHANCE TO BE THERE. 

Just think: You create the characters, the relationship, the setting, the activity. The audience knows who you are, they care about you, and they’re right there with you. You’re setting them up for the story, and they’ll relate to your characters 1,000 times better if they’re characters and relationships they can see themselves in.

Now, you can do scenes in strange places, about strange things, with strange characters. I’m not saying you can’t (obviously it is possible), or that you shouldn’t. But find something to ground yourself in. Ideally, that would be the reality of the scene. If you’re not so sure about creating a Whole New World, base it in the reality of real life. 

Inside a whale is fine, too.

My college improv group used to run free workshops, open to anyone, on a number of topics. We had games workshops, character workshops, performance technique workshops, all run by fellow students. We weren’t professionals, but we would research what we wanted to workshops], get together, and sort it out. However, as time has gone by, we’ve been doing significantly fewer workshops, and, frankly, it shows.

I had a goal this semester to run a character workshop, in order to explore creating dimensional characters - characters who were more than an accent or a quirk. I reserved a space, put an announcement on our website, made a facebook event, and made an announcement at one of our weekly meetings.

Yet, the day before the workshop, only two people besides myself had committed to coming. I am not a professional, I am not a coach, and I don’t think I could have successfully run a workshop for such a small group. So, 24 hours before the workshop, I cancelled my room reservation and sent out word that the workshop was cancelled.

The university policy for reservations is that they must be cancelled at least 24 hours in advance, and I wanted to ensure I gave the group as much time as possible to commit to attending. 

Well, an hour after I sent out word on the facebook event, via email, and on our website, three more people listed themselves as “attending” on the facebook event, and posted that they would be attending the workshop regardless of whether or not it was cancelled.

That struck me as a bit odd, and also a bit unfair. I made sure word was out about my free, open workshop a week in advance of it, but more than half the non-me attendees couldn’t be bothered to commit to attending until after I had cancelled it. Then they expect that by declaring that they’ll go regardless of whether it’s cancelled or not, I am expected to accomodate them.

One of the latecomers told me he hadn’t committed until today because he previously wasn’t sure he would be able to get a ride home for Easter afterwards. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a valid reason, but then he gave me trouble about cancelling the workshop on such short notice. To my thinking, if attendees can make decisions at the last possible moment, so can I. Furthermore, I really had very little choice. I had to either keep or cancel the reservation, and keeping it didn’t seem practical when there had been so little expressed interest.

I have a life, too. I have things that I need to do. If it’s acceptable for everyone else to shilly-shally about what they’re doing, why is it not acceptable for me? Why is it not valid for real life to interfere with MY obligations, or change MY priorities? I don’t exist for the sake of the improv group, but damned if they know it.

I am in a college improv group. We are open to anyone and everyone who wants to join. Anyone who shows up at a General Meeting can play games, give suggestions, the whole nine yards. Any member can be in a show. All of our shows are on-campus, most of our shows are in the Student Union, and all of our shows are free.

That means anyone can be at our shows. We don’t have small children often, but we see a fair number of middle-aged and elderly folks, and, of course, students. We know that’s our demographic. We are not your mom’s improv group, but we’re an improv group you could bring your mom to. 

Bearing that in mind, we try to keep it PG-13.

• Mild language is okay, but no F-bombs, if you can help it. 
• No explicit sex or violence. Sexual innuendo is okay, if done cleverly and in context.
• No drug or alcohol abuse. You can have a cocktail at a fancy dinner party, but don’t be totally hammered. No shooting-up onstage. 

I bring this up because of our General Meetings. It’s important to practice the kind of improv you plan to perform. Practices aren’t performances; they’re looser, there’s more wiggle room, but you could bring your mom to them, too. Our General Meetings are fairly clean. 

These meetings also tend to be fairly large, probably 20 to 30 people, some of them old hats, and some of them new faces. Some people are excited, some are nervous, but everyone’s got something good to offer. We play a few short form games, then a new face volunteers.

He walks into his scene as an old man, says “Man, my genital warts are killing me,” and walks off. It’s uncomfortable (no pun intended), but no one says anything. 

A couple scenes later, the emcee is looking for a suggestion, and this same kid shouts out “Deepthroat!”

You sit down next to him and say, “Hey, it’s awesome that you’re so into this, but just a heads-up that we try to keep things fairly clean,”  he replies “I just came from XYZ and they were dropping f-bombs and penises like it was nobody’s business.” You have just been appointed the unpleasant task of informing him “We aren’t XYZ. What they do isn’t what we do. Please tone it down.”

This actually happened at one of our meetings. And, yes, he has toned it down. He has good instincts, he’s very sharp, and he’s learning. Not everyone starts out strong. Hell, I started out by taking a swing at my scene partner in a game of “Freeze,” and I turned out just fine. 

We are an open group, and I think that’s great. Anyone can come, anyone can watch, anyone can perform, but not everyone is a fit for every group. It’s important to be able to assess whether the group you are in is doing the kind of material you want. If they aren’t, do you want to attempt to fit into their dynamic? Might you be better off looking for a group more suited to your kind of humor?

There are four improv groups on my college campus. Two are open to anyone, two are audition only. One does exclusively long form, one does long form and sketch, one does exclusively short form, and one does long and short form. 

The funny thing is, all those improv groups can be traced back to one public improv group that was on campus seven (?) years ago. All these different groups have roots there, and they separated because they wanted to be doing something that wasn’t available in that original group. It wasn’t a good fit for them. 

That original group doesn’t exist anymore. But a lot of people are in more than one of the remaining four groups. We do different things, but we respect and appreciate what the others are doing. It’s a nice set up. 

An Armando is a long-form improv format in which the improvisers get a one-word suggestion from the audience, and then one improviser steps forward and gives a brief monologue. The group then performs three or four scenes based on that monologue, then another monologue is given and three or four more scenes are performed.

It is, in essence, a fancy montage. However, the monologue acts as a kind of “idea-generator” in that it fleshes out the suggestion into a number of relationships, locations, activities, and themes the improv group can use as inspiration for scenes.

When I first learned to do an Armando, I was told to tell a true story. True stories typically have more details, and therefore give the improvisers more to work with, and are easier to come up with on the spot, because you aren’t inventing them. They already exist.

Now, I have recently heard the Armando monologue taught as “a story, maybe true, probably not,” but I take issue with this for a number of reasons.

The first is simply that the things people make up on the spot tend to be less detailed than stories from life. The monologue is not meant as an outline for the scenes, but as a kind of bank for the scenes to borrow ideas from. A story from life is more likely to have solid, realistic details than a made up one is.

The second is that people are more likely to invent an embarrassing or uncouth story than they are to tell one from life. I have vivid memories of an Armando I witnessed in which the monologue was about a man having his genitals bitten off by a dog, and the doctors and nurses laughing at him for having been turned into a woman. This was the improviser’s first Armando, he didn’t know any better, but the entire back line, and the entire audience, was cringing. By the grace of god, they managed to perform all their scenes without referencing castration, but it was a tense set. 

That, of course, was an extreme case in which the details given didn’t lend themselves to a quasi-polite show. The improvisers weren’t comfortable with the details given in the monologue, and so they were forces to take inspiration from broader themes, which is fine, but not ideal.

The point of all this is to say, I love the Armando as a format, but I believe one should always encourage true stories. That is all.

All we do in improv is make things up. We get on stage with a basic framework for a scene: a format, a gimmick, whatever, and from that we create magic. But what happens when the framework breaks?

My improv group did a show a few weeks back where the game broke. The emcee got up to introduce a five-person game called “Survivor,” in which five people do a scene based on an activity. Once the scene is finished, one of the people is voted off, and the others repeat the same scene, compensating for the missing person. This goes on until only one person remains, doing the entire scene alone.

We hadn’t played the game in a while, and, when it came time to get suggestions, the emcee confused “Survivor” with “Goon River” and all our improvisers ended up with quirks, an activity, and a story title before we finally stopped and asked if he knew what game he was setting up. 

What followed was not pretty. Our rainbow salesman, clumsy ballerina, obnoxious dog, man with too many cats, and Drew were all hanging out on stage (as per their activity), but they weren’t doing a scene.

It was absolute madness. They knew the game had been botched, so they latched onto their characters and would not let go. The obnoxious dog chased the man with too many cats, the clumsy ballerina fell all over the stage, and the rainbow salesman desperately peddled rainbows, but there was no story. It was just a mass of people, each doing essentially their own thing.

You might be saying to yourself, “Five people is way too many for a scene to work. This was just asking for trouble,” but I disagree. We’ve done five-person scenes before with little trouble. We have successfully played “Survivor” before. I genuinely think it was the knowledge that the game had been set up incorrectly that threw people off. They were nervous, they panicked, and it showed.

This was a learning experience. People need to learn (or be taught) how to make a scene, no matter what. The framework of “Survivor” is simple enough; the problem was that the improvisers had been given too much information, not too little.

So, I am admonishing amateur improvisers everywhere to be willing to stop, look at the situation, and think. If you have five people on stage, how many need to be talking at a time? Could you create a backline? If you’ve been given a character, how can that character interact most effectively with the rest of the group? If the format breaks, can you fix it? If not, how can you work with it? Working with it is the absolute least you can do, because otherwise it just devolves into chaos.

There are some improv “rules” I take serious issue with, and first among them is “If you don’t know what something is, just make it up.” 

I understand the theory behind this advice: it’s never helpful to go into a blind panic onstage, so if you have something you aren’t sure how to work with, you have to just do the best you can.

HOWEVER, I don’t think it ever hurts to ask. This is especially true if you are playing (A) a guessing game, or (B) a long form. 

In a guessing game, it is vitally important that the improvisers understand what their quirks/ characters are. If the emcee says, “Jim, can you be Oprah?” and you know you can’t do a convincing Oprah, you say no. If he says, “Can you be a narcoleptic?”,  you don’t know what “narcoleptic” means, but you say “Yes” anyways, that guessing game will never end. If you ask what “narcoleptic” means and the emcee says, “it means you fall asleep without warning during everyday activities”, you will have a better idea of whether or not you can perform it, and the guesser’s life will be a lot easier.

In a long form, all the scenes are based off the one-word suggestion (sometimes filtered through an idea generator or a monologue, but sometimes not). If you do not know what the word means, you will have a much harder time following how your fellow improvisers’ scenes come about, and they will have a hard time following your ideas as they relate to the suggestion. If you have an idea generator or a monologue, then obviously there will be more material for you to work with, and knowing the nuances of the original word won’t matter so much. 

The more you know in general, the more versatile you will be as an improviser. Asking questions is a great way to learn, and it shows you care about what you are doing. Folks like that.

At a show last semester, my improv group performed a Montage that made me want to punch things. The problem with this particular Montage was meta**. My improv group has been getting really meta in general meetings, but this is the first time I can think of where it showed onstage at a show.

**When I talk about Improv being “meta,” I mean that it comments on itself in an obvious way. Someone comes on stage and starts talking to you, the audience, about the scene happening onstage.

What I recall happening at this show was:

• There was a scene with two people in it. Awesome. Strong start. Then, another two people walked on with chairs, and sat down and began discussing the first scene as if that scene were part of a TV show they were watching. Then another two people walked on and started discussing the second pair as if THEY were a TV show being watched.  Then it got edited.
• Two people go on and start a scene about filming a TV show. Two more people come on, and start discussing the first pair as if they’re part of a documentary about filmmaking. Two more people come on and start talking about how this documentary about people making documentaries is really terrible.  Then it got edited.
• Two people go on and start talking about how terrible movies have gotten. Two more people come on and talk about how hypocritical it is for a movie to be about how terrible movies have gotten. Two more people come on and say that it’s gotten way too meta.  End show.

One of the biggest problems with trying to avoid ^that^ is it only takes one person to make the show go meta. If one person in the backline decides this scene would be better as a TV show or an infomercial, there is nothing anyone can do to stop them. And, no matter how many scenes you start, that one person can walk on at any time and take it to a meta place. 

I’m not saying any one person was responsible for the meta in that montage. That montage was a long time ago, and I honestly don’t even remember all of who was in it. But I’ve been in many scenes that started as two person scenes, and were turned into commercials or tv shows or what-have-you by an enterprising member of the backline.

Usually, the lone soldier who comes forward to change your scene is trying to help. They don’t think your scene is moving fast enough or is going anywhere, or they really want to be onstage so their parents can see them perform, so they try to give you a hand. 

That audience laughs because, what a twist! That was cute! It turns out their entire discussion was actually an EXCERPT FROM A FILM! COMING SOON TO (Improv) THEATERS NEAR YOU! But by the time your scene is from a film within a film about making documentaries about making movies, you’ve probably lost the audience.

The audience wants to see something new. They don’t want to watch half an hour of Improvception.  

If you’re doing a Montage, there is nothing to lose by having one slow scene or one dull scene. Once that scene ends, you can go on and do something completely different. If you really see potential in the dull/slow scene, walk on and engage with the improvisers already there. Try to help them save the scene without taking it out of their hands.

If you’re doing a Montage and there’s an incredibly awesome scene that everyone loves, do not do that scene again. There’s nothing wrong with building of themes or characters, or being inspired by that incredible scene, but no one wants to see that same scene for the entire night. 

The audience wants you to take risks. They want to be surprised and impressed by what you’ve put together. They want to be in disbelief that what they just saw was unscripted. Give them that! Don’t be afraid to look foolish or do a terrible scene. Failure means you tried something you weren’t sure you could do. Failure is how you learn to be better. Trust yourself and your fellow improvisers to do something new and exciting.

The audience will thank you.

This is year six (?) of the annual Agents of Improv trip to New York. Apparently, this trip was a thing in the years before I joined, didn’t happen my first year, but has been happening since. In the years I have been in the club, the trip has entailed a train ride to new york and the viewing of an Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB) improv show. Other than that, of course, there was a great deal of running around in NYC which in itself is a great deal of fun and about which I have no complaints.

The complaints come from actually planning the event. Last year, planning the New York trip was my job, and I planned the shit out of it. I found train fares, I made a facebook event, I set deadlines for when I would need RSVP’s by, I looked up things to do in NY before the improv show, and I made all that information as public as I possibly could. However, no matter how much you look up, no matter how many times you ask people for information, no matter how many messages you send begging people to change their RSVP from a facebook “maybe” to something useful, planning anything for an improv group (or at least my improv group) is like herding cats.

I would go into a general meeting and someone would ask me, “How much per person is the group train ticket?” And I would respond, “That information was in the past three messages I sent out, and it’s on the event page.” And they would say, “Oh, I don’t check my facebook messages. Or email. Or the event page.” WELL, WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME? Do you seriously expect me to track down every one of the 40+ people in the facebook event to tell each of them individually every piece of information from each of the several messages I have sent? 

For a six weeks before the event, I was telling people on the event page, through messages, and through email that I needed a definite headcount for the group train ticket two weeks in advance, and that I was taking the headcount through the facebook group and through personal messages/ e-mail. On the day of, as I was going down my list of attendees, a group member approached me to give me his group ticket money, except that he wasn’t on my list. I told him he wasn’t on my list, and he got angry with me and informed me that he had told me he was coming at a general meeting. I am sorry, but I sent probably ten messages begging people to inform me in writing what they were doing, and I know he was a recipient of those messages. If every person had told me in person that he or she was coming, I would have absolutely not been able to remember who I was watching and waiting for.

Once we were all on the train (which some of us had to run through the station to catch, due to unusually long lines at Dunkin Donuts), sailing was pretty smooth. We played Hot Spot/ Musical Chairs in Bryant Park, answered trivia questions from a homeless man named “Neil, The Question Guy,” and then split into separate groups of people doing their own thing.

I know one group went to chinatown, another went shopping, and my group went to the Natural History Museum. For dinner we attempted to find a “GoodBurger” restaurant, which was a failure on many levels, so we ate at Chelsea Papaya instead. We also saw the Chelsea Hotel, which is apparently mentioned in some song by some band or whatever. I didn’t care, but Molly and Dan seemed a bit excited. And then we saw the improv show.

We went to Harold Night, which is basically when you pay $5 to watch as many Harolds as you can stomach. I don’t remember how many teams performed. I think it might have been 5. It doesn’t really matter. It’s a good deal for the amount of improv you see, it’s nice to see a group that isn’t from your college, and everyone on the UCB teams has had to take all the UCB improv classes, so they’re trained. I don’t know if they count as professionals, but they are trained improvisers. 

So in the end, the stress from planning the trip was worth it and a good time was had by all. However, if ever someone is trying to plan a trip for you, you can make their job a little easier by reading the messages they send out about it and respecting deadlines. They wouldn’t be spamming your inbox if it wasn’t important, and they wouldn’t set deadlines if the deadlines were arbitrary. 

These are the complaints I’ve been holding onto for the past 12 months. Happy new year.