Improv and Delirium

by Catherine

Zombie humans, Packman dinosaurs, and suspending disbelief

by paulkivelson

The beauty of collaboration in improvisation is a lot like collaborating in the workplace – when we listen and support each other, the outcomes are better. And that means sometimes we are the center of the action with players and co-workers supporting our decisions. Other times, the best thing for a scene or an outcome in the workplace is to let others shine and to support their ideas by making them look great. That calls for big values: “doing right, not being right.” Doing the right thing for the team sometimes means letting go of being right. Platitudes are easy, following them…well, not so much.

When we share the ‘stage,’ at work or at play, we build critical skills of trust that serves the team’s best interest. The only way to engender trust for the times we take focus is by making sure we support others when they take the spotlight. When we let others shine, they are more likely to step up and support us when we lead. If everyone is out for “number one,” why pretend to have a team at all? If I know you’ll get my back, I’m more likely to get yours.  It’s how humans are wired. Trust matters.

In a recent improvisation show with friends, a situation surfaced much as it does at work. Two improvisers had focus and momentum. I was already on stage and I had a quick decision to make. Think about the how this same scenario manifests at work where two co-workers are “creating” something. Of course, we’re there, so we need to jump in to add our ideas, right? We need focus, too!

Not necessarily. It feels natural to want to jump in with our ideas. Still, a great improviser, team player, co-worker, boss, etc., asks herself (himself) the following before barging in:

• Am I often the “focus?”
• Am I jumping in just to participate without having a way to add value, or “raise the stakes?”
• Does the situation have a rhythm of its own that works without me?

If the answer to all these is “yes,” hold back. At this moment, being a leader means letting your own ideas go, and making the right choice for the scene. It’s not easy. The ability to recognize when it is time to follow is the difference between merely good versus great collaboration and leadership.

Go beyond the obvious, and challenge yourself to follow sometimes. There will always be opportunities to lead by taking focus. Remember the sun will always shine – just not always on you.

Valentina Hasan gives an impressive, balls-out, all-in performance for Bulgaria’s Music Idol TV show, despite having no English or singing skills. Clearly, she just loves to sing and perform.

And, even though the judges reamed and ridiculed her (no appreciation for commitment!), justice ultimately prevailed. People in the audience/on Youtube found her performance to be so entertaining that she was asked back.

Yes, most people who watch this and pass it on to their friends are not stroking long white beards in profound reflection and appreciating her commitment–they’re just laughing at her.

But, they are enjoying her performance. And she is enjoying her performance. Isn’t that what it’s all about?

The Tryout:
(She’s singing “(Can’t live) Without you” by Mariah Carey)

Victory Performance:

In acting classes at the American Conservatory Theater, my instructor makes us play games that are played out totally silently. I find them very satisfying to play and to watch. And though you hear the narrator reading out the story in this one, I see a kind of trance like silence that will envelope the stage pictures. Which may be compelling. William Hall did such an exercise as part of his masks workshop and I happened to be actually behind the mask and it was intensely satisfying.

Another example that I just couldn’t remember earlier but now has come to me was a piece of Interactive Storytelling that Tessa Wills performed at a show during the MAPP at the Red Poppy Art House. She played a tape in the background and then told the story on a red plate by molding pieces of blue putty into different shapes (see above). The thing was very gripping and evocative. It helped that she lit the thing with only candlelight.

Chaplin thought about how to make it more true, not how to make it more funny.

• Keith Johnstone

Keith Johnstone’s voice kept echoing inside my head as I watched The Circus this afternoon at the Castro theater. Clearly Keith had spent a lot of time studying Chaplin. The faint memories I recall from childhood while watching Chaplin movies on Doordarshan were of him doing a lot of kicking people in the rear and running and tripping over himself. Kids love that kind of stuff. In my row today, a determined looking mother sat with two of her radiant looking children hoping to inculcate in them a sense of appreciation for the right kind of stuff . They loved the scene when he gets stuck in the lion’s cage, they shrieked and gasped. My faculty of appreciation had clearly become more sophisticated and therefore rather dull. Despite myself I was moved, delighted, heartbroken and amazed.

Chaplin is a genius. This much is clear.

But what does that really mean. Firstly, multi-talented. Not a dabbler but a master of many skills. His mime. It is brilliantly precise and evocative. There is a scene where running from the policeman and chances upon the side show of the circus (so thats where the term “side show” comes from). The side show is a house with those mechanical puppet contraptions. The clown that hits his head on the fence repeatedly, the scarecrow that takes off his hat and puts it back on again. Chaplin and another thief who is escaping from the law proceed to assume a place in the side show and Chaplin picks up what looks like an eggplant and improvises a display where he turns and raps the thief on the head with the eggplant (on closer inspection, its an umbrella which makes sense, its more harmonious with the reality of the scene, an eggplant would be not as believable), turns back and opens his mouth wide and laughs. Then does it again in precisely the same fashion as last time. This is where I marveled at the perfection of his mime. Eventually the thief passes out from being tapped on the head and the facade is blown. The audience howls with laughter.

Being a master of theatrical skill is not enough to be a historical legend and at one time arguably the most famous man in the world. He obviously had a mystically deep insight into comedy. Escaping from the Policeman, he runs into a flailing circus act. The magician makes a bored looking girl sitting in the chair disappear and in the reappearing act, he opens the door to the chamber where the girl would usually be and sees Chaplin cowering in there stricken with the most beautifully portrayed fear. The girl then sticks her head out from under a hole in the ground looking bewildered and confused. The magician is stunned and panics and shuts the door only to find Chaplin now in the chair under the magic cloth. The crowd goes wild. He finally manages to escape and the normal act resumes. The crowd cusses and boos and asks to “bring back the funny man.” The crotchety circus owner offers Charlie a job which he instantly accepts in his perpetual zeal for survival.

At the tryout is where we see Chaplin’s satire at its best. The owner barks an order at him.

“Go ahead and be funny!”

Charlie proceeds to do a little gig. Again, brilliant mime. The clowns find it hilarious but the owner is not impressed. He wants that same madness that gripped the crowd when Chaplin had barged in on the act running from the police. He is frustrated that he doesn’t know how to bring back the magic. Until one day when the handy men quit their jobs and Chaplin is hired to replace them his first task being to transport a stack of dishes. He immediately drops one dish and in the act of trying to pick it up nudges a horse standing nearby and is then chased by the horse on to the circus arena spilling dishes all over the place. The crowd once again turns into a cheering beast. The circus owner finally figures it out. “He is a sensation but he doesn’t know it. Keep him on as a handyman.”

“Improvisation is an exhibition of good nature.”

• Keith Johnstone

If you fail on stage and are good natured about it, the audience will want to take you home and cook you meal. Chaplin is an embodiment of this principle. Repeatedly we see him fail with extremely good nature. And that is hilarious. The Circus is a magnificent illustration of good nature and an extraordinary commentary on what constitutes funny. A reminder that the magic of spontaneity cannot be planned for or theorized about. That there is this intense delight in seeing someone relentlessly committed to the pursuit of an objective but being thwarted in every essay. Charlie Chaplin brings to you the most wonderful ways in which he can fail but always remains completely true to the story. He is absent-minded enough to wipe the fish along with the bowl but wily enough to play an entire game of golf without owning a golf ball, brave enough to fall hopelessly in love and adorable enough to know he has nothing to offer the girl. I wanted to bring him home and cook him a meal and take him shopping.

To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it!

- Charlie Chaplin

*** The troupe is performing their last area show tonight. I highly recommend that anyone who can, see it ***

The reasons for my delight in this performance are broad. Foremost among them being that the show was simply enjoyable to watch: good entertainment. On a completely different level though, and the one I want to speak to here, is how well the form functioned. The style selected for any performance is critical to its success. At its best, the kind of show will be an optimized dovetailing of the cast’s skill set, the audience’s expectations, the time available, the venues available resources and what the performers think is fun to do. When the performance is improvisational a final critical element is that it unfold according to the broad rules of improv:
It’s made up on the spot
Control of both the details and the arc of any story is shared between all the actors and even the audience
As Patricia Ryan says, an improviser moves through a scene backwards; focused on the past, moving fearlessly into an unseen future

When actors take the stage with the predetermined aim of spontaneously creating something entirely new within a fairly restrictive set of rules (like preselected genre scenes) they sort of stretch the limits of the improvisational aspects of the work. That is, a set of “truths” are known to all before the performance is engaged. Perhaps this takes something away from the play from an improv purist perspective, but it can add so much to the professionalism of the work that it may be entirely worth the cost. I think it is.

The most noticeable enhancements to the polish of the work are the physical endowments made possible by the genre’s “restrictions”. Sets can be dressed with appropriate furniture. Actors can don costumes fit to the times. Lighting improvisers can select gels and gobos most likely to enhance a scene from a specific age and local … Less noticeable and probably of greater value is that the cast has opportunity to “get their head” into the game. They can even rehearse the mannerisms, speech and prototypical story-lines of the genre. They might choreograph the basics of apt dance steps. Musical improvisers could research the music of the targeted time and place.

Nina Wise, is a bay area performance artist and improv coach. Her best recommendation for improvised, one-artist acts is that the actor take the stage already knowing what the first line and the last line of the show are. Everything between those two “bookends” can be spontaneously invented to serve the mood and the moment, but beginnings and endings are what audiences remember the most and, of greater importance, what they primarily measure in judging the quality of a work. Doesn’t work so well in multi-performer art, but it definitely hints at the production value adder of improv that’s only 99 and 99/100% pure.

Does this amount of fore-planning make a show less improvisational? In some ways. Does it guarantee a successful performance? Absolutely not. Do the genre-specific restrictions make the acting easier? In some ways yes; in others no. Perhaps the most important question is a philosophical one: do we improvise best through a strict adherence to the liturgy of the Big, Big Book of Improv or when we focus on creating the most enjoyable experience possible for our audiences, fellow actors and especially for ourselves?

One of the most interesting takeaways was that while a good opposite gender character starts with a stereotype – a walk or accent, for instance – it doesn’t stay there. For me to play a man, for example, it’s not enough to have a gruff voice or male stance. It’s learning how to absorb and take on male *behavior* in a way that is real and not over the top. That is no easy task for someone living every day in a female body.  For a two-person golf scene, I played a male character along with another female improviser also playing a male character (Shakespeare would be confused but delighted)! The male improvisers would “ding” if we got a behavior right and “duck call” when we got it wrong (something men wouldn’t do). That scene was a big moment of learning for both of us ladies. The entire several minutes we said very few words. We slowed down our talk, our movements, and our looks at each other. We focused on how men would hold and swing a golf club. We one-upped each other about golf. Men say less, they say it more slowly, and they take their time. And while it felt too slow at times for my female sensibility, it hit just right for the male improvisers watching who guided me through my “male tour” with their feedback. Slowing things down in the scene (talking, walking, looks, demeanor and action/movement) made the characters more believably “male.”

Another important reminder was that great gender characters don’t have be over the top. In fact, the best ones aren’t. I honored how men really behave in that scene without taking on too many stereotypes and taking them too far. And as improvisers, we want to be mindful of stereotypes. Simultaneously, stereotypes are inevitably your starting point when you are trying to play the opposite sex because you lack first-hand experience. Still, you build on it by adding layers. One consistent behavior (not talking much, for example, or scratching my “beard”) in tandem with a male walk and voice is enough to play a good male character according to my male judges.

Another great reminder here is that the difference between really good and really great improvisation is in the details. Improvisers know this. Yet, it’s easy to forget when playing the opposite sex. We’re too focused on the larger gender “markers.” When my female colleague playing a man delicately put down the golf bag as a woman would, for example, the men “duck called” very loudly. She then corrected her approach, and dropped it like a guy would drop a gym bag – there was nothing gentle about it. The guys howled and dinged in approval. Even the little mannerisms – the way we hold things, the way we flick a wrist or let arms hang at the side, or the way we cast a glance – can be powerful metadata to communicate gender.

Of course, the guys had their turn playing ladies and it was hilarious. One of the male improvisers applying lipstick looked like he was outlining his lips with a power drill.  He received a big “duck call!” He then shifted to a dainty application, even putting the cap back on the tube and re-inserting into his purse. He received big dings from the ladies. Small little details make a huge difference. Object work always matters. It’s just more complicated when you’re a guy who has no idea how to really apply lipstick. Creating great gender characters requires improvisers to become astute observers of the mannerisms of the opposite sex (for purely research purposes, of course)!

The guys also gleaned that they, too, can honor the opposite gender and avoid playing into too many stereotypes at the same time.  While many of the men started out with the same stock of female characters, they  discovered that there is an entire range of female behaviors outside the upset mom, the airhead teen, and the giggly girl archetypes (Joseph Campbell would have been intrigued) that also add dimension to the heroine/female protagonist. Ultimately, we all discovered that using stereotypes without refining them takes away from the depth of the character. Nice work, all!

Finally, some of the biggest rewards came from watching status shifts. Women who normally take very female roles (mom, wife, girlfriend, etc.) acted empowered with their male roles. The guys also gleaned insight from having to be the girlfriends and the moms.  The guys also walked away with an appreciation that playing a girl in comedy is more than just a high voice, a funny walk, and a wig – the easy and overused “go-to” for any comic who has done it (Martin Lawrence, Tyler Perry, the list goes on). Status, details, and behaviors add the delicious layers that make scenes rich without just turning them into trite comic bits.

Experimenting with gender and status can enrich the improvisers and the scene when the improvisers are committed to honoring the depth of the “opposite sex” characters.