One Change

Humans. We are creatures of habit. If we allow ourselves to get into a routine then our behaviour starts to follow specific patterns. Take the colleagues in an office for example, they come to work in similar outfits, eat breakfast, lunch and snacks at the same times every day, often eating the same things and with the same people. They walk at a predictable pace, going to the same places, humming the same tune or fretting about the same meeting with the same boss who is always on the verge of firing them.

However, things can very quickly get very interesting. My office have just issued to everyone a ‘Pebble’. It is a super-smart pedometer that measures every step you walk, every cycle you pedal, etc. All of a sudden the entire routine is broken. Everyone is on their feet far more often. They are walking to meetings they would drive to, visiting places on the site they wouldn’t normally go, walking with people they wouldn’t normally go with and having conversations they wouldn’t normally have. This tiny piece of technology firmly clipped to our shoes has acted as a catalyst to change our behaviour. And when people behave differently, when they start saying “yes” to things they normally wouldn’t exciting things could potentially happen as a result.

“ But Lewis…” I hear you cry, “I’ve been reading for 230 words now and you haven’t mentioned what this has to do with improv! Sort it out you dopey sod.”

“Calm down…” I reply, “that’s a bit harsh.”
“Look, does this blog post even have a point?”

“Yes, I’m getting to it.”

“Well hurry up and stop this stupid conversation mularky”.

When we do long-form improv, we tend to start the hero’s story at the state of comfort and routine. This is the world as it exists before anything exciting happens. Marty McFly is an underachiever at school in a downtrodden family. Luke Skywalker is a simple farm boy living with his aunt and uncle on Tatooine. The characters are just existing as they always have, nothing more, nothing less, nothing exciting.

Then, suddenly, we introduce the catalyst and everything changes. Marty is introduced to Doc Brown’s time-travelling Delorean. Luke and his uncle by an R2 unit and he discovers it has a hidden message. Boom! Kapow! Whizz! Kaping! Now we get to the juicy stuff. This one change affects the way our characters behave entirely. They are still the same people, they still have the same super-objective’s in life (for all you Stanislavski fans out there), but the way they interact with the world is necessarily altered by this one change.

This is something we should all be doing in our long-form shows. Building a strong solid character and then pushing them into an altered world to see how they come out the other side. One change can change everything.

My Two Loves

For those of you that don't know, as well as an improviser I'm an academic, last year I was the first person in the UK to get an MA with commendation in Film & Television Aesthetics and I'm currently working (slowly) towards my PhD in Performance in Contemporary American Television Comedy. I have noticed recently that improv attracts a lot of very clever people and it made me realise that the gap between improv and academia isn't that large a leap. So here are the common denominators of my two loves.

What academia and improv have in common:
Both require and encourage further study into the field. In academia we are constantly researching, making sure that our studies use the newest research, or become the newest research. To be on the top of our game we attend conferences, spend countless hours reading and rereading, and then we write to put everything in practice. Improvisers spend countless hours rehearsing, developing new formats or refining current ones, they attend countless hours of workshops to learn the best practices from those in the know, many flock to Chicago every year to immerse themselves and learn from the masters. And instead of writing, we perform, we publish our research on the stage for others to see.

Both encourage nerdism. It goes without saying that academics need to know their specialism inside out, so being overtly enthusiastic about goes hand-in-hand. Improv is much the same, it is easy to become obsessed with perfecting our craft because it is something we genuinely love to do. We scream from the rooftops about new things we have found, new formats we have developed, new shows to see. And when we see a show we feel like magicians watching an illusionist; we know where all of the mirrors are, we know where the rabbit came from, instead we enjoy watching the way that it is done and if a show is done really well we forget that we knew the tricks at all. We are nerds.

Both are niche. Academia in general is not niche, but in order to be an academic you must specialise in something very niche, in my case Contemporary American Television Comedy Performance. Improvisation is, in the UK, very niche. It is quashed by it's mainstream cousin, Stand-Up. For instance there are thousands of full-time professional stand-up comedians in the UK, and I believe there are only eleven full-time improvisers.

Both are ephemeral. Nothing lasts forever, especially in improv and academia. Of course, an improvised performance only exists while it is in action. Once it has been performed, poof! it will never be seen again. Academia has a similar scenario, whereby anything you publish is the newest and most advanced research in the field, but it is barely a moment before the next article, book or conference paper is printed, superseding yours.

There are likely many more, but at 9:30am, sitting at a desk at my University, delaying the writing I must do for my PhD before I make my annual pilgrimage to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival those above are what came to mind. However, I cannot sign off a blog post about improv and academia without mentioning books. There are plenty of books out there for improv but below are the ones, both obvious and not, that I feel have helped me grow as an improviser over the years.

Impro and Impro for Storytellers - Keith Johnstone.
Classics for a reason. Set out some very good guidelines and practices for improv, especially short-form. I return to these once a year or so to remind myself of the groundwork that a good performance builds on. When I first started we borrowed heavily from these books, to the point that we called him 'Uncle Keith'.

Improvisation for the Theatre - Viola Spolin.
Another classic, another forefather (or foremother) of improvisation. Another must-read.

Games for Actors and Non-Actors - Augusto Boal.
Boal did some fantastic things developing the theatre of the oppressed, getting people to express themselves through drama games. As a coach and director I use a lot of his games to try and get the other improvisers to practice expressing things in a different way. There's a reason why this one is also a classic!

Yes Man - Danny Wallace.
It may seem odd to some but I genuinely believe this light novel-come-memoir is one of the best improv books around. The author lives his live by the very first rule of improv: say yes to everything. Amazing things happen, true or not it gives a great example of the power of yes for next time you are on stage. Just don't see the film... it's shit.

TheatreSports Down Under - Lyn Pierse.
I was borrowed this book when I did my undergrad degree by the improvisation tutor. It is a fantastic compendium of rehearsal and performance games for all needs. I cannot say enough great things about this book, especially for short-form groups. The only catch is that it was only printed for a short while, and only in Australia so it is quite rare. At the time of writing Amazon nor it's marketplace have any copies and I once remember seeing it listed for £80ish. Yikes.


Theatrical Improvisation: Short Form, Long Form, and Sketch-Based Improv - Jeanne Leep.
This is a great little book for learning about the basics of different formats. This was my first introduction to the world of mid-form and long-form and it really helped me wrap my head around it.

The Improvisation Game - Chris Johnstone.
No relation to Keith (I think), but another nice books full of games and exercises. You won;t learn anything particularly new but if you try the things in the books it gives a nice baseline to explore from.

The Wunder of Improvisation - Al Wunder.
What a name for a book! Despite the wanky title this book is fantastic. It doesn't care about different forms or formats of improv, only with spontaneous physical expression. Personally I found this really useful to develop my physicality on stage and this is definitely a book I need to revisit as it has been years since I picked it up. Definitely worth a read and despite the content originally not catching my attention the author's enthusiasm and love for his craft is hard not to get carried away by.

If you have any more to add feel free to jot them in the comments section below.

Spinning Plates

Last night I did a show with Glitch: The Improvised Puppet Show. We were supporting Joystick in their Edinburgh preview.

Glitch shows are always fun and silly. But this one especially so. Doing a Glitch show often feels like spinning a lot of plates at once, as well as the usual good improv practices you also have to think about long-form story structure, the narration and the little furry things on your hands. Especially for someone like me who is new to puppetry, constantly thinking about how the puppet looks to the audience, and whether my fellow puppeteers are doing what I want (or vice-versa) is a whole new part of my brain. But in this show we only had 15 minutes, so we scrapped the narrator went out there and just had fun. The plot was not as great as it could have been, but who cares? It was a fun, funny and very silly show, and that’s exactly what we needed to deliver.

Glitch is one of the most rewarding shows you can do because when everything works the way it should you have a real sense of achievement, but sometimes it’s easy for me to get myself down by focusing on the plates when I should be reminding myself why I am juggling them in the first place… for the sheer fun of it.

Improv is fun, I need to remind myself of this every now and again, and last night was one of the best reminders I have had in a while!