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.