So, I’m going to be honest here. August and September blew
my friggin’ mind. I did a 3 day intensive and a musical course with Baby Wants Candy in Edinburgh and London, and then had the joy of a week’s intensive with
Colleen Doyle as part of the iO England thing. It was great, and it made me
realise three things I need to address.
- I am a smart-arse.
- I am a robot.
- I become blinded.
So smart-arsery is one of my biggest flaws at the second. As
my first improv training was in ‘game-of-the-scene’ and playing very verbal
games like ‘World’s Worst’ my brain is geared in a way which immediately looks
for the puns or the clever gag. This is quite helpful when I’m doing a song in
Music Box because I can usually come up with some pretty cool rhymes, but in
the actual scenes I end up blocking myself out of the moment because I am too
busy searching for that great gag. I need to let go of that and trust that the
laughs will come.
This leads me to my second point. I am a robot. Those familiar
with the Pirates, Robots and Ninjas theory know that this describes a player
who follows the rules and analyses the scene, justifying any anomalies almost
compulsively. Whilst this is true of me, it is not what I am talking about
here. I am an emotional robot. In scenes I emulate emotion rather than actually
experiencing them. A great scene will have a strong, grounded, emotional core
which will allow the comedy to grow out of it. I am a relatively unemotional
person in reality, as a child I was hypersensitive so I think I have ended up
just shutting these parts of my brain off but I have recently realised how
vital they are. One of my favourite scenes I have done recently involved two
old friends at a wedding reception. One friend was in love with the groom and
the other (me) was extremely awkward about the whole thing. I decided to run
with it, rather than just acting awkward, I forced myself to feel awkward. I
started to think about other things that would force a more awkward response,
even if only internally, I decided that he had always had feelings for his
friend so now not only was he awkward from what she was saying at an
inappropriate time, but also because of how he felt about her and the situation
he had found himself in. I’m not sure I’ve ever been that proud of a scene
before.
The final thing I have learnt is based on a show. I did a
gig and there was a scene that didn’t feel like it went very well, nobody’s
fault, these things just happen sometimes. The show was running long and a
threshold needed to be crossed so I did everything I could to speed through the
scene. It was a few days after the show that I got some notes back from the
gig. I had become blinded. I was so concerned with speeding through the scene
in record time that I bulldozed, ignored, nullified and disregarded loads of
offers by my scene partner. I had no idea. I would never intentionally do this
kind of thing, I don’t have a big enough ego and I like to think I’m a
supportive player. However, in this instance I had become so committed to
getting to the next scene as quickly as possible that I didn’t commit to the
present scene. Needless to say I feel terrible about it. Del Close said that
you should treat your fellow improvisers like they are geniuses, artists and
poets, and regrettable I didn’t in this instance.
So, that’s a bit of a self-deconstruction based on my past 2
months of living the improv dream. There’s loads more that I learnt that I’ll
undoubtedly post on here eventually. But until then, sayonara!
