Category Archives: advanced

May 19

Ah, Horse Apples

Hi. Been a while.

Just performed with Horse Apples – Me, David, Nick, Matt, and Barry.

We want to keep doing this because it’s fun for us – we’re all dads and at least 40, so really this is the fun for us. But we’re very sensitive to holding up a space in a community we’re so glad to see growing. We want to deserve our spot, not just get to ride out our wake.

Solution 1 – Get the Young Hungrys to open the show. They’ll bring friends and family. An audience is often more family and friends than random entertainment seekers. Even in the bigger cities if you consider “students and hobbiests” who are “there to see their friends,” “there to see their friends.” Our families and friends are asleep in our/their children’s beds. The Young Hungrys’ friends and family would show up, not yet exhausted by either the invites or the improv.

Solution 2 – Cultivate Opener with TLC. Leveraging “The Lottery” approach, marry outstanding students with establishment players/teachers in a group committed to multiple rehearsals and shows. Barry coached. Casts have been great.

Solution 3 – Do better improv. Can’t coast. Gotta step up. We needed to rehearse. We needed coaching – one voice that could matter more than our opinions and align us. At The Second City, star players were going to First Cities for sitcoms they could think of you for. Think of times when you just laughed at something funny and those times you wanted the person eliciting laughter to know you were laughing so you laughed a little harder. Horse Apples are the guys who moved to Third City, Richmond VA, for family. No one in our audience is motivated to show up or laugh for us; we gotta make’em laugh.

Solution 4 – Gimmick? Tenure in improv is immaterial when a child is infinitely better at improvising than an adult. But, maybe one benefit of our beens-around-the-block is owning being a museum. We’ll fill a wheel with named improv formats written on each pie piece. An audience member would spin the wheel to determine our form for the night and give us our suggestion and the show would start.

Tonight we spun the wheel for the first time…

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Jun 27

Post-Pandemic Pack – Worth The Wait?

“Pack” is Back, baby!

Nick Leveski (the “ck” to my “Pa”) and I had our first in-person show in over a year on July 23rd of 2021. We had a great crowd, eager to get out of the house and to laugh. We had a whole lot of fun.

But was it any good?

I run the classes program, to include writing the improv curriculum, at The Coalition Theater. Oh, and I have a website dedicated to dissecting Improv As Improv Does Best. Clearly I have thoughts about what constitutes “good” improv.

But while I believe in “my way,” it’s my way. In learning improv it’s important to have direction and goals and I believe my approach is useful to improvisers looking to learn. At the end of the day, though, to be worth a damn, an improviser needs to figure out their way of improvising.

The brilliantly funny, Rachel Marsh, told me post-show, “You all did all the things we’re told not to do – negating, transactions, teaching scenes – but damned if you didn’t make it all work.” Again, in learning improv it’s extremely useful to receive guidance that leads us toward choices that are fun for us and the audience and, conversely, away from choices that often lead to real slogs of scenes.

But of course, to really know what you’re doing you need to understand why certain choices are labeled improv “no-nos.” Then one plays within a world of possibilities, not limitations.

So…

What follows is a dissection of the five scenes that made up Pack’s 6/23/21 Show to answer the question: “Was this a ‘good’ show?”

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Mar 16

Black Box Beats warm-up

Lights come up on black-clad high school students standing on and around wooden boxes of varying heights.

You know what’s coming next.

Staccato sophomoric pretension. A wonder to laugh at, if you’re not in the actual audience and/or have to drive a performer home afterward.

Like with The Invocation, a structure of that kind of high-falutin performance can help us practice the different types of contributions we have available in service of Group Games.

Statements. Words. Sounds – emotional, mechanical, animalistic, etc. Callbacks, Call-and-Response, and Choruses. Each are available to us. Why not utilize the full suite?

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Nov 14

Location, Location, Location: An exercise about Connecting through Characters and Relationships

GUS, the delightful and talented team from The Baltimore Improv Group, opens its sets these days by asking the audience for “Three non-geographic locations.” Asked to come up and lead a practice, I brought this exercise with me. We had a lot of fun with it. You will, too.

Have you ever been in The White House? Ever gone into space? Ever visited an old West saloon? No? Well have you ever seen a television show or movie about one of those locations that you felt was “relate-able”?

The audience relates to Characters and Relationships even in “unrelatable” circumstances. As improvisers, we can go to wackier and wackier places as long as we center our scenes in knowable characters and relationships. And, remember, we know our characters and relationships through their patterns of emotional behavior.

As an improviser, have you ever been suggested a location or activity you’re not personally familiar with and as a result you end up playing a character who is “new” to the location/activity or just openly inept?

When the audience is engaged with Characters and Relationships they care way less about the authenticity of your mime and/or details. It’s the old Back To The Future Versus The Matrix dynamic: Because we were invested in Doc and Marty as people, knowing that once 85 MPH was achieved the Flux Capacitor sent you back in time was all that we needed. Conversely, because The Matrix was mostly filled with unemotional characters, nerds ruthlessly attacked the world’s nitty gritty.

Bottom line: This exercise will allow your group to more confidently explore far off worlds by finding a connection in Character and Relationships.

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Jul 26

Find “Game” by Feel

Mmmm…what do these have in common?

When asked for a desired focus for a scheduled coaching session, a Duo sent me the following:

Mainly character stuff, fleshing them out versus building out more plot. Getting better at finding and sticking to the game of the scene.

What follows is some didactic and exercises that filled two hours.

DIDACTIC: How do You think about “Game” in improv?

Acknowledged ad nauseam here on Improv As Improv Does Best, the idea of “Game” gets thrown around a lot in improv.

At its most dumbed down, “Game” is “the funny thing, done more.” Though what the “funny thing” is is subjective.

At once both more sophisticated and more corny, “Game” can focus on the repetition of the cause and effect of actions. Short Form‘s blessing and curse is that its rhythms connect so quickly (helped by being made explicit) – the audience is rigged to react to anticipation but the rigging can be too tight and become stale.

Aiming for an universal answer this site’s materials are predicated on the definition of “Game” as “a sequence of actions related by cause in effect, heightening in a progression through repetition.” Holds true for baseball and Monopoly alike.

Regardless of definition, “Game” needs Emotion.  Continue reading →

Jun 4

In-the-Moment games

I love Pattern Play. I love the way an ensemble, focused-outward on making each new move in the service of what they individually have seen come before, can make a group look like it has ESP.

Eminem meets IKEA

I love “the moment.” I love the way an authentic reaction to a moment -that in no way could have been preconceived – can connect with an audience for a big laugh.

And I LOVE when concentrated pattern play incorporates “the moment” to be something uniquely Improv As Improv Does Best, connecting the ensemble and the audience in a previously-unknowable, perfectly-found moment.

“An ensemble of players gets on stage without previously rehearsed lines or blocking and acts out, making up the show as they go along. The audience understands that this show is constructed from nothing before their eyes. In these aspects, improvisational performance differentiates itself from any other performance medium.”

– Improv As Improv Does Best

I have three examples from my latest 301 Patterns & Games Showcase show.

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Apr 13

My 3 Rules & The Iterative Process

I recorded the session of my Patterns & Games class at The Coalition Theater in which we tackled the My 3 Rules game I’ve previously presented as a warm-up.

One, the camera’s distance makes it hard for the viewer to really track the game in play.

Two, oh, man, looking for a drinking game? Watch me teach and drink every time I say, “Right.”

Three, My 3 Rules – like Kick The Duck, Red Rover – is a game played through iterations. With each iteration, students “get it” more and by the end are fully engaged in the mechanics and they’re laughing. 

In the following post, I’m going to share some clips from that night’s video showing the iterative learning process. My hope is that it’ll serve as a teaching lesson, both through how I provide instruction between iterations and how students loosen up and learn as a result of the iterations. Continue reading →