Objective: To build scenes by exploring and heightening committed perspectives.
Category Archives: Character & Emotion
“Pimping” lesson with exercises
Objective: To responsibly and recklessly endow scene partners (with characteristics, information, activities, etc.) that s/he must accept.
“Playing It Raw” lesson with exercises
Objective: To play with strong emotional perspectives that evoke strong emotional reactions and drive strong emotional scenes.
Let Me Show You My Room: an exercise about honesty, details and mime
Objective: This exercise is about channeling personal memories to evoke details and define mime.
Continue reading
Comic Strip Based Subsequent Beats exercise
Objective: To focus on strong initiations that heighten established games with new stakes, situations, characters and relationships. Continue reading
First & Subsequent Beats Revolver exercise
Objective: To focus on strong initiations that endow personal and scenic games and leverage those quickly defined games with subsequent beat initiations that heighten characters and relationships. Continue reading
1.0 – The 3lements
Improvisation: Making it up as you go along.
A group of players gets on stage without previously rehearsed lines or blocking and acts out. 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.
Improvisation then is at its best when it leverages its monopoly on spontaneous collaboration before a live audience. When a group of individuals creates something out of nothing together on stage before their eyes, the audience sees magic. When improv is as improv does best, it is magic. Magic. “How’d you all do that?” Continue reading
1.1 – The Self Contained Emotional Statement
THE SELF CONTAINED EMOTIONAL STATEMENT
How do you start an improv scene? My answer was forged from the perspective of giants’ shoulders.
Mick Napier, of The Annoyance Theater, says we start with just one thing.
– Assume a posture.
– Grab an object.
– Start a motion.
– Engage your environment.
– Embody a character.
– Emote.
What do you do with that one thing? Expand, says Napier. Discover through “if this
than what” extrapolation. Build that one thing out, or draw a line to another point of the
scene.
The direction I believe you should expand to – the scene start structure most conducive to
good improvisation – is the Self-Contained Emotional Statement.
It can be as simple as:
– I love it here.
– I hate the arts.
– I’m uncomfortable.
The Self-Contained Emotional Statement aligns you with an emotional perspective. It’s a solid foundation on which to build the possibilities. Continue reading
2.0 – “Two Person Scene” Theory
When we whine that we don’t want to do group game work anymore, we ask, “Can we just do some two person scenes?” We want to breathe. And we equate “two person scene” with “time to breathe up top.” There’re just two of us; there’s less impetus to force our voice into the scene. We’re free to discover the scene without fear of hijack.
We can walk up to center stage to face our partners, careful not to make any sudden moves, meet them eye to eye – chests turned out slightly to the audience – and in our round, enunciated theater voices negotiate the reality of the scene. “Well, if I am your lawyer then I need to know why you’re in the pokey in the firsty place.”
What happened to the Self Contained Emotional Statement? Where’d your patterns go? “But…uh…we’re doing two person scenes now.”
There are many approaches to two-person scenework. I prefer to do two-person improv as improv does best. Continue reading
2.1 – “Two Person Scene” Practical
We’re going to build “two person scenes” on patterns of emotional behavior.
LET’S WARM-UP Continue reading