ACTION PASS – In a circle, a player turns to his left and executes an action, any action. The next player observes that action and attempts to recreate it EXACTLY in turning to the player to their left.
Progression:
• Do it once through. Then immediately have them do it again focused on slowing down and really noticing all the nuances of a player’s action and working to repeat the action exactly.
• Call attention to what makes them laugh – straight repetition, embracing something “accidental”
Lessons:
• Focus Outward – take the time to really see all that players are giving you. The first step in reacting to what’s happening is seeing what’s happening.
• Support your fellow player’s moves – There are no mistakes/There is no “right.” There is only “what has happened” and “what’s happening now.”
Category Archives: exercises
“Here’s What I Know” self channeling exercise
HERE’S WHAT I KNOW – One player takes the stage with everyone else in the audience. Audience, with teacher moderating, asks the player very technical or nonsensical or just hard questions. The player presents him/herself as an expert in all areas and is therefore able to confidently respond to all questions.
Lessons:
• Emotions are always trump – A maniacal laugh. A dismissive ‘pshaw.’ Even an awkward misdirection. All of these non-informative but emotional responses keep a player in control.
• Decisiveness is king – struggling to the right answer is rarely as satisfying as quickly deciding on any answer.
• Commitment is all the sense you need – players can get hung up on thinking through responses that “make sense.” Forget sense. Just make a choice and stand by it confidently. Commitment to making a decision despite sense will make your response sound “right” even if it isn’t and/or it’ll focus the scene on your “wrong” character instead of the Q&A “stuff,” which is awesome.
• Committed, You Can Stand By Yourself – you can be on stage alone for 30 seconds or for five minutes. Commit to yourself. Don’t rely on meeting your scene partner center stage before the scene starts. You can be alone.
I Am Superman self channeling exercise
I AM SUPERMAN – Everyone stands in a circle. One at a time, each player will enter the circle, say “I am [NAME] and for the next 30 seconds, I am Superman” at which point the teacher will start a timer and the player does whatever they want until the time is up at which point everyone claps and the next player takes the circle. Players around the circle are NOT to interact with the player in the center. The player in the center should be encouraged to do something they’ve been told they need to do more of on stage. Do mime. Be emotional. Stand still. Doesn’t matter.
Lessons:
• Surrender to your group – let go of ego, let your team know that you’re ready and willing to commit to being awkward in front of them.
• It sucks to be alone – don’t let your fellow players suffer on stage alone. Get out there and support each other.
“Yes, Yes I Am” acceptance exercise
YES, YES I AM – Form lay-up lines on either side of the stage. The player on stage left endows the player on stage right with a strong emotional perspective (“You think Ringo is the best Beatle”). The player from stage right accepts the perspective (“Yes, I do’) and commits through several lines of dialogue (“He voices Thomas the Tank Engine” / “I own every Thomas trinket there is”).
Lessons:
• “Yes” is funny – there’s a surprise unique to improvisation in watching a player accept a perspective thrust upon him/her. The “Yes” of acceptance stands to be funnier than anything else even the cleverest person might have responded with.
• Specificity heightens the funny of acceptance – “Have you ever eaten a train, piece by piece, after you derailed it with your penis?” “Yes – for charity.”* When we negotiate the bizarre, we (and the audience) get bogged down trying to make sense. When we accept the bizarre, we (and the audience) explore and heighten fun worlds where the bizarre is “real.” [* thank you Mr. Show]
Heightening Emotional Agreement exercise
HEIGHTENING EMOTIONAL AGREEMENT CIRCLE – A player makes a Self Contained Emotional Statement. It can be as simple as “I love it here,” “I hate the arts,” or “I’m uncomfortable.” Then progressively each person to the right heightens the perspective by agreeing with it – essentially with a “Yes, and.” “I love the beach.” “Yeah, I love the white sand.” “Yeah, I love getting my tan on.” Etc. The initiator gets the final addition. And then the person to their right starts a new SCES.
Lessons:
• Repeating Agreement is funny – what’s better than one person who believes something strange? Two people who feel that same way.
• Agreement fosters collaborative building – many people united behind one emotional perspective will be able to heighten creative details to apexes beyond the reach of any single person.
Agree (even if you don’t). Heighten that emotion (even if you don’t personally feel that way). I love this clip and its players enthusiastic agreement.
Performers are David Pratt and Cindy Nester.
Emotional Decision Making exercises
Emotional Decision Making: If you are to “choose one thing” entering a scene, emotion is always a strong choice. It doesn’t matter what the choice was if you commit. And choosing to decide without deference to “sense” can make for fun unique scenes.
Suggested Exercises:
EMOTIONAL CHOICE CIRCLE– Player One makes a decision of what emotion they will use to react to Player Two through. Then Player Two says anything. And Player One has the previously decided upon emotional reaction to the anything. (“I have a dog” / “Fucking Christ!”)
Lessons:
• A committed emotion will always trump sense – if you just feel you never have to explain how/why you feel what you do.
• Any emotion works – if we try to “understand your motivation” before making a choice about how to feel, you’ll end up in a scene that’s been done a million times before. But, if you make a choice about how to feel before any context is established, then that scene has the potential to be different than any that’s been seen before (“I’m the first Johnson graduating college” / “Ooooh, my god. I’m so scared”).
EMOTIONAL LAY UP LINES – Player One makes a decision of what emotion they will use to react to Player Two through. Then Player Two enters the stage to engage Player One and Player Two responds through their chosen emotional perspective (“Hi” / “I love you”). Give the scenes a few lines back and forth.
Lessons:
• Repetition is the only justification you need – If emotional offers are not aligned (“It’s so beautiful”/ “I’m so depressed”), don’t waste your time negotiating which feelings are valid; just heighten the juxtaposed feelings (“The colors in this sunset – breath taking” / “So much pollution”; “The deep reds, bright purples…”/ “The black in our lungs”).
BLIND SCENES – Player One starts engaged in the environment (with an action, object, atmosphere, etc.). Player Two, starting with his back to the stage, has the first line of dialogue.
Lessons:
• Commitment is the only justification you need – If players’ initiations don’t align, they don’t have to make sense of why they’re together. They can just accept and heighten what’s happening.
EYE CONTACT SCENES – Players One and Two have to make statements back and forth without breaking eye contact. For the sake of the exercise, these scenes can consist of two players standing center stage as talking-heads.
Lessons:
• Harder to assert when pressured – We tend to want to ask questions or make weak statements when forced up against our scene partners. We have to be (or at least “seem”) confident even in the face of demanding insecurity.
Emotional Subtext exercises
Emotional Subtext: Make assumptions to heighten emotions. “Have you seen my wallet?” “I get it; I’m not fiscally responsible!” Seeking to use emotions to drive scenes, we can make our partner’s contributions matter even if they don’t initially resonate.
Suggested Exercises:
EMOTIONAL ACCUSATION LAY-UPS – Player One comes off a lay-up line with a very innocuous line (“Oh, look, a mushroom”). Player Two makes that line matter by making a strong assumption about what that line could mean (“I’m sorry I told you about me tripping on shrooms”).
Lessons:
• Don’t feel pressure to explain the subtext/Commitment trumps sense – “What a beautiful sunset”/ “I’ll never cheat on you.” All that matters is that Player Two thought up a “cheating” subtext from Player One’s “sunset” it doesn’t have to be justified.
• Don’t defend; heighten – Player One needs to make assumptions, too. “What a beautiful sunset”/ “I’ll never cheat on you”/ “I knew it. You’re cheating on me”/ “That you would think I could ever cheat on me is inexcusable.”
“YES, BECAUSE” SCENES – Player One makes a statement about they feel about herself or her scene partner. Player Two heightens that feeling by making explicit the reason why Player One feels like she does (“I’m afraid of roller coasters” / “Because I dropped you as a baby”).
Lessons:
• Feeling Comes First – Don’t wait on your motivation before feeling something. Let feeling something, and the repetition of that feeling something, lead to an understanding of “why” (if needed at all).
• Stay In-the-Moment – Commitment to reacting to the last thing said will keep us committed to the moment and focusing outward
• Take a beat – the best thing about emotions is feeling them. We don’t have to respond verbally right away. Take a moment to be affected, to feel the impact of the line. And do it without maybe before knowing “the impact of the line.”
Emotional Initiation exercises
Emotional Initiations: The sooner we identify how a player feels the better – because that feeling can be heightened by the player and played to by the player’s teammates. The sooner we can identify how a player feels about a something the better – because that something can be heightened by the player to heighten the player’s emotion and that something can be referenced/heightened by the player’s teammates to force the player into a reaction.
Suggested Exercises:
SELF CONTAINED EMOTIONAL STATEMENT CIRCLE – Around a circle, everyone makes a Self Contained Emotional Statement. It can be as simple as “I love it here,” “I hate the arts,” or “I’m uncomfortable.”
Lessons:
• It’s a statement. Not a question shifting the responsibility of providing information to your partner. There’s a period. It’s definitive.
• It’s an emotional statement. Emotional reaction is one of our three key tools; let’s get to it. You need to feel and, for the reaction, you need to give that feeling a direction. Give X the power to make you feel Y.
• Being self-contained, the statement places you on solid ground without dictating the scene to your partners – Mick Napier urges us each to “take care of yourself” without confining the scene. Allow your partner the choice of whether to mirror you in some fashion or to take on something entirely their own. Being self-contained is increasingly an imperative the larger a group you have on stage.
ANNOYANCE-STYLE SCENE STARTS – Have the class form a line across the back of the stage. Call out one name. That person should immediately take the stage and “take care of themselves” with a choice about their emotion, posture, environment, activity, etc. The moment you call that name, another improviser should be coming out on stage as well. That person must also “take care of themselves” with a choice. Players expand on their choices, most importantly establishing and heightening their emotional perspective. Run through this several times until you are confident everyone will take care of themselves right out of the gate and, eventually if not immediately, get to emotion.
Lessons:
• If I’m picking my nose, what does that say about my age? If I’m forty-five and picking my nose, where am I? If I’m forty-five and picking my nose in a restaurant, am I embarrassed?
• A scene needs information. But expand on what you’ve already got. Commit to it.
You don’t need motivation to have a feeling
Emotional Character Development exercise
Emotional Character Development: We don’t need it “all figured out” the moment we step on stage. Make one choice and then build other choices on top of that choice. We can start with emotion and build the details of our character around that. Or, we can start with a detail and build an emotional character from there.
Suggested Exercises:
CHARACTER WALK – students walk around the space as themselves. Teacher gives prompts for them to make choices from (see Progression below). Teacher asks additional questions to flesh out the characters. Teacher has students reset, returning to walk around the space as themselves again. And repeat.
Progression:
• Have players change elements of their personal walk to see how it affects the way they feel
• Change your rate – speed up, slow down
• Change your size – is your walk big or small?
• Walk with a different body part forward
• Change your spine
• Be an animal
• Walk like someone you know
• Ask the class to try on a different:
– Emotion
– Posture/Physicality
– Desire (I want…)
– Perspective (I like…, I hate…)
– Environment
– Action
• Ask questions to flesh out the character. Basically “if this, then what”; for example, how do you feel about the action you’re doing, or how does that desire affect your walk?
• Ask students to speak in their character’s voice – calling out students individually to contribute
• Tell students to acknowledge each other’s presence to discover their ‘status’
Lessons:
• Don’t let starting a scene be intimidating – all you need to start is one choice
• Seek to establish emotion – as emotion will drive our scenes, we don’t want to stop our character development until we establish that emotional perspective. Character ≠ Emotion. You can be a lispy hick, but until you make a choice about how that lispy hick feels you’ll be hard pressed to heighten the stakes of a scene.
Personal Engagement exercise
Personal Engagement: If you were all by yourself on stage, how would you feel about who you are, where you are and/or what you’re doing? Finding an emotion and an active scene element to feel that emotion toward can be the continued catalyst for a successful scene.
If I say, “I love cats,” I’m just emoting. If I say, “I love this cat,” I’m emotionally reacting. If we make the object of our emotion active in the scene – actually tangible/ observable/ repeatable on stage – then we have something to react to instead of just talk about.
What is it specifically that we’re feeling about who we are, where we are and/or what we’re doing? What is it specifically that we’re feeling about who our scene partners are, where they are and/or what they’re doing? If we make a decision to connect our feeling to a tangible/observable/repeatable anything on stage, we can progress the scene by heightening our feeling and that “anything.”
Suggested Exercises:
PERSONAL ENDOWMENT CIRCLE – One by one around a circle, each player engages an emotion and makes explicit what it is that is evoking that emotion.
Example:
• I love this cat
• I hate pulling weeds
• Des Moines, you’re impressive
• I’m proud of my shoes
• I’m afraid of my face
• I’m sad I have no friends
Lessons:
• Specificity breeds details – when you know what you’re feeling and what you’re feeling about, then our creative minds have a clear direction to explore.
• Active elements keep us physically active – it’s much harder to sit still when you love this cats than to sit in a chair and talk about loving cats.
• Don’t wait to be joined before making a choice – We don’t need anyone else. You’re never alone on stage, even if you’re the only improviser not on the wings; you have a world to explore and to react to.