Interview with Steve Sim

Auszüge aus einem Interview mit Steve Sim von den Crumbs

(Über die Philosophie in den Anfangstagen) "If it’s short, it ends. If it’s long, keep going. There’s no rules. Games – those are for the class room. (…) Sink or swim, do or die.)"

"There was fear before, because I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. Now I know that I’m having fun and how to make it fun for me."

"Once you’re in a different city and you have to do it, and it’s not your friends and family showing up, you’ve got to raise the bar you’ve got to I’m-really-working-now."

"I didn’t call [the rules] ‘rules’. (…) What I understand most is that it’s a common vocabulary of the impro scene, whereas we didn’t have necessarily words for it, like "Yes And’, ‘Agreement’, ‘Forwarding’."

"When anyone asked if they could learn improv, I’d say, you can’t learn it in a class, you have to do it. And then after being at these festivals and meeting these people and working with these people – cause all of these are great improvisors as well – I realized, maybe there is a way to teach this."

"I can teach people to trust, I can teach people to follow their impulse. I can teach people to relax. Rather than This-is-how-you-do-it,it‘s How do you do it."

"I would do a scene with somebody who’s never been on stage before. And I was still young in improv as well, and it still made me afraid. But here I was on stage about to do an improv scene with somebody who was more afraid than me. So, I had to be relaxed. I had to make them feel safe. I had to make them the star.

"The improv games (with Keith Johnstone) were fun on the surface. It was much deeper and more meaningful and more fun for us to create these open scenes."

"We started getting invited to festivals to play and we started getting invited to teach. And I think that part of that is due to the fact that we weren’t in the Johnstone school or in the Second City school, the Improv Olympic school. We learned those things later."

"I think that I’m a more physical player than Lee. And Lee, I think, is a better actor than me. He’s got more emotional range, perhaps. And I think I’m good at seeing the bigger picture. I think, Lee can do better monologues than me. And I think I can do better abstracts work."

"There’s not much difference from country to country doing the shows. There’s more difference in the same city than city to city."

(Die Fragen stellte Stephan Holzapfel für www.impro-news.de)