February 1st, 2007

Tag Out

Viola Spolin disliked freeze tag because it robs scenes of their dynamics. Johnstone disliked it because it promotes destruction by "original" players rather than promoting cooperation. And yet, it is still one of the simplest and possibly most popular improv games of all. It’s especially useful as a warm-up without an audience to get into the rhythm of a scene.

·         Tag in, even if you don’t know what you’re going to do.

·         Don’t “freeze” in the typical sense of the word – stay dynamic. Actors who act stiff during tag out tend to stick to “Help, I’m stuck!” or “I can’t move my arm anymore!” scenes.

·         The actor tagging in also shouldn’t take up the stiff position of the actor tagging out, but should use the position as a jumping-off point for a more dynamic action.

·         Don’t make the body the topic of a scene just because the opportunity presents itself. Maybe that’s just how our brains work – we draw inspiration from our surroundings. But since tag-out scenes often involve the actors’ starting in strange positions, you always see doctor scenes or “Can I give you a backrub, honey?” scenes.

February 4th, 2007

Comedy vs. Trash

In a comedy, the job applicant knows that he has bad breath and tries unsuccessfully to cover it up. The personnel manager doesn’t mention it, but does his best to avoid breathing it in (also unsuccessfully).
 

Trashy version: “Hello! Wow, does your breath stink!” – “Yeah. What, are you telling me I gotta brush my teeth to work here?”

The sophistication of any given game lies in the fact that the obvious isn’t emphasized, but remains an undercurrent.

February 9th, 2007

Suggestions

Generally: You shouldn’t ask standard questions, but hold an interested dialog with the audience, ask questions to wish you expect answers.
Clichéd questions provoke clichéd answers. For example, the “vocations” that are most often given by the audience (in Germany) are butcher, plumber, and baker – possibly because the word “vocation” makes people think of the typical clichéd trades.  It’s better to ask: “What do you do for a living?” (This is a question that a remarkable number of people are hesitant to answer).
Other questions suggest a certain cliché. Name an object that fits in a purse. But you didn’t ask for “an object that belongs in a purse.” Most people wouldn’t answer that second question with “eraser,” but rather, in more than 50% of cases, “lipstick.”
You should also realize that certain questions are also very difficult to answer: “Name a machine that should be invented.” This is even hard for experienced improv actors.
Calls for suggestions should be directed by what could really inspire people onstage; questions should be asked as though they were part of a conversation: clearly and without devolving into babble – it also needs to be interesting for the audience members who aren’t directly involved in the conversation. You don’t need to play children’s entertainer; you just need to be interested yourself – this makes your interest all the more authentic to the audience.

February 13th, 2007

Stress and the Game

When actors are under a lot of stress – for example, when the audience is bored, when the actors can’t concentrate, etc. – capital errors start to occur: bad temper before the performance, being bossy on stage, avoiding decisions, clichéd characters. A trainer should see a bad performance by the team he has trained.

February 14th, 2007

Theatrical Conventions

In straight theater, especially in houses with a good reputation (like the "Deutsches Theater"), actors signal that a punchline is coming (long before it ever arrives) with a spoken gesture. Why is comedic talent so rare at that place?

February 15th, 2007

Nonchalance

German improv troupes could learn a thing or two from the nonchalance of American improv theater or the reading stages of Berlin. However, the nonchalance of the Berliner reading stages often becomes carelessness, which becomes more and more awkward the older the readers are.

February 16th, 2007

Cheeriness

"Cheeriness is also missing in music – especially in Germany! – a certain elegance, a certain lightness. This is the ingrained failing of the “esprit allemand.” In symphonies, for example, there is a kind of overblown “world view,” (...), that means even this “night to light” (...) For Beethoven, this still made sense. For us, it’s just cheap.
(Hanns Eisler: Conversations with Hans Bunge. Conversation from 11/06/61)

February 17th. 2007

Masks

Cabaret entertainers who try to imitate the inflection and gestures of great entertainers are just dreadful. Even worse are presenters in improv theater who copy other improv presenters word-for-word. And more terrible still: presenters who end up just quoting themselves, and who have lost touch with the audience.  

February 18th, 2007

My Teaching Developments – From Planned Lessons to Improvised Coaching

During my first 1-2 years of teaching, I always planned my lessons for any given group in advance – the exercises, games, tutorials, etc. that were most appropriate for the group were the ones I would use. Then I began to make the exercises more flexible. Today, I sometimes just throw out the entire lesson plan and develop whole new impromptu exercises during the lesson or training session.
In this way, the lesson itself becomes an improvisation, and not through any theoretical principles, but through the development of my own competence and my ability to react to unpredictable changes during class.

February 19th, 2007

Serious Singing

"A singer should try to sing lightly, in a polite and friendly way. It doesn’t have anything to do with what’s going on inside him; he should try to present the lyrics to the listeners rather than to express them. He must avoid artificial coldness, false objectivity, and inexpressiveness – because this depends on the singer."
(Hanns Eisler 1962: Preface to "Ernste Gesänge" (Serious Songs))

February 23rd, 2007

Realism and Insanity in Improv Theater

Scenes that are set within the realm of the predictable tend to be riddled with clichés. Scenes that begin with the absurd and have no connection to reality come across as silly.  
Solution: Begin with the realistic and add insanity in small doses. The dose will determine whether we see a realistic scene with interesting characters or a crazy scene that also carries a message for the audience.

February 25th, 2007

Contents

Criticism of improv theater often focuses on the contents of a given performance: boring stories, banal stories, trivial topics, etc. But the same critics often don’t notice that in reasonably well-acted shows, the “contents” are not much more meaningful.
A bad show is, above all, a badly-acted show. And inversely, a good show is well-acted.
To cite a well-known example from cinema: the “story” of “The Graduate” is obviously very banal. But the film was so vividly acted that it struck a chord with the audience of the era. One has to add: it’s not surprising, since Mike Nichols came straight from the Chicago improv theater tradition.

February 26th, 2007

Trivial Teaching and Trivial Learning in Improv Theater

Theorists like Heinz von Foerster or Luhmann differentiate between trivial and non-trivial machines. Trivial machines, given a certain input, produce a certain output: 2 times 3 is .....6.
Non-trivial machines produce an unpredictable output. The existing educational system (mainly schools) tries to trivialize non-trivial machines (children).
"A non-trivial machine might enjoy peppering sentences (in English) with Turkish vocabulary – possibly because it prefers the sound or the rhythm, or because it wants to show that it has also mastered the Turkish language. This is neither taught nor learned in school."
"An extreme form of this humorless, virtually mechanical trivialization is the much-used modern standardized test. Someone who has to fill out a form cannot give unexpected (though correct) answers, nor can he change or make comments on the questions."
(Niklas Luhmann: The Educational System of Society, p. 80)

The same can be seen in improv theater. Students and even advanced actors often insist on knowing how something should be performed “correctly.” They adopt clichés that they have observed in the past, because they believe that sticking to these clichés will make them better at improvising. They diligently make lists - lists of prompts, lists of genres, or even lists of feelings – and keep them up their sleeve to use at the right moment. The point of improvisation is to let all of this go, to react flexibly in any given situation. The purpose of improv lessons is not to teach students how to perform a given game perfectly, but rather to teach them how to adopt a more flexible mindset that will essentially enable them to perform successfully in any given game.
The only sad part is that the majority of teachers have the same attitude as their students: they teach games and exercises rather than teaching students how to be more flexible. Their mindset is: how do you improvise “correctly?”
It should be: how do you improvise? Teachers who teach in this style allow (and demand) reflection from their students. An improv student who learns this way doesn’t need lists or other tools; s/he merely tries to find ways to release his/her creativity.

English version (excerpts)

2007

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