Synaptic Chaos Theatre

I was given some excellent advice once by a member of Calgary’s Improv Guild.  He said that when you’re doing a scene, and something big happens, your natural inclination is to run away.  Don’t.

The audience didn’t show up to see you run away from the giant sea creature, or to hide when aliens invade, or to abandon the ball you just kicked down the sewer drain.

The audience wants blood.  The audience craves victory.  The audience wants you to get into trouble. Continue reading →

Kids are pretty amazing when it comes to questions.  When they’re playing, they don’t ask each other about what they’re doing – they just make everything fit the reality of what’s going on.  They freely offer ideas and build on previous ideas to keep the play moving.

As we get older, we get afraid of failing so we ask lots of questions.  We feel a need to establish perfect information before we act.  There’s nothing wrong with this; in fact, the best teachers teach you to ask lots of questions so that you can learn more and clarify information.  I think this is really important.

Unfortunately, questions are bad in improv for two reasons: Continue reading →

Right, so last time we covered “No Blocking” – a fundamental rule of improv.  Now we’ll cover the other two I mentioned:

1. No Blocking.
2. No Wimping.
3. No Steamrolling.

We can also view these as positives:

1. Accept every offer.
2. Accept and build with new offers.
3. Make simple offers.

Accept and build with new offers

Using our previous example (“Hey, come look at my new car!”), we saw the following responses as examples:

1. “Yeah, show me your new car.”
2. “Nah, I don’t really like cars.”
3. “I’ve never heard of this ‘car’ thing before. This is the year 1600, after all”

Knowing what we know about blocking, Option #1 seems to be the best choice – it’s definitely not a block.  There is a slight problem with it, though – it doesn’t add anything to the scene.
Continue reading →