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.
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I was once at a convention, sitting semi-incognito and listening to some of the attendees chatting about performing in cosplay (that’s where you dress up as characters from TV, anime, books, etc.).  One of the young men spoke with great confidence about how he was going to do his entire skit as improv.

Naturally, I couldn’t wait to hear where this was going.

His friends told him it wasn’t a good idea.  He remained convinced that improv was easy – you just get up on stage and make things up as you go.  His friends told him that there was more to it than that; improv takes practice.  He restated his position; after all, how can you possibly practice something that’s completely made-up?

About that time, everyone remembered I was in the room.  The young man then said to me, “You know what I mean, right?  You guys don’t have to practice at all, right?”

“No, we practice a lot,” I said, “That’s how you learn.”
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As I mentioned previously, knowledge is important. And in fact, there are two reasons why.

First, knowledge of the rules gives you tools.  These tools keep your mind working the way you want it to on-stage.

Second, knowledge of everything else gives you things to say.  If you don’t have things to say, you’re taking up space in the scene.  Yes, I know what mime is, but think of mime as speaking without sound.

Therefore, I implore you to start reading books, comics, newspapers, blogs, anything.  Watch TV and movies, listen to music, speeches, symphonies.  Go see plays and operas.  Consume media in foreign languages.  Have experiences.

And while you’re at it, talk to other people who have experiences.
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SCT is having a lot of success with our recent “How To Improv” classes this year.  If you attended, thank you!  We’ll be doing more in the future.

We’ve decided to blog a bit about as many of the myriad details that show up in an improv performance, and give everyone a good, solid, textual grounding in improv skills.  True, a lot of people have already done this, but here’s the difference:  I haven’t yet, and it’ll be fun for me.  So here we go.
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