This is a post I’ve been wanting to write for a while now, and ironically, the reason I haven’t is because I want it to be perfect. I’m disobeying the damned title of the post! So here, finally, we go.

There is something that has happened so often in my time improvising, or that I’ve heard so often, that I’ve come to think that if there is one true rule of improv, it is this: Fail big! I’ll give some examples.

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1) At the most recent SFIT Dust-up on closing night, I was fortunate enough to be grouped with Mike Christensen, Kate Jaeger, and Mike Murphy of Jet City Improv (Seattle); Joel Dale of Improsia (Seattle); and Antonella Serra and Enzo Zammuto of B-Teatro Boxeattori (Turin, Italy). For the SFIT Dust-up, each group has a bit over ten minutes to decide on a format before performing. Kate said that she wanted to do a set in which we spoke in whatever language we wished, especially for the Italian performers to be allowed to perform in Italian. We wound up speaking five different languages (if dialects count as languages) over the course of 12 minutes: English, Italian, French, Klingon, and Boomhauer Mushmouth. And it was a blast.

Mike Christensen, Enzo Zammuto, and Kate Jaeger (photo by Todd Gardiner)

Right?!

On the way out of the theater after the show, I said to Kate how happy I was that she’d suggested the format. She commented that it was the most scared she’d been doing improv in years. And we both looked each other with huge grins on our faces and asked each other something along the lines of, “How awesome is that?!”

I hope you, reading this, know Kate. But if you don’t, know this: she’s a Seattle treasure. An awesome human being, an award-winning actress, a brilliant singer, and one of the best improvisers in town. She’s not someone you would think of being afraid on stage. And yet… having had that moment doing improv made her positively giddy talking about it afterward.

2) This one’s shorter, I promise. Ian Schempp? Know him (of course you do; he’s one of the writers here)? Awesome improviser, great improv teacher. Had him for a long-form essentials class a few years back. The single thing I remember best about that class? He said (and I may be paraphrasing), “I’d rather do a terrible show than a mediocre one. Because if it was terrible, it meant I was trying something. If it was mediocre, I was just playing it safe.”

Hell, yeah.

“The Adventures of Gilbert & Sullivan”

My biggest regret about that show was when we revived it for festivals in Honolulu and Seattle. I felt like I’d gotten to a certain level, and owed it to the audience to hit that level in shows. So I played much, much safer than I did in the original run. And while I thought others in the cast did awesome work in those festival shows, I’m still angry at myself for striving for “good enough” instead of “terrifying.”

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I could cite example after example of cases in which I’ve seen improvisers shoot for something bigger than they thought they could do, and it didn’t matter whether they reached it or not. One of the many beauties of improv is that failures, at least if they’re on a grand enough scale, are delightful. Failures, to use improv nomenclature, are offers. Brilliant offers. AND they teach us and make us better at our craft?! They’re like snake oil that actually works.

Trust me on this. Want to get better? Challenge yourself to fail. Feeling like you’re in a rut? Oh my fucking god, PLEASE challenge yourself to fail. Try to speak too fast, to make up iambic pentameter, to play characters that no right-minded director would ever cast you in. Do it, do it, do it.

Fail big.

A few days ago, a fellow improviser shared five improv tips in a private Facebook group that he’d seen posted elsewhere on Facebook. All of the tips made sense to me, but every single one of them was of the “Don’t” variety. Among the many things I took from Mick Napier’s excellent book, “Improvise: Scene from the Inside Out,” was that rules can really stifle improvisers, get them stuck in their heads while playing. And so, so very many of improv’s “rules” are of the “Don’t” variety: don’t ask questions, don’t do transaction scenes, don’t say no. Consequently, it’s really easy when one does do one of these things (as is inevitable, really), it’s all too easy to start being up on oneself: “Oh, shit. I shouldn’t have done that.” And then one’s head is pulled out of the scene. BAD!

Do’s, however, I think are more helpful. Because if one isn’t actually doing a “Do,” the thought doesn’t arise of having broken a rule. A do, just like a don’t, isn’t something that is happening all the time. When a don’t happens, it pulls up the negative internal critic, which tends to hang around for a while. When a do happens, it might pull up a “Woo! Kick ass!” which only makes us want to do more. So. A few do’s I posted in that group that I’ll share here (in slightly edited form):

1) Do care. It doesn’t matter if your emotion toward something is positive or negative, but it does matter that you feel something. Especially if it’s about the other character(s).

2) Do be willing to have your feelings change, if it’s honest within the context of the scene.

3) Do be specific. People talk about stuff in their lives, and they do it specifically. “I could really use a margarita” is better than “I’m thirsty.”

4) Do start from the middle of a scene. “Hell, no, I won’t give you a divorce!” is a more interesting way to start a scene than discovering over the course of three minutes that you’re married and your wife is unhappy. Jump right to it. It’s a huge gift to your scene partner(s).

5) Do look each other in the eye. You might be surprised what you find there.

Recently, it was my great pleasure and honor to coach and play with a fairly new improv group. Their sense of play was great, and it was clear that they’d all had a fair amount of improv schoolin’ from various excellent teachers. And, at one point, I felt compelled to give a note to one member that’s awkward to give to people you know, and more awkward still to give to someone you’ve just met. But it’s a note I’ve felt would be useful to colleagues a thousand times, whether while in rehearsal, performance, or watching a show. But, y’know, if you’re not the director or coach, it’s just bad form, right? So this was the first time I ever gave the note.

“Be aware of what you’re wearing on stage.”

This sounds obvious, but in a form where a) big physicality is more engaging than standing around and talking, and b) performers tend to wear whatever they were wearing off stage (i.e., low rise jeans and/or loose-fitting tops), we occasionally show the audience more than we intended them to see. This is not meant to be a puritanical note. Rather, it’s an acknowledgment that even if the audience is delighted to see our bared breasts or tuchuses (tuchi?)*, if they are seeing them, they’ve been distracted from all the scene work we’ve done up until that point. It makes, even if only for a brief second, the scene about something else. We’ve worked hard for the suspension of disbelief, yeah? So let’s not concede it to a moment of, “Did I just see that actor’s ass?”

Unless, of course, it’s on purpose.

* This issue, by the way, is a gender neutral one. In my own experience, the offenders have more often been male, in fact. So, so many hairy ass cracks.**

** Yes, I know the irony of this note coming from someone who has entered scenes in nothing but his underwear.

One of my favorite warm-ups was introduced to me by Adina Gillett in her Performance Series Class at Jet City Improv. It’s not one I pull out of my bag often, because I’m worried that overuse would cause it to lose its effectiveness, but it’s given a huge boost to a couple Interrobang rehearsals over the years. I’ve found it most effective as the first or second warm-up of the night. It’s useful for starting things off at a high energy level, and also to kick off a rehearsal positively after having had a more difficult rehearsal previously. The two specific instances I can recall were the first rehearsal after a highly technical rehearsal that had been frustrating, and a rehearsal in which it appeared that folks had low energy coming in the door.

The exercise? Badprov. Put the improvisers in two lines, and tell them to do the absolute worst improv they’ve ever done. Every improviser of at least moderate experience level has strong ideas on what constitutes bad improv. This is their chance to wallow in it. One improviser from each line will step forward, and the two improvisers are to do a terrible improv scene. Director/instructor should call out “next!” fairly quickly—length-wise, these scenes are similar to scenes in Freeze Tag. Players go to the ends of the lines and the next two step forward to start another terrible scene.

There are a few things I love about this warm-up:

1. Because the improvisers have not only been given permission to be terrible, they’ve been outright told to be terrible, they’re freed from being too much in their heads. Consequently,
2. They commit with huge energy, and
3. The scenes they create tend to be hilarious.

The two rehearsals I’m remembering were among my favorites we’ve had. I can still remember individual moments of brilliance from the work that followed Badprov in both rehearsals.

Strongly recommended for any time you feel like your group is getting into a rut, or feeling frustrated. I can’t thank Adina enough introducing this game to me.

Starting when I was in junior high school, and for about two decades, my life was largely defined by what show I was doing at any given time. And then I got married, had kids, got a “serious” job, and moved to the suburbs. When I got divorced, I moved back to the city, and it wasn’t long before I had to scratch the itch that was performing. At the time, there were two reasons I chose improv instead of scripted theater:

1) I had (and have) a life outside of the theater that I didn’t want to forego, and improv can accommodate as much or as little time as one wants to give it; and
2) I love improv, and except for a few drop-in sessions in the old Seattle Mime Theater in the Oddfellows building, I hadn’t done it since 1986, when I was part of Northwestern University’s signature improv/sketch group, The Mee-Ow Show.

I’m not sure I ever gave much thought to why I love(d) improvisation. I just did. Since returning to it 2009, I’ve become nerdier about the form—what works and what doesn’t, what warm-ups work best for given formats, truth in comedy, rules and when to break them, why autocorrect insists on changing improv to improve—the usual improv nerd stuff. And I’ve come to realize that, while there are many things I love about improv, at its core what I love most is that everything matters.

If you’re like me (and a multitude of other improvisers), you make your living at one of those “serious” jobs. In my “serious” job, I’m a web developer. Also, if you’re like me, not everything matters in your job. Very few things matter, and the very few things that do matter, matter an awful lot. A conversation about how beautiful the sunset is over Lake Washington as seen from our 15th floor window is a welcome distraction, but a distraction nevertheless. What really matters is finding the missing semi-colon that’s breaking the code, and enjoying the sunset is going to keep me from doing that. That semi-colon is some serious fucking business. If I don’t find it and fix it, Acme’s not going to sell as many widgets tomorrow.

And that’s fine. Cool, actually. I like my day job. But, in a Venn diagram, the circle of things that are important to getting my job done is very small.

Not so with improvisation. What’s the first rule of improv, fellow nerds? Yes, and. And what are we yes, anding first? Whatever our partner has offered us. And what is her offer? Everything she just did. Not just the words she spoke (although that’s what we notice first). Everything. Her tone. Her posture. Her accent, her characterization, her physical actions, her physical placement on (or off) the stage. Everything.

But our partner’s offer is just one of countless offers in the space. Who’s the audience? What is the layout of the stage? Of the theater as a whole? What kind of tech is there? What’s the weather outside? What’s happening in the world at the time? How are we feeling? Everything we sense, everything we know, is an offer. Nothing is a distraction, because everything matters.

Here’s a game I learned from Stan Wells that I really like to help pick up on offers that we might not typically notice.

Godot
In Godot, the first premise is that the two improvisers have about the same level of knowledge of the world as babies. Looking at a chair on a bare stage, about the only thing the improvisers can say about it with any certainty is that it’s there. Not that it’s a chair, that it’s constructed of wood, that its purpose is for humans to sit on. Just that it’s there. It’s something different than what surrounds it. If we, as improvisers, don’t come to the chair with the idea of its purpose, its possible uses become limitless.

To begin the scene, one improviser should already be on stage. The other improviser should enter and exit three times, and then the scene should begin. And the improvisers are as babies, remember, so they don’t have language. These aren’t necessarily silent scenes, but there won’t be words in them.

Think back about that chair and its limitless possibilities. And now think of the other object on the stage that’s different from its surroundings: the other improviser. Ooh, that’s something really interesting. It moves! It makes sounds!

Play. Discover. With the stage stripped to its barest elements, those elements that are there, no matter how small, become hugely important.

My favorite instance of watching this game featured Dusty Lee and Diana Dotter. The space where the class was taught wasn’t a stage, but rather a large room. There was one window in the room. Prior to this game, I’m not sure any of us had given it much thought. But as Dusty and Diana moved in the space, they noticed their shadows on the floor. And they became entranced with watching the shadows and in learning how they affected the shadows. The truly brilliant moment was when the shadows of their hands—not their actual hands, just their shadows—touched. And they both leapt back, astonished. And then started moving back toward one another again, the shock lessening each time their shadows touched, until finally their actual hands touched.

Sounds really artsy-fartsy, and it probably is. But watching it was emotional and wonderful. And it was as simple as finding offers in things we often don’t even notice.

I’ve already written close to a thousand words here, which is stupid long for a blog post, but I could easily write another 5,000. But I won’t, because… TL;DR.

I’ll just say this: the more we open ourselves up to offers in every form, the more opportunities there are to open ourselves up to the joy in improv. An audience member coughs? It’s the beginning of the plague. A light goes on unexpectedly? A new angel has been born. Your partner accidentally says “locker ship” instead of “rocket ship?” Astronauts are nerds stuffed into lockers (which reminds me—mistakes are our biggest gifts, but that’s another post altogether).

Go. Play. With everything. It all matters.