Monthly Archives: September 2012

Getting To Know You: Joel Dale

Posted on by jdale
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Getting to know me eh? I could talk about all my food allergies and general cynicism, but really this is about my journey into improv. Well, I got into theater in general because I was following my sister’s footsteps in school by hooking up with the drama club. I did some performance in grade school but I’m kind of timid by nature and didn’t get really active until high school when I was influenced by my sister. My first exposure to improv came after rehearsal one night where the cast played freeze tag. I remember getting yelled at by one of the other actors for going up too often and ending the flow of things that were going well. I stuck with learning theater by getting a minor in it in college. But the real deal of improv started happening when I moved to Washington State. As a means to make friends, my sister suggested I join an improv troupe. I was a math teacher and assistant director of the plays at my high school. A student of mine at the time sent me to an audition but gave me the wrong time. I broke into a church where it was taking place to find already filled out used audition slips of all the people who had already been there. I was three hours late and the realization made my heart sink. But it turns out three hours late was the beginning of their rehearsal. As I was leaving they were showing back up and the result was Fools Play Improv took me on in 1996. After two years with them of weekly short form shows I went on a journey with another friend from Fools Play and started Improsia up in Seattle. We were motivated by trying to find ways to inject more traditional theatrical forms into improv. Improsia started as a company in December of 1998 with the goal of adding anything and everything into an improv show. Sing/Dance/Drama/Whatever. I learned a lot about what motivates me artistically in that time and where I wanted to see the art form go. I also formed the opinion that doing everything possible was a weird and basically unattainable goal. Wanting to experience more and get exposed to more, Improsia became the only representative of Seattle at the major festivals in America during the turn of the 20th century. Through my travels I studied as much improv as I could with all sorts of greats of the art form from around the country. And as I got better I ended up performing my brand of improv in LA, DC, Portland, Edinburgh, Chicago, Austin. The success of Improsia connected me to being the artistic director of the now shuttered Seattle Neutrino Project and more recently the creation of the Improsia offshoot, The Temporary People.

Feeling like I have more comedy within me, I have begun writing and performing original essays about life and how I view the world. The further exposure to more types of performance continues to evolve my thinking about improv. I also draw inspiration from all sorts of places. I can say films like Magnolia, stage shows like Young Frankenstein the musical, performance troupes like Blue Man Group,  and beatboxers like Roxorloops all have caused me to rethink, change, and add elements to the shows that I develop.

Today I have very strong opinions about the subject. I am greatly guided by a desire to something that connects with an audience and am constantly asking myself the question, why do improv over something else. What qualities separate it as an art form, why are those worthy, and how can I utilize that strength to its maximum? I don’t aim for goals like “do an improv show that is as worthy as a play” or “is as good as scripted work”. I want to do improv because it brings to the table something that only it brings and I want to blow people’s mind with that. Otherwise I should do something else.

Getting to Know You: Dave Clapper

Posted on by Dave Clapper
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Hello! My name is Dave Clapper, and I’m honored to be part of this collective of improvisers.

I’m finding it surprisingly difficult to write this post. It’s not a bio, per se—that can be found on the About Us page. And I don’t think it’s exactly a mission statement, either. Or maybe it’s partially that? Maybe it’s a bit of both. And some other stuff, too.

The 1996 Mee-Ow Show

flier from Edinburgh Fringe Festival production of the 1986 Mee-Ow Show, “Oedipuss ‘N’ Boots”

So, a little bit of bio from the top: my first introduction to doing improv came early, thanks to a wonderful junior high school teacher named Mrs. Dewyze. I loved improv from the moment I knew it, but didn’t always pursue it, usually due to pursuit of other forms of theater. The early pinnacle of my improv experience would have been my sophomore year at Northwestern University, when I was cast in its 1986 Mee-Ow Show, under the direction of grad student Dan Patterson, who went on to create “Whose Line Is It Anyway” for BBC Radio, BBC TV, and ABC. That show was the first Chicago-based improv show to play at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and was also the last improv (aside from exercises to generate material for scripted shows) that I did until 2009.

But there’s probably a better indicator from my time at NU of the philosophy I bring to improv: I initially started as a Theater major, but graduated with a degree in Interdepartmental Studies in Speech, which is another way of saying that my academic pursuits were unfocused. While at NU, I was also a member of a dance company for three years, did a great deal of “traditional” theater, a little bit of performance art, and a ton of adaptive work (much in the same vein as what Book-It does). I also wrote a fair amount (something I’ve loved since early, early, early in life).

One of the things I loved especially about the adaptive work was that it was almost always a highly generative and ensemble-based process. The sizes of the roles rarely mattered to the part one had in the process—in almost every case, ensemble members brought in a great deal of source material themselves beyond the text itself. And although the work was far more structured than even a traditional scripted work (because of the style’s insistence on keeping the narrative voice of the author intact), the creative process was closer in its way to improv’s rehearsal structures than to rehearsals for more “traditional” theater.

SmokeLong Quarterly Issue 36

SmokeLong Quarterly Issue 36, cover art by Tuyen Tran

I think, because of how much I learned to love the group-based generation of art (and a host of psychological reasons as well), my passion for the arts in adulthood has been an entrepreneurial one. I was a founding member of Northwest Passage Theater in 1990 (which is what moved me, along with seven classmates, to Seattle). And within a year was on the boards of both the League of Fringe Theaters and the Seattle Fringe Festival (and I can’t tell you how excited I am to see the Festival’s return). I also worked as a stringer for two different start-up Seattle theater publications, Northwest On Stage and Intermission. And when I was parenting two young children and consequently away from the stage, my fiction was published in dozens of literary magazines, which in turn led to my founding my own literary magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly. Since returning to the stage, I’ve been a founding member of two different improv groups in town: the long-form group Interrobang Improv and the Seattle franchise of ComedySportz. And the only scripted work I’ve done has been the uber-generative ensemble pressure cooker that is 14/48.

I kind of hate everything that I’ve written above, because it sounds to my ear like a litany of “Look at me.” Ugh. In laying out some of the things I’ve done (and hopefully why I did them), I’m hoping to get across some idea of the foundations of my improv philosophy, and why I want to be part of the grand experiment of Around the Block. For me, improv is open to every possibility, and we’ve only just begun to nurture its potential. I see it as the cauldron inside of which any of the arts can be mixed, steeped, cooked, and from which the audience can directly be served, even as the mixing, steeping, and cooking is occurring. Jesus, what a terrible metaphor. But does it make sense? Does it?

Show me improv that incorporates commedia dell’arte and modern dance; poetry and aerialism; punk rock and graffiti. Better still, join me in figuring out how to make that improv, and then let’s make it.