Rebuilding Better

A look at one improv skill this year has made us better at — even if we haven’t been able to do improv all year.

I see rebuilding in improv as something we all end up doing from time to time, no matter how much we may avoid it. We walk into the scene with an idea, then our scene partner says something, and we have to readjust our ideas about what was happening in the scene.

Sometimes, we may want to go with our idea instead, which will lead us to “NOing” our scene partner’s gifts. So the best thing to do is to know how to roll with whatever comes our way and find something new; rebuild.

Will Hines — Check out his great medium articles — introduced me to a concept he called “initiation etiquette” during an online class I took from him (Thanks to Will a lot of folks were lucky enough to learn online this year). Initiation etiquette is about not coming into the scene with too much of a plan, and more of a willingness to listen, especially if you’re not the one initiating the scene.

In classes in the past, I had heard things like, “If you want something to be part of the scene, you should get it out in the initiation.” Will’s initiation etiquette seems to give the initiator a bit more room to get their idea out. As I understood it, initiation etiquette basically boiled down to the notion that if you are not initiating the scene, your first line should be 90 percent YES and 10 percent AND.

I think this framework is meant to help us avoid rebuilding. If we don’t come in with too much, we never have to rebuild at all; we just get to organically build together once. Improv utopia!

However, thanks to countless hours spent honing our improv instincts, we are continually writing new parts of the scene in our heads. Our minds are comedy machines. We see unusual things, and we think of ways to make them into patterns and heighten them instantly.

It’s easy to get so far ahead of our scene that we get attached to moves that we will never use and did not communicate a framework for. It’s even easier to do this when communication is vague. If you call your scene partner “dear,” you may think they are your date, but your scene partner may think they are your child.

You’ll start playing to your date, and they’ll start playing to mommy. Eventually, someone will finally say what they’re thinking, then the other will have to rebuild.

So even if you use great tools like initiation etiquette at the top of your scene, sooner or later, you’re going to have to know how to pivot your reality graciously.

For many people I know and me, learning how to pivot graciously has been one of the biggest life lessons learned this year. In one way or another, we’ve all faced changes to our ideas of what would happen day-to-day. Even though it’s been tough to practice improv, we’ve all gotten a lot better at this skill.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

Let’s say you’re doing a show, it’s a Harold. Group game one is about to be initiated. For those who don’t do Harolds, this is just a scene we know will be a group scene.

One of your teammates comes out. They bend their knees, tuck their arms in, and cluck like a chicken. “Great!” you think. A second teammate comes out and does the same. It is safe to say this will be one of those fun group scenes where you all just find a weird sound-and-motion-esque pattern. Right?

You bend your knees tuck those arms in, and get to clucking. You look at your teammates, and they are clucking away. Another teammate joins in the fun! Four chickens? This is gonna be such a fun group game.

You can hear the audience is already starting to laugh at the absurdity. Alright, we’re all set up. As soon as someone does something a little different, we’ll accentuate it, make it a pattern, and it’s off to the races!

Just then, one of your teammates walks on and says, “alright, kids, that’s enough playing chickens, come on inside for supper.”

What? Now there is no way you can do this fun little free-form chicken scene you were drafting. Well, thems the breaks. That’s improv. And you really shouldn’t say, “No, we’re real chickens.” Because then you’ve spoken, and that means you’re probably not real chickens, and that’s a “NO” move that your teammate doesn’t deserve.

Your teammate’s move didn’t say no to anything; it built on the reality. Even if you wanted this to be a different scene, your teammate has done nothing wrong. It’s important to remember this. This person is not annoying or destructive. Their building the scene with you, and you were pre-planning.

You can’t just ignore the move because that leaves your teammate out to dry. Your teammate said it… you’re kids. That’s the reality. And you have to address the fact that you’re a group of kids pretending to be chickens all day. The audience wants to know what’s up with that. The right move isn’t to push what you thought the scene was going to be. It’s usually best to try and agree with the reality and say why.

You’re a good improviser, and you know all that, so you say something like, “Aww, Mom! But, we were just showing the real chickens how to dance!”

Great, now you’ve got a fun, fully justified scene where some kids are teaching real chickens how to dance. These kids want to teach chickens people stuff. YEAH! That it! The Justification is there in your head! You got it!

Maybe you’ll say you were showing them how to do math, then a chicken will have prepped a court briefing, and you’re out of here! This scene is good to go!

Just then, one of your scene partners, who was also clucking like a chicken, says, “yea, Mom, I was just about to lay an egg.”

Uhh Ohh. But that doesn’t follow the logic of your justification! AHHH!

But, wait… you didn’t say, “We’re teaching the chickens how to dance; we love teaching chickens human things!” You just said you were teaching chickens to dance. This scene partner of yours didn’t negate anything you said. They’re building too.

If you say you’re teaching the chickens human things now, you’ll be NOing the move about the humans laying eggs. The scene won’t have a clear justification. It will probably get messy.

Again, it looks like the right thing to do is to pivot and rebuild. Say something like, “Yea, the more we dance, the closer we get to laying eggs!”

That scene can be a fun little ramble where you dance around, and every once in a while, someone lays an egg instead of going inside for supper. It didn’t go to plan, but because you YESed, it all worked out.

This “just go with it, support others, and do your best” attitude has gotten a lot of folks through the last year.

When folks said you had to work from home, it probably wouldn’t have been much use to say no and just go into work like you had planned. There wouldn’t have been anyone there anyway.

When your kids had to stay home from school, it probably wouldn’t have been much help to send them out to the bus stop the next morning. They would have been waiting there all day. Even if you had resisted, you would have eventually had to accept that school wasn’t happening.

Some folks lost their jobs, their houses, and much more due to circumstances created by the pandemic this year. These are difficult, taxing changes. It takes courage and strength to rebuild these things. Time and time again, though, I saw some amazing folks I know do just that.

We’ve all faced heaps of these changes in plans this year. We’ve learned you can either roll with it or wait and complain and get mad; and eventually, we are forced to roll with it anyway. It’s been a challenging year, and we’ve all learned to be a little more flexible.

I’ve even seen a new attitude about folks who are unwilling to be flexible and change their ways arise right now. The best way I can describe it a collective, “Ohh, grow up,” from all the folks who have been doing their emotional yoga all year long.

No one wants people to look at them and think, “Ohh, grow up.” But that’s exactly what people think when you hold on to your own ideas too long on the improv stage. It becomes pretty clear you can’t see the scene past your own perspective.

Pushing your own ideas rather than rolling with everyone else’s doesn’t just hurt the scene. It’s also apparent to everyone that you’re behind the eight-ball.

We all end up behind the eight-ball sometimes. We’re not perfect improvisers. We’re not perfect people. Sometimes we don’t see things the way we want to.

We can feel it when folks think we’re behind the curve on something. We usually know.

A moment occurs when we find ourselves behind the curve, both in life and on the stage, where we are tempted to vindicate ourselves. We want to dig our heels in and think, “I’m right. I’m not going to change. I’m going to double down on the way I’ve been behaving and wait for any shred of evidence that I was right. Then, I’m gonna use that shred of evidence to justify my behavior! Then you will be behind the eight-ball!”

There’s a tendency for us to feel like we’ve already made such a fool of ourselves that we can’t change now. It feels like it’s too late to take our actions back and just do things differently. It’s too late to yes that improv move. It’s too late to reach out to that friend I never texted back. It’s too late to apologize for putting all that corn in Blair’s locker Sophomore year. It’s too late to start wearing masks. It’s too late to start adhering to that healthy diet. It’s too late to start believing in climate change. It’s too late to tell my Dad I love him.

Well, here’s the thing that’s really hard to see from inside the scene or the situation. It’s not too late. To quote post-grunge Ontario based band Three Days Grace song Never too late, “It’s never too late.”

You can change that behavior at any moment. You can just say, “Whoopsie, I goofed.” That’s legitimately all you have to do.

If you feel like you made the wrong move or dug your heels in or did a behavior that wasn’t cool, you can decide to just make the opposite choice at any moment and say, “I was wrong.”

Sometimes you may even have to say, “Hey, I was wrong, and I need some help to get back to where I ought to be.” Asking for help is hard. But it’s also never too late to do that. The world isn’t Hogwarts. A lot of folks have learned the hard way this year that asking for help doesn't mean you will receive it. But it never hurts to acknowledge you need help and ask.

To use our example from before, let’s suppose that when your scene partner came out and said, “Alright, kids, that’s enough playing chickens, come on inside for supper.” You just said, “No, we’re real chickens,” and continued clucking. There’s a pretty good chance that scene will continue without you.

At any moment, you can stop clucking like a chicken, stand up, and say, “I was really enjoying playing chickens. I’m sorry. I’d really like to eat dinner with you all now.” And you will be back in the scene. It’s that easy. After the show, people may even say, “Cool move where you stayed a chicken for a while!”

This whole essay could be about why you shouldn’t be pre-planning and thinking of things before they happen. I’ve heard that advice a lot before, and there are many instances where it’s good advice.

But the instincts that lead us to pre-plan also lead us to make dope moves, plan great tag runs, and know when to rest. It doesn’t seem practical to never look forward in the scene at all.

In life, you have to take the information you have and prepare for what’s ahead. When new things come along, you make new plans and roll with it because you have to. Improv really isn’t very different.

We have to collect the information that has been outlined in the scene so far and try and make something of it. That’s a big part of the whole improvised comedy thing. We can’t just say, “don’t ever try and conceive any notions about what the scene you're in looks like.”

We can make plans, we can do our best to figure out how to help comedy unfold in our scene, but eventually, we’ll have to rebuild. So why not acknowledge it will happen and just be the best re-builders we can be rather than trying to trick ourselves into never having to rebuild at all?

This year has been arduous. We can all agree with that. But I think it’s been a lot harder for the folks who refuse to adjust. It’s even been difficult for the folks who think, “Alright, I readjusted, and that will be the last time I have to do that.”

It won’t be the last time. Change is a constant. People say that, not just me. People who are smarter than I am say that. Poets, maybe.

Smart people say that because it needs to be said. Rebuilding is hard. We say things like, “Alright, that’s the last time I’ll readjust.” because it helps us justify doing this difficult thing that we’re getting tired of doing.

This year we’ve all learned how to work from home or work differently. We learned to hang out, learn, and teach on zoom. We learned and accept mask acne.

The changes aren’t fun, they’re hard, but eventually, everyone’s doing it. You can either make the most of it or just shut your life down completely. Why not make the most of it? I think that’s all rebuilding well is, really, making the most of it.

I’m going to try to bring more of that attitude with me to the improv stage when we all get to return.

A big thank you to Alissa Platz for the inspiration for this essay.