Don’t fight the flow
As my improv career continues to grow (in duration, if nothing else) I find myself talking in ever more esoteric and borderline cultish ways about how I improvise. I often describe the process of a scene coming into existence as discovering what’s already there, or talk about a character as though they are a real person whose life I’m only temporarily sharing. “I felt really sorry for him, but I don’t think he ever realised he was unhappy” is something I genuinely said after a Between Us rehearsal, about a character I had created! What rubbish! Of course he’s not real. I made him up. He didn’t realise anything. He didn’t even exist, right?
So why do I talk like this? Is it to protect myself from any criticism of my artistic choices? “She wasn’t a stereotype, she just happened to be a nagging housewife, I couldn’t change that, it was her!”
Is it the supreme arrogance of the conspiracy theorist, believing I have some special insight into another world that others just aren’t intelligent/funny/talented enough to see? “I just knew, you know?”
Is it just the kind of artistic waffle that every creative spouts to justify charging outrageous amounts of money to enjoy their work? “I’m basically a conduit for God, so… reach in to your pockets, please.”
Given the vast majority of shows I do tend to just about cover my bus fare home, it can’t be the last one, but the others are frighteningly believable explanations given I just came up with them now. However, I think there’s a better — slightly less self-flagellating — explanation.
More and more I’m of the opinion that good improv is about nothing more than getting out of your own way. You hone your understanding of what makes a satisfying scene or story, then demolish all the things that get in the way of you realising that in real-time, like your anxiety about looking stupid, or your need for approval, or your annoyance at the bloke in the back who works for the venue and who just answered his phone in the middle of your big revelation at the end of Act Two — yes, you prick, we can all hear you, and next time I see you at a creative networking event you can bet I’m telling everyone I can find that you’re a rude, unappreciative, unprofessional arse and nobody should ever work with you.
…and breathe.
When you successfully cordon off your ego and enter that state of flow, the constant decisions you make about your character, their behaviour, their thoughts, the world they live in all become so effortless that they stop feeling like decisions. Improvising in this way is thrilling. You get to be the first audience member, somehow in control of everything, knowing exactly what’s happening and how it will unfold, yet being led willingly into the unknown future at the same time.
You know how in Elizabethan times, theatre patrons would sit on-stage so they could get the best view possible? Try looking through the character’s eyes, seeing what they see, hearing what they hear, feeling what they feel. VR has nothing on this.
Okay, so far, so great. You’re amazing, Alex, everyone is in awe of your way with words. Now what happens when that whole process messes up?
A few weeks ago, Rachel and I did a performance of Between Us, with Sturike opening in the first half. We were performing upstairs in a pub, to a crowd of about 50% friends and 50% strangers, on a Friday night, and the first half had been back to back laughter as that night’s Sturike cast meandering effortlessly between crisp, rapid-fire gags and bizarre, hilarious Lewis Carrollian adventures. When we got our suggestions, it became apparent that I was going to be playing a spoken word poet, to much amusement from the schadenfreude-filled crowd.
The show we ended up putting on was definitely a delight to perform and the audience were inundated with lines about finding rhymes for your own name and when a hobby becomes an obsession. Of course, we were teasing the prospect of improvised poetry for at least five minutes, until my refusal to perform for Rachel’s character became an unexpectedly serious plot point. All in all, it was a pretty funny show.
When we came off stage, we were greeted with all the compliments that we’ve come to recognise as the marker of a job well done — improv virgins telling us they had no idea it could be like this, improv veterans telling us how jealous they are of how amazing our show is, rival warlords offering up their offspring in tribute, et cetera. But talking about it between ourselves afterwards, we had to ask: did we fuck up here?
I mean, what we just did was a comedy, which might be very good, but it was not what we advertised. This was supposed to be a serious, dramatic show about turmoil and heartache and emooootions! A reviewer watching that might have had a good time, but would they walk away disappointed at a promise broken? Did we just pull a Frozen? You know, that film about a quirky snowman and his reindeer friend and, wait , hang on, where did these princesses come from?
Honestly, I had been thrown off by our get. Much as the audience may have wanted to see it, I had an immediate visceral response to the prospect of improvising spoken word poetry. Firstly, I think it’s a bit dickish to mock someone else’s artform just because you don’t like it. Secondly, despite all my years spent destroying any last shred of an inhibition onstage, I really didn’t want to genuinely try to write poetry on the spot in front of a crowd of people. I was stuck between a disingenuous rock and an emotionally vulnerable hard place and I used comedy to escape. The problem was, the audience loved it. Before we knew it, we were thirty minutes in to a fifty minute performance and what we’d done up to that point felt like a sitcom.
Thankfully, Rachel is an excellent storyteller. I knew she sensed that we were drifting off course and she gave me a few golden opportunities to throw in an emotional suckerpunch. Suddenly, we were deep in a horrible argument, throwing back lines that ten minutes ago had seemed like throwaway laughs. “Stop laughing at me, you’re always laughing at me!” “It’s not my fault you don’t have any hobbies!” Before we knew it we were back on track and by the end of the show, we’d delivered what we promised — but it was a close call.
All that trouble stemmed from instinct. When you’re doing a narrative longform show, the most innocent thing can turn out to cause you huge problems down the line. Annoyingly, the only way to find out what those things might be is to do them by accident, then spend days turning it over in your head.
Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing. Only one person in the audience even mentioned that the start was a bit ‘ha ha funny’ and they weren’t particularly complaining. This blog post might seem like a big self-congratulatory ramble: “I caused a little problem that nobody else even noticed and then we solved it anyway and everyone loved it, go team Between Us!”
The thing about improv is, no matter how good you are, you’re always learning. I ended up acting out of fear, but the moment I did it became a part of the character and part of the story and I couldn’t go back. I made a hurdle that we had to overcome as a team and I’m so practiced at ‘just going with the flow’ that I didn’t even notice what I’d done until we’d talked about it for a good ten minutes afterwards!
The better you get, the more difficult the lessons are to spot, but they’re the same lessons over and over again. Drop the ego. Follow the story. Say ‘yes, and…’. Tonight I played a zombie in an improvised horror show by Fury at The Pit Loft in New York. It was radically different to the kind of improv I’m doing back home and I was playing with a large cast, most of whom I’d never met before.
I was well out of my comfort zone and I could feel it holding me back at the start. Yet by the end, I was being shot by teen campers, eating grizzled priests and blowing up in a magic dance ritual to an ancient god. I loved it and I couldn’t have had all that fun until I just embraced the flow. Improv is all about the unknown and the unknown is scary and stressful, but once you conquer that fear, there’s nothing stopping you.
Drop the ego. Follow the story. Say ‘yes, and…’. Have fun!
