Improv is a team sport
I love being part of a team. Playing week in, week out with the same group forges bonds of friendship and intimate understanding unlike any I’ve experienced outside of the bedroom (watch out for my after-hours blog about the benefits of improv in the bedroom soon). When I’m onstage with my team, the knowledge of their individual styles and our group’s collective vision allow me to make complex, unorthodox, fun moves that just wouldn’t feel fair to throw at an unfamiliar player. Every group I play with regularly is a pocket of joy that I get to reach into and pull out a happy little gem of familiar surprise. Why would I ever play with anyone else?
Well, there are lots of solid reasons, which I’ll list for the sake of accuracy: you get to learn from others; you get to do scenes that are outside your wheelhouse; trusting a stranger gives you a bigger rush than trusting someone you already trust; playing with a new group in front of a new audience is a great way to build your reputation and personal brand…
Every six months, I take part in the British Improv Project. If you haven’t heard of it, BIP is a biannual cooperative, non-profit improv retreat based in the Midlands, founded in 2015 by the amazing Geoff Monk of NICE. You’d be hard-pressed to find such a wealth of diverse talent for such a good price anywhere else in the British Isles and I highly recommend it — also, I regularly teach at them, so if you want some of this wisdom direct to your face, this is a great way of getting it.
The centerpiece of each BIP event is the Saturday night jam; one such jam is the source of maybe my favourite ever scene. Over the course of this particular weekend, two of the event’s teachers had stood out to me: Richard Fallon, of Comic Sans Script, and Daniele Harford, of The KneeJerks. Both of them had taught workshops which blew my mind and completely changed the way I thought about improv (and gave me exercises that I have since stolen and spread around like viruses).
These two lessons were so radically different, not just in their teaching but in their pedagogical style. When I entered Daniele’s classroom, she began by telling us all how she was a better director than an improviser and how she sometimes struggled with fast-paced, gamey scenes and how she had adopted this style as a way of keeping up; Richard began by barking a list of fifteen or so rules that would be ruthlessly enforced throughout the ninety minutes that followed.
Daniele’s workshop on Meisner Technique showed me how simple emotional truth and immediate connection could create astonishingly powerful scenes, while Richard’s Strong Moves Only methodology had given me an impossibly efficient framework for getting right to the crux of the scene and making it do all the work. Where Daniele showed us how to hold a moment like clay in our hands and sculpt a relationship before the audience, Richard taught us to smith iron, forcing the scene into shape by hammering at it with all the righteous willpower we had. I was a little bit awestruck.
When the two of them got on stage together to perform a scene, I was on the edge of my seat. They had such radically different styles. Which would win? Who would flounder? Could they hold it together or would this be a horrible mess?
The scene began with the two facing the audience, catching one another’s eye and looking away, slightly embarrassed. They knew each other. They were in a public place — a cinema. They discussed film and snack choices tersely. They didn’t quite argue over who was first in the queue for a ticket. Suddenly, it all became clear: they were a married couple who were each so stubborn that they couldn’t come to the cinema together, who had accidentally decided to go at the same time.
I loved this scene for a lot of reasons. Against all my reservations, it was real, it was natural, it was hysterical and it was seamless. Most of all, though, this scene taught me an important foundational truth about improv and the value of playing with new partners.
We’re all on the same team.
No matter where we come from, no matter what school we learnt from or what style we prefer, when an improviser gets onto the stage, they want to create together. They want to say ‘yes’ to their partners.
Sure, we may have a team that we play with more often. We may have several. We may do solo improv, something I’m looking forward to learning about at the next BIP weekend, in less than a week(!), from the awesome Mike Brown.
But we all love this weird, nerdy, joyous artform. We love watching it, we love doing it, we love seeing it poke its adorable, misshapen head into popular culture.
We’re all on Team Improv. So next time you have the chance to play with a stranger, do it! Not for what you’ll learn, not for what you’ll gain, but because they’re already on your team, and you’re already on theirs.
Addendum: To all those namedropped in this blog post, apologies for any accidental misrememberings and/or intentional narrative fudging. Please contact me directly via Facebook with feedback, complaints, legal threats, etc.
