My Harold Diary: Harold Number Twelve
I don’t seriously delude myself and think that, in some utopian way, if everyone was an improviser, things might be politically better. That would be as naïve and narcissistic a belief as the ones actual activists who are explicitly working against power structures hold. This isn’t to say that mass action can’t help tamp down the abuse of power, but rather that as a tool for radical change, it’s mostly not much more than a limiting function. Real changes need to come from actors that are connected to the levers of power. Regardless, I can’t help but think that part of what draws me to improv is that in a very fundamental way it is anti-authoritarian and anti-hierarchical. It is an explicitly group-oriented, leaderless activity and usually any attempts for one person to lead make it something terrible. In that vein, I wonder what the political leanings of a lot of improvisers are. Socialists? Marxians of some stripe? Anarcho-syndacalists? Most likely some shade of democrat, but it would be nice to see the kinds of skills we learn in improv carry over into the political realm.
I was thinking of this both because of a lot of the blogs I read have been talking about the rise of the authoritarian mindset in American politics and because my Sunday group suffers a fair amount of the time from individualmind. Instead of building things together, people will hold on to ideas or go off in their own direction instead of really paying attention to each other. There a weird tug then between the form we’ve chosen – Harolds with organic openings, which require a rather dutiful allegiance to ones teammates over oneself – and our own individualist leanings. I wonder, as well, how much of this is Enlightenment/rationalist thinking that we have all been inculcated with, a conceptual framework that prizes the individual above the group.
Harold #12 was performed on Sunday November 22nd and while not the best thing we’ve ever created, was certainly better than a lot of other Harolds we’ve done (and to be completely fair, we’ve only done five together and only two – including this one – with organic openings, so expecting much more than “okay” is perhaps unrealistic – not that we shouldn’t hold ourselves to a higher standard, but just that maybe we shouldn’t be dejected when we don’t create a hilarious work of art). When I try to think of what the theme was – if any – the best I can think of is that this was the Callous Disregard for Human Life Harold. Not really, but that wove its way around the scenes. Our opening was ok, hampered both by the size of the small practice space and the mien of the group. There was some heightening and game finding, and a lot more agreement than there has been previously (a lot of thanks goes to our coach for devising exercises to work on that).
1st beats: L walks out and then I do, and he initiates with something inspired from the opening where everyone was tipping over a cow. We were on a farm and testing whether it was true that if you cut a chicken’s head off, the body ran around for a while. We killed a chicken, then tried a cow. I kept trying – unsuccessfully – to pull in something from the opening where our callous disregard for the animals’ lives was due to us thinking we were better than them, which is originally what I thought the game was supposed to be. Eventually we run out of animals, and it’s just the two of us, and I ask if I can borrow L’s knife. Edit. Then R and R (who so far have done the majority of Harold scenes together) step out and R (I may have to rethink this naming scheme…Let’s say R and B). R initiates from the opening, that the movie she’s watching is terrible, so she’s going to hang herself. I can’t remember the opening perfectly, but I thought the game had been heightened in the opening so that the protagonist was such an aesthete that she was willing to kill those that didn’t agree with her aesthetic sense. Regardless, the scene was a bit unreal (not that L and my scene didn’t veer into the cartoony the minute I adopted Squiggy’s voice), but there was good support from the back line as we were other cinema-goers telling R to sit down. Then C and K come out and K initiates a scene from the opening where we had all talked about how great an invention orange soda is, so he had sold all his possessions in order to buy orange soda. Good scene.
Group game 1: I initiated this one from the opening from something I really liked when we were heightening the orange soda thing. We said at one point that orange soda was the greatest invention ever created, and then listed some inventions it was better than, so I came out and said, “Thank you for inviting me to Menlo Park, Mr. Edison. But, while I enjoy your inventions, none of them compares to my Candied Bar.” Since it was a group game, I just assumed others would come in with similar inventions, but it got muddled as the back line didn’t budge and then L, as Edison, started talking about an invention competition. No one on the back line ever did a “cut to”, so we just stood around talking about the competition. Then K came out and showed us his invention The Thumbed Tack. Then a bit later there was a merciful edit.
2nd beats: One of the things I really learned this session was that ultimately, my duty is to think of a decent second beat before I really participate in the scene going on at the moment. That means actually analyzing what the game is. Instead, what I’ve been doing is splitting my time, mostly dedicating myself to helping out in the current scene and in the margins thinking about the second beat. That of course leads to what happened in our scene. Now, in the first beat, the game of the scene isn’t about murdering people, but rather about testing an urban legend or unbelieveable fact. I think the first thing out of L’s mouth in the first beat was that he had heard if you cut a chicken’s head off, it’ll run around for a while. One of my main problems is adhering too closely to the opening, so when everyone was tipping a cow as a prank in the opening, I may have pulled that into our scene and made cutting off the chicken’s head a prank on the farmer. This means I wasn’t really listening to L. So, for the second, I started playing a prank on a couple, burning down their house. If anything was good in this beat, it was C and K playing the doomed couple. They played it so real that I am still laughing at their deaths (because there is something deeply wrong with me). At least I got out a justification for why we were doing this. R and B then did a second beat where R was strapping explosives to herself because she had a bad day at the office. Nothing terrible about this scene except that B didn’t really react honestly. C and K’s second beat had to do with them being out on the street now, and all K had was all his orange soda. I did a walk on as a guy trying to buy a soda from K who refused.
Group game 2: If there’s a second of space where no one’s doing anything, I feel compelled to keep things moving along. I didn’t mean to start both group games, but there was that pause – the pause where as an audience member I start to wonder about the group and get taken out of the performance, and so I do whatever I can to avoid it when performing even if I have no solid ideas – so I jumped out and used a half-idea I had tucked away from the opening about a flasher. I think I initiated, “How do you like this?” The rest of my teammates put us in a park, and instead of us all yes-anding the situation in an honest way until we got to a game, we all – with the exception of C and K – just played it a bit silly. Working like that ends up really stifling scenes because when one doesn’t act honestly, one has to continually think of artificial moves to keep the scene going. If a guy flashes you, you don’t admire his sculpted body. You tell him to get the hell away from you. Starting from that honest place then allows us to blow the scene out naturally.
The 3×3 tournament finals were last night, and one of the teams These Guys Look Like They Read (Will Hines, Kevin Hines and Erik Tanouye) basically ran a clinic in honest reactions. It was probably one of the most instructive sets I’ve seen in a while because they spent the time truthfully playing off each other and truthfully calling out each others’ emotional states and used all of that as a fundament so that when they got sillier and sillier, they really earned it and none of it felt forced or unnatural. I think C described the set as “liquid”.
This may be one of the problems though in performing premise-based improve as a novice. Because the game is handed to everyone on a silver platter, there’s a severe temptation to start off silly, and it really takes a lot of practice and a lot of discipline to reign that in.
3rd beats: Regardless of the overall quality of the Harold, I do like that we’re becoming more comfortable making connections – making non-forced connections that is – which is my favorite thing about a Harold. Again, I misread the game from L and my scene, but at least connected it a bit with R’s game, as I and L were flying a plane into a business office as a prank. C again played an office worker realistically going about his business. R came in then weirdly off-game started competing with our plane over who would be the first to hit the building. It would have been a million times better to have R and B just play their game (maybe even show up with the explosives from the 2nd beat in C’s part of the scene instead of adding a third section – although I did like our stage composition with three distinct sections of action, like a triptych). Then there was an edit and L was trying to buy orange soda from K, and then L and I got in a ridiculous bidding war. When K still wouldn’t sell, I slit his throat like L and I did with the animals in the first beat, and our coach gave us the blackout.
Again, not the worst thing ever created and certainly on the road to improvement.
Filed by andyb at November 29th, 2009 under Harold