My Harold Diary: Harold Number Fifteen

There are a few insights I’ve had in the last week, and having so many practices and classes at once is an incredible help in really getting clear as to what it is we’re doing when we perform improv. It’s such an amorphous thing, and there’s no singular definition of improv, just a certain habitus that pertains to UCB, or a more overarching habitus that applies to longform improv at large, and feeling out not just the unspoken rules, but the concept of longform improv itself, is a long and involved process.

For example, we’re taught game at UCB, where “game” can have many definitions, but in general is the overriding concept for a scene, the concept that drives the action. Game can be generated out of the scene or out of the characters behaviour, the former tending towards more jokey scenes, the latter tending towards scenes that focus on relationships between characters. Games-of-scenes contain within them though the sub-category of game-as-character-behaviour though. Last night, the second part of the macroscene had an overarching game that dealt with parent/child relations. The characters began in a town where everything was played through this dynamic, and it was, frankly, incredible to watch. While the game began out of the characters’ behaviour, it became the premise of the entire town and therefore the game-of-the-scene.

So, we’re taught game and to think about game especially in the context of the Harold. Find the unusual thing in the scene, blow it up and explore it. Textbook scene mechanics. We’re even taught that game is the fun thing in a scene. However, there is a disconnect between “unusual thing” and “fun thing” that our coach Terry really helped dissolve in the last week. We’ve been doing an exercise out of practice where we get a suggestion and write initiations and responses and then come up with a game based on those first two lines. Most games can be boiled down to something easy. The cliched tropes are “bad doctor” or “klutzy mother” or something like that. MAD TV type shit. We’re taught to hone in on the unusual thing, but not hone in on what’s actually fun about the unusual thing. In this exercise, Terry was challenging us to not just name the game, but name it as something fun that you’d actually want to play.

This may seem like a “Well, duh” moment, but when one is in a scene and so intent on finding the unusual thing and working with it, and when one is in a Harold and finishes a scene and has mere moments to think of a second or third beat, you tend to just take a generic idea out of the first scene.  Partly because of time constraints, partly because it’s easy, partly because of the entire culture of cliched comedy that we exist within that makes these tropes easy to latch onto. “I can play a bad doctor”. Easiness though leads to joylessness. What makes most scenes not work is that they are joyless. The people in them aren’t having fun; they aren’t playing with the idea, they are just embodying a standard cultural comedy trope. When an actor takes a generic game instead of really honing in on what’s fun, she gives up her free will and merely becomes a stand-in barking out a pre-programmed script. Where is the joy in that?

Now in 401 at UCB, I sit on the cusp of the dividing line between doing pre-programmed bullshit and being a truly creative improvisor. I think, at least from my own internal experience, that the glee of just having a scene continue from this pre-programmed script might overshadow or obscure the sense of discovery in scenes, such that, if I really want to become a better improvisor, I have to get used to scenes just existing and knowing that no matter what happens, we can always do something, i.e., the people I’m working with now are all super-smart and we’re not going to get stuck, so give up that fear and really let go. Once that knowledge is grounded, once you know that a scene will always go on and you won’t just be standing, mouth-open, blankly staring at a crowd, then people can truly explore what’s fun about a scene. But if one gets addicted to that glee, the glee of working off a trope, then it’s just automatic, and who gives a shit. Might as well do sketch if that’s what gets you off.

The newest question I’ve been working with as well is how to manufacture a brain state where I’m talkative and making connections. I’m not sure what to call the brain state, perhaps “abuzz”, but I most often am put into it at Harold night, that is, by watching other people perform Harolds. It’s like my brain almost sympathetically arranges itself along with the performers. All I know is that it is “abuzz” after I leave there, and I feel ready to do really great creative work. Today I am trying an experiment. Before practice, I am going to listen to complicated minimalist music that has a lot of moving parts and see if that works.

Anyway, Harold #15 was performed in practice with my team A Dangerous Woman on Monday, January 11th. The suggestion was “steam ironing”, and we did an ok organic opening that wasn’t very dynamic. There were some ideas in there.

1st beats: I walk out with R and initiate a scene based on a very languid punching match from the opening. After a bit, a part of my brain realizes we need a justification, so I say that we’re trying out S&M for the first time. In my mind S&M is an unusual thing because I don’t ever really witness it nor have ever investigated it in my life, but really, “unusual thing” means “unusual for all humans, not just the actor”. While we heightened to the point where I asked R to slit my throat, all we really did was play some pre-programmed idea. Because we were so involved in that, we both missed something truly interesting. At one point, R hits me hard enough to draw blood, and I said, “I like blood because it reminds me of menstrual blood which reminds me of your vagina.” People laugh, and we take it as a throwaway line in the larger game of “Intertwining death and sex”. But that was the real line of interest! A and C then come out and C initiates with laughter and pointing, also from the opening. This scene was confused because C said A had a stain on his shirt, and C thought it was funny that A would be humiliated at an office meeting. Both of them were playing kind of coy and not really saying what was on their mind, which led to a kind of stilted scene. Then L and K came out; L was a cool conductor on a train trying to show K the ropes and to get K to abandon his buttoned-down ways. There’s a game there, but L and K got stalled on the whistle and pulling a lever to make the train go.

Group Game 1: We are tailgating a Jets game, and A doesn’t know much about sports. We think that’s ok, but he still insists on saying nonsensical things about sports. Generic all around. However, K is kind of hanging back, and C eventually asks A who his friend is. A says, “My autistic friend.” Some of us here that, some of us hear “artistic”, and K holds up a painting he made. There’s the real moment of discovery! But it was too late.

2nd beats: R and I sneak into a mausoleum to fuck a corpse. Remember, I think the game is “Intertwining death and sex” or more specifically “Death/sex gets us closer to life.” Again, generic. The one funny moment of discovery though is when I lubed up the corpse’s asshole with vaseline. L walks in as a guard or undertaker. Edit. C and A are eating hot soup, and A burns his tongue making it difficult for him to talk. C thinks it’s hilarious because A has to give the valedictorian speech in an hour. Cut to the speech. A has trouble talking. C thinks it’s hilarious. Why is C such an asshole. A said he had trouble find an unusual thing in this because there are people like C all over. Time dash for L and K. Same thing as scene one.

Group game 2: We slipped on banana peels in the opening, so I did a presentational group game in which I am the host of a Candid Camera-like show about old Vaudeville gags. Generic. But again, I was just glad to have a premise and for the scene to be continuing that I didn’t give it a second thought.

Terry called it after this, which I’m glad he did because we were just going to go through more of the same. My third beat would have been R and I having sex in a car on the tracks of L and K’s train. The lessons: 1) Fuck fear, 2) Find out what’s fun about the unusual thing, 3) Fuck generic tropes.

Filed by andyb at January 13th, 2010 under Harold