The Improviser's Way

A Longform Workbook

Katy Schutte

• Editorial: Nick Hern Books
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781788500340
• Categoría: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Categoría: Actuación y audiciones

An inspiring and interactive workbook to help you develop skills for longform improvisation, by one of the UK's top improv performers and teachers.

Structured as a twelve-week course, this book provides techniques, advice and exercises that can be done on your own or in groups – with activities to complete as you go – for learning faster and becoming (more) amazing at improvisation. It draws on the author's own experience of performing and teaching improv around the world, with added gems of wisdom from key experts.

Starting with the basics of improvisation, it moves on to explore areas of the craft such as rehearsals, character, editing, form and style; plus career advice including how to cope with bad gigs, jealousy, fear of missing out and your Inner Critic.

The Improviser's Way is ideal for improvisers at any level – from those new to improv entirely, through those familiar with shortform who are looking to extend their reach, to experienced longform performers and teachers looking to refresh their approach and embrace new ideas. It is also invaluable to anyone looking to discover more about this popular, thrillingly creative and empowering form of performance.

By the end, you won't just be a better improviser – you'll be a better person!

'Written with the calm and kind wisdom of someone who has been there and done that, here is a wealth of brilliant suggestions to help you improvise better and, perhaps more importantly, help you be better at the job of being an improviser' Lee Simpson (The Comedy Store Players, Whose Line Is It Anyway? )

'Katy Schutte is a leading light of the UK improv scene and this book is as warm, witty, compassionate and funny as she is' Tom Salinksy (Spontaneity Shop)

Week Seven:
Form and Style

There are guidelines for improvisation but no one set of rules that make your choices clear in every show. Choosing the form of your show and the style within that show can help you to make those choices on stage and enable your team to be cohesive in their art. This week we look at style and form, breaking established forms, the specifics of the Living Room, and the challenges of two-person improv.

Form

As with films, novels, plays and comics, there is no one structure or definitive way to structure an improv show. There are many, many forms. The Harold is our most famous longform structure, and schools often teach the Harold as your first structured improv show. It teaches you how and when to edit, how to bring characters back, how to generate ideas as a team and how to explore theme. If a teacher tells you that there is one way to do a Harold, then what they are really saying is: “This is how I learned and how my school teaches a Harold.” Originally Del Close’s Harold form came out of having improvisers play and seeing what worked, not starting with a structure that came out of his head. I’d recommend learning the Harold and using it as training wheels until the techniques above become second nature.

There are lots of other classic American forms like the Deconstruction, the Pretty Flower, the Bat, the Armando, the Slacker, etc., or you can design your own. There are lots of books and online resources giving you all of these structures in detail, so I’m going to look at form more generally.

Each part of a form has a different function for a show.

Audience suggestion

An audience suggestion or call-out is the classic way of proving that you’re making the show up as you go along. They make the audience feel like they’re part of the show and they inspire the team to create something totally new.

If you don’t want to take an audience suggestion, find something that inspires the team in a different way. I have seen a few groups use: the music from someone’s phone, tweets, Wikipedia articles, the blurb from the back of a book, a play or festival brochure and so forth. Rachel and I take a look at each other when the lights come up (inspired by TJ and Dave) and use the physical and emotional information we get to start the show.

Opening

The opening is the part of the show where the audience suggestion is explored. It often uses all of the improvisers so that everyone is able to throw out theme ideas, warm up with the audience and get more in tune with one another. The opening can be organic or heavily structured like a kind of theatrical shortform game. This is the well that the rest of the show drinks from.

Scenes

Scenes are the mainstay of our art form. They are different to openings and game beats. They can often stand alone but are more powerful within a form. Some forms have a very specific number of scenes and guidelines about which scenes revisit particular characters, themes or locations.

Game beats

Game beats are re-energisers and an exploration of a new angle on a theme, or a palate cleanser or reset button for the show. Whatever your opening was, other game beats will likely be similar and happen a few times throughout the show. For example, you might have three organic group beats to break up the scenes and give you new inspiration, or a brand-new monologue when the first one feels like it has been thoroughly explored.

A good description of a form as a whole is that it starts with a thesis (the opening), explores the thesis (with scenes and game beats) then concludes with whether or not the thesis was correct (the final scenes).

Genre forms

I’m talking about shows like Improvised Shakespeare, Austentatious: The Improvised Jane Austen Novel, Murder She Didn’t Write, Improvised Star Trek and so on. The form of a genre show will likely mirror the structure of the source material. If you wanted to do improvised Memento, you would be performing a series of scenes that each took place before the last. If you were performing a horror genre, your form might start with a lot of scenes introducing the characters, then a bunch more scenes having them killed off, with the ending being a parallel of Carrie’s hand coming out of the grave.

Narrative

A narrative show may also be a genre piece. It means that you will be doing something along the lines of the Hero’s Journey with a protagonist and a beginning, middle and end to the story.

When I coach narrative, the number-one problem is that people add too much information. When you get halfway into the show, stop adding! New characters, facts and story expectations can leave you with too much and the end of the show will be a lot of people quickly trying to tie up loose ends. Establish the world at the beginning and find out who has the biggest ‘want’. They will probably get what they want halfway through, then realise that it didn’t solve their real problem. They’ll find their way back to the start having changed.

Styles of Play

There is no one way to improvise but it is very helpful to define how you are going to play. When I coach, I check in with the group to find out what they are going for and that helps me steer them in the scenes. There is so much contradictory advice in improv, but most of it is context-specific. If you want to do gags in a show as opposed to lifelike character exploration, then you need to use different techniques. If the actors in your company are all playing different styles, it might stop the show from being as solid as you would like.

“Warm up appropriate to the show you are doing.”

Bill Arnett

Even the Harold can be performed in many different styles. It can be done focusing on premise scenes or using slow-burn truthful character work. You can also blend various approaches, as long as your team is in tune enough to know which approach a particular scene needs.

Premise

I find it helpful to think of premise shows as improvised sketch. The first person on stage is normally telling their partner the idea they have for a sketch in a line of dialogue and the two (or more) of them then play out the game. Premise shows often use source material like a monologue, newspaper clippings or confessions. Shows like Whirled News Tonight in Chicago play this way, as do The Maydays in Confessions and Tonight’s Top Story. UCB shows are often game and premise-driven.

Using your source material, find something that stands out to you: a turn of phrase, an emotion, a strange situation. Then discern what’s funny about that thing. Look at how you can change the specifics to make it a new sketch. Get that idea across to your fellow player(s) with an initiation. That initiation should give them the who, what and where of the scene and the angle you want to play.

Game can be used for good or evil

I was coaching a two-person show last night. One of the lines (referring to sex) was “That sounds like a criticism of my technique.” It was a lovely line to build a game off. Now the first player can passive aggressively criticise how the other character does everything. “If you shake the pan, the eggs will stop sticking” and so forth. The improvisers were surprised that they could use game in this way and not just for high-concept moves. Doing something as subtle as a character game along with everything else can be really satisfying and helps give you a stro...