I absolutely resonated with Jimmy Carrene’s blog on emotionally connecting. While there are many different ways to start a scene, connecting emotionally gives the audience an investment in the characters right away. I put a lot of emphasis on this personal connection in my classes.
Here’s what Jimmy has to say:
“What I love teaching the most in improv is connection — players connecting on a deeper emotional level.
So many improvisers focus on trying to be witty and fast and funny, but they don’t realize that you can’t really do any of those other things well if you don’t first form a real emotional connection with your scene partner.
Having an emotional connection with your scene partner is essential to having a good scene, because if you do, you can go over anywhere with your scene partner and your scene will be believable and honest, which is what we are going for in the first place.
Connection between two players happens before the scene even starts. You don’t need words to create a connection. I have actually seen words kill the connection. It’s a sad death, killing the scene before it even gets started.
Whether you’re in person or on Zoom, all you have to do is look into the eyes of your partner, feel the energy going on between you, and trust the clues you are getting from your partner. It’s like a treasure map.
Does your partner look happy? You could be old friends that had a crush on each other who haven’t seen each other in a long time. Does your partner look sad? You could be a couple breaking up.
This is all you need to begin a scene, and then just trust that the scene will unfold.
If you work this way, you will not have to rely on your wit or cleverness, which can always dry up during the scene. Instead, you will be making organic discoveries and not inventing.
It’s truly amazing what you can pick up off another person when you take the time to take someone else in and be affected by them. Spending just a few seconds being present with someone else can give you so much information. Take in their body language, their facial expression, their unspoken energy and then sense how you feel in relation to that.
Although I first learned how to form a connection in a scene from Del Close, I really honed this skill by taking several Meisner acting classes over the years, and I’ve seen how it has made me so much more attune to people all around me and helped me be able to read the unspoken energy in the room. And on stage, it’s been an invaluable tool in creating believable characters and genuine connections.
You might think that forming an emotional connection with your scene partner will always make your scenes depressing and heavy, it’s not true. In fact, being more emotionally connected to your partner just creates a relationship between two people that is more honest, and what’s honest is often what’s the most funny because it’s what resonates with people. People laugh because they recognize themselves in the characters. Even if the scene is set on Mars, if the two players have a believable connection, the audience will laugh because they relate to how the characters are reacting to each other.
So the next time you are about to do a scene in an improv class or in a show, take a couple of seconds to mentally check in with your partner and see what they are giving you before you speak. Then trust that the scene will unfold and see if it takes you somewhere better than you could have planned.”
This piece is by my friend, Vic Hogg, a wonderful improviser and teacher in London whose blog is here. If your age is 50+ years, see if her thoughts resonate with you. If you’re under 50+ years, here’s a peek into the issues that confront some of your older improv playmates.
I had the weirdest experience in an improv comedy class a while back. During a game, we were told to all act super-ancient. Suggestions were given to us: clutch your back, mime using sticks and walkers. Pretend your false teeth fell out. Maybe pretend to be incontinent or walk in the wrong direction forgetfully. It felt surreal. When I asked in the moment, “Isn’t this kind of… ageist?” I was reassured happily that no – it’s not. I mustn’t worry. Making decrepit oldies the butt of the joke isn’t in poor taste.
I found the response confusing. Was I having a sense-of-humour failure? We need to be able to make fun of ourselves, after all. Clowning around with human frailty is integral to any artform. But I’d studied enough comedy by that point to know that some topics need careful attention so that they don’t perpetuate a culture of ‘punching down’*.
*To punch down: to make jokes at the expense of a person or group that’s in a position of social, political or economic weakness relative to oneself.
The teacher and my mostly 20- and 30-something classmates moved on to the next exercise. What was 50-year-old Buzzkill me concerned about? It was a games-driven comedy class, after all, so surely not massively problematic to have this throwaway gag? It was definitely intense but there’s no denying it: people get older. We’d created momentary caricatures in an experimental space. Was I overreacting?
Well, yes and no. Beyond this extreme example there’ve been many slower, scenes-based classes, jams and shows where I’ve noticed unhelpful or ageist labelling. Mature players, myself included, have all had a scene partner (especially if that person is an inexperienced improviser) blurt out: “Dad”, “Mum”, “Gramps”, or “Grandma”, even when we’ve endowed ourselves as someone else. It’s really not surprising: in the heat of the moment, they’ve responded to the person, not the player. They read the face before they listened to the offer. It happens and, I’d argue, it isn’t malicious. But it’s hard to play against, especially if the older player isn’t hugely experienced either. It can perpetuate the feeling that these are spaces for younger people and that elders are only welcome if wearing the teacher’s hat.
Certainly, I was the (older student) elephant in the (class)room. Improv comedy is marketed, primarily, for and in response to interest from 20-40-year-old adults who are in the process of finding friend groups and relationships that resonate before they settle with families or big careers and have fewer evenings and weekends to burn on improv and/or pubbing and clubbing.
But I was already in my mid-40s when I discovered improv. I tried a class, fell in love with it and retrained via endless improv courses and a Masters in Applied Theatre. I became the novice all over again and worked like a dog to fast-track my expertise. It was less about friendship groups and post-show laughs than a consuming need to gain mastery. Happily, it paid off and I now make my living through improvisation. My face fits my experience level.
For a time, however, I was the oldest person in class AND the greenest. I was a mature adult yet a total rookie. Apart from Keith Johnstone, my teachers were invariably younger than me and vastly more experienced. It’s an unconventional dynamic that was distracting and tiring to navigate – certainly for me but also, I imagine, for my half-my-age classmates. Get out of our playground, Mum!
NHS anti-ageism PSA poster.
The very notion of ageism occurred to me less due to my maturity (I was definitely in denial about that) and more thanks to great ethics training. My MA course convenor Sue Mayo (an outstanding intergenerational arts practitioner) described to us a poster in NHS hospital corridors. Under the photo of a standard-issue, grey-haired Nana, it read: “My name isn’t sweetie, dearie or love; I am usually called Dr Elliott.” Underneath that? ‘Ageism is everywhere and can be so insulting. Think about what you say. Think about what you do.’
To acknowledge the wider context for a moment, that public service announcement will only become more relevant. In February 2021, the UN announced the number of centenarians worldwide will rise to around 573,000 this year (from a mere 20k in the 1960s), causing Statista.com to ask: “Is 100 the new 80?” With 34 percent of the planet’s population now over 50 and with population figures predicted to plummet, older folks may well increase in number in improv rooms as much as anywhere.
However, I realised I was partly looking at my comedy-class ageism moment through the lens of defensiveness. I’m not getting any younger, after all; on the cusp of a demographic leap (55+) I’m definitely feeling my age. And society’s age boundaries are becoming more complex and divisive. To generalise, the rewards of golden-age capitalism served Boomers well; the inequities of late-stage capitalism keep Millennials from their goals. A career-switching Gen X-er like me is also constantly striving to maintain; gaining and losing power in equal measure every day.
And yet, these days, there’s also a positive blurring of boundaries and disintegration of generational walls. The internet lends power to all. For starters, it disarms our elders’ ancient right to gatekeep mastery and it puts knowledge, if not wisdom, in everyone’s hands. By the same token, any older person can hop online and curiously sample the next generations’ historically autonomous zones. The disintegration of these generational barriers definitely means that ageist labels sting more. But it also means we might find more in common than we expect in our lives, our scenes and on stage. We can be even more playful with a more creative, diverse richness of references.
And this has become my ‘in’. What if I view age gaps with a ‘Yes, And’ improv attitude, happily curious about the universal human experience rather boxing myself in with reductive stereotypes? For instance (digital privilege notwithstanding) you might, whether you’re a pre-teen or a pensioner, have a pocket super-computer within reach right now. This weekend my mother-in-law shared a cute Easter-themed TikTok in our family WhatsApp channel; she’s 80-something. Tuning into the bigger picture makes scene offers involving toffees and naps either redundant or ironic.
It’s hit me that I won’t be listening to Vera Lynn in the Old Folks’ Home as I’d been ‘sold’ as the norm when I was a kid: I’ll be listening to my first-generation dance music heroes who are now all hitting their 50s and 60s. Just this weekend, Fatboy Slim, 57, invited TikTok users (an app whose demographic is 50 percent 18-34-year-olds) to recreate a 2001 dance video by a then-58-year-old Christopher Walken (#MyWeaponOfChoice). We older types need to keep up even as we let go because the tropes don’t work. One way of swerving stereotyping is to be the player initiating with a contemporary offer.
Happily, online improv during COVID has helped to widen up the playing field to even more elders worldwide keen to try improv for the first time, while dedicated ventures, such as the annual Vintage Improv Festival, work tirelessly to create a broader, more diverse platform.
It’s important we bake age-acceptance into our relatively nascent UK improv community because these younger, newer players will find life creeps up, just like it does for all of us, and they might want to carry on playing even after the career and the family. To give Josie Lawrence, 61, a (deserved) ‘National Treasure’ label yet continue to stereotype / diminish / erase older people in amateur improv comedy character studies is misguided. Even if served with a side of: “I’m not ageist; some of my best friends are over fifty.” We have to make the scaffolding and vertical learning more robust, for longevity’s sake. Improv for all! Let’s dismantle ageism just like every other ism!
So, whatever your age, digital use, social-media preferences or toffee habit, let’s agree that ageism or age-related discriminations in improv spaces are limiting, tiring and hard to navigate. Let’s actively build an Anti-Ageism Toolkit to protect us all – businesses, schools, theatres, teachers, students, audiences – against age-based clangers. Reject your inner oppressor, ditch the clichés and follow the fun!
Victoria Hogg is Founder/Director of creativity training company The Offer Bank; connect with her by email or on LinkedIn. This was written in support of Vic’s ‘Growing Old Playfully’ workshop that ran on The Improv Place.
It’s important to know what you tell yourself when you think you’ve somehow failed/made mistakes while improvising. In her blog on this topic the talented Katy Schutte, a UK improviser, takes on her own realizations and gives us a blog worthy of consideration. Reposting here with permission from Katy whose blog can be found HERE.
We were talking in The Improv Place Office Hours yesterday about failure moments in improv scenes. The question was; how do we deal with it in the moment and not let it get us up in our heads and throw us off our game? My revelation was slightly different. I realised that it wasn’t failure that I found uncomfortable, but rejection
When we talk about failure in improv, we’re often talking about missing information; for example, misnaming a character or making a story choice that goes against something that was said before. When we’re new to improv it can feel like blanking or doing something ‘too weird’. We play a lot of games and run exercises in class to make students ‘comfortable with failure’ to allow a larger comfort zone and tolerance of mistakes and miscommunications, to harness errors and to make them part of the tilt or fabric of the reality.
I’ve been doing this a long time, but clangers can still feel bad; after all, the Patriarchy says I should only things it if I’m perfect and indeed if I’m better than the boys. I’m also aware that failures can be the exciting bit, the bit where the magic happens. At the point I mess up, the show gets more interesting. It’s stopped following the train tracks, it’s not prescribed or predictable. My failure has created a place where someone (including me) can take this new information and steer the scene according to a new truth. It’s the place where improvisation justifies itself as an art form. We all know that failure is inevitable in any creative enterprise. The more we fail in fact, the better an outcome we get; iterations give us solutions.
So why does it sometimes feel great and sometimes feel awful? I think that’s all in the reaction to the moment. Firstly, there’s our own reaction; if we broadcast that it’s a mistake with our facial expression, body language or speech, it’s going to be taken as one. That’s commitment 101. Sell every line, every idea like they are excellent. Secondly there is the moment that comes after. Our mistakes can either be embraced, or met with rejection.
“If you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that you play that determines if it’s good or bad.” – Miles Davis
I personally never loved games or scenes where students are jokingly told ‘that was shit, get off’ or where there’s an elimination or punishment aspect (unless it’s self-policed, then I’m okay with it). Particularly for women, perfectionism is so strongly baked into us by society that to mess up a silly warm up game can feel like the end of the world if we are being shamed for it. If the failure is celebrated and embraced as an achievement, that puts me in a much better headspace for risk taking.
If the whole jazz band suddenly stop playing and look at you like you’re dogshit, that’s how rejection feels. As Brené Brown tells us, it’s a human need to belong, not just to fit in.
I’ve certainly experienced my failures being both embraced and rejected in improvisation.
I was playing in a teacher show at an (amazing) improv festival. It was getting crazy and I came in with a weird chef character that was a big choice; I was hoping to solve a problem in the scene. One of the other players said “And I have to yes-and that?”. It got a big laugh. It was certainly a way of releasing the crazy tension in the scene. For me – I felt awful and didn’t really make it back on the stage much for the rest of the show. I felt shamed and exposed; I had been told by a well-known improviser and in front of my students and community that my offer (and therefore my improv) was terrible. I don’t bear the improviser any malice, but it is a useful illustration of how rejection influences play.
In contrast, I have a very fond memory of playing in The Improvised Star Trek Podcast that ran for 5+ years and shared some of the cast of the more famous The Magic Tavern Podcast. I was worried about remembering all the names, titles and circumstances of years of backstory. I decided to play a lowly cleaner on the ship so that I wouldn’t have to ‘know’ all of these facts as my character. Rather than let me play in the background for the whole show, the other characters all decided to change jobs and to promote me to captain. Every offer I made felt golden and I had the time of my life. When the offers you receive are fun and generous, all you want to do is be generous back!
I wonder if ‘get off, you’re shit’ rejection is a British Old Boys’ Club embracing of toxic masculinity. It is certainly reflected in some Clown training too. See this great article on Via Negativa. Casual bullying and name-calling was always part of the fabric of my education in school and symptomatic of a society that ranks individuals, breeding a culture that believed tearing another down was the way to rise to the top (whatever the top fucking means).
Perhaps the reason I was so thrilled to learn IO Chicago’s ensemble style was because I wanted to fail with joy and not rejection. To belong, not to filter my behaviour to fit in, to feel like every offer was a gift, not to be judged, but to be embraced.
How do we cultivate a joy over rejection model of improvisation?
Build up trust and be kind before every rehearsal, workshop and show. Make sure that you have exchanged boundaries and foundries (things that fire you up with joy) and warmed up or at least gotten on the same page. People are less likely to throw you under the bus if they trust that you have their back and if they like you.
If you felt rejected or shamed in a show, talk to the person who made the rejection move. They were likely in a fear place and telling them how you felt might change their future choices. Remember not to shame them for their choice, just tell them the story you’re telling yourself about that moment. This is how we grow understanding instead of resentment.
Ideally you’ll be playing with a group that knows how to play that sweet next note, but if not, you need to support your own failure, even if no one else on stage does. If the rest of the band are looking at you like dogshit, play your own kick-ass solo. Repeat the thing you did until it’s a running joke, or elegantly justify it being there. If you get a name wrong once, be a character who gets names wrong. If you made a story move that didn’t make sense, hold onto it and fold it into a clever plot twist at the end. The writer put it there, so there must be a reason.
Remember how you can bring the joy for other people; make their mistakes feel golden. Try not shame others by throwing them under the bus. Justify those tilts so that they are the one note that makes the song.
A fascinating article that will resonate with some improvisers, especially those who practice mindful meditation and make it part of their improv journey. Does this article speak to you? I gain focus, calm, and often joy when I can be in the present moment. It is when ‘flow’ happens, the zen state. Yes, it is a very special feeling.
Reposted with permission from the author, Thomas Chemnitz, Instructor Die Gorillas (Theater), Improvisation, Berlin
For a while I have been interested in mysticism, a spiritual way and practice, that can be found in almost all large religions, although most of them (especially Christianity, Islam and Judaism) keep these practices in the shadow or had even forbidden them.
The mystic practices aim at clearing the inner mind and being in the moment. For only by connecting to each present moment, without thoughts and judgements, it is possible to connect to something, which actually cannot be put into words (for words narrow down), yet is often referred to as »the Eternal«, »the Universe«, »the Godly« or »God«.
The most important mystic exercise is meditation, of course (which, by the way, is not only practiced in Buddhism or Hinduism).
»Being in the moment«. »Clearing the inner mind«. This is also what we aim for in improvising. Only that in an improv class we use playful activity instead of meditation. As a matter of fact, many exercises use extra speed or complicated rules, in order to leave the rational and judging mind behind and allow us to act and react spontaneously and »from the bottom of our soul«. If this happens, workshop participants experience it as a liberating moment, usually accompanied by laughter. Sometimes they are also quite astonished to see what has come out of them, in this very moment.
And here is where we come to »the ego« or rather »liberation from the ego«. In the mystic practices, whether in meditation or in the rotating dance of the Sufis, the goal is to stop the constant inner chatter of the ego and let it dissolve, like a wave into the ocean. This is very hard work, for naturally the ego fights hard against this, it’s a bit like dying after all. Although: dissolving doesn’t mean extinction, for – to stay within the image – the ocean needs the wave to express itself.
Dealing with the ego is also quite a topic in improv. Two years ago I wrote a focus on this and don’t want to enlarge on it again (so if you want to read more, go to June 2018). Only this much: if you want to make the experience of truly and successfully »improvising together«, the ego is all too often in the way.
In some partner exercises (i.e. the »mirror exercise«) there is the phenomenon, that at a certain point none of the partners can tell who is leading and who is following at this very moment. We also have the improv-saying »follow the follower«. But who or what are we actually following then?
And then there are these improv scenes, where afterwards it’s hard to tell, how that brilliant idea actually came into the scene, where none of the players could claim it to be his or hers. The idea was »simply there«, it »just happened«. Interestingly enough, these kind of scenes usually seem to be the most rewarding ones, where you have improvised with this special easy flow, and where everyone felt happy afterwards. And whereas most improv scenes vanish quickly from memory, these stay in your mind and you mention them, when after 20 years of improvising you are asked for your »most special improv experience on stage«.
Now I would go as far as to claim that these improv moments are also a form of »mystic experience«: a bit mysterious maybe, but rewarding and fulfilling, as we have managed to liberate ourself from our ego and truly connect with the present moment.
And no matter if any form of spirituality means anything to you or not, I do wish you many of these moments when improvising!
I think a lot about the older improv student, since I have many students who are 40+, 50+, 60+ etc. I am an older student myself. My main message is: It’s never too late to put on your improv shoes and begin the journey. You have so much to bring to the stage, so much to gain yourself. And I do believe you will find that improv makes you ageless.
Then I read Jimmy Carrane’s Blog, I knew I had to re-post it here. Enjoy!
To the older people starting out in improv: You belong. This is for you.
If you are an older person and you are just starting out doing improv, stand-up, storytelling or acting, I want to say to you are in the right place.
You did not wait too long.
You are not wasting your time.
You belong.
We need you.
I know that is not what you think. Continue reading →
Camp Improv Utopia is not the name of an improv show. Instead, it’s a delightfully immersive retro camp experience for adults who improvise. As a loyal camper, my memorabilia proudly features decals, awards, hundreds of pictures and an ample number of new Facebook friends. I am a returnee to both East (coast) Camp and Yosemite since 2015.
This blog is simply my thoughts on improv based on my own journey or re-posts that strike me as particularly noteworthy. Feel free to add your comments.
