iO Level One - Week Eight

Yesterday was our final class in level one at iO (how time flies). It’s a pseudo bitter-sweet moment being done with level one, as the class had a number of very entertaining and talented people in it who sadly due to schedules have all now been split among the numerous level twos.

Before the last day two of my classmates got the idea in their head to arrange a sort of good-bye banquet….in the last class. They sent e-mails around and everyone brought some sort of food item (mostly things like beef jerky, donuts, chips, etc – though one person brought homemade tortillas and there was a salad and a few other actually food items – even our teacher was in on it…she brought the jerky). We all met 30 minutes early and ate and discussed which sessions of Level Two we had gotten into.

Eventually 7pm rolled around and we got started. Our teacher decided that on this the last day we were going to stray a little from the syllabus (keep that on the DL) and go ahead and perform the Harold followed by a surprise exercise. She asked for six people to hop up and told them the opening they were going to use was the Invocation. They got their word and jumped into it.
The first Harold went pretty well (very well considering it really being the first any of them had done). Their opening ended up creating a beautiful stage picture of someone riding a bike as they were talking which eventually morphed into a “Hell Bike” by the end with the Devil astride it. Really the only critique afterwards was the fact that they ended up too close to the initial suggestion: Bicycle – both group games centered around people cycling or bicycles and in a number of the scenes they appeared (and in general most of the scenes took the ideas from the opening too literally and they never really explored the themes they found in different settings).
Next five others and myself hopped up. We were told we’d be doing the Conducted story opening and got the suggestion Mop – then we began. Our opening told the story of a janitor, picked on by his peers – who only found solace in his mop – yet which he eventually forsook for a wet-vac. By the end we had discovered that the mop was magical and could fly yet tragically died alone despite it trying to improve others lives.
Our scenes went really well – we started off with a three person scene (one guy occasionally walked in and out as the new guy at a school) while his “friends” picked on him behind his back – making all kinds of assumptions about him from what he was dressed as (and a nice nod to the opening where the janitor was picked on). The second scene involved a parapsychologist who had been called into investigate the haunting of a family’s home where the appliances moved by themselves and had been for the past four weeks – the rest of the group got to help by making chairs move on stage. The final scene involved a poor old lady who got a neighbor boy to clean her gutters – yet constantly distracted him with depressing stories about her life and parties she got humiliated at. The first group game involved everyone excited about moving into their new entirely glass house which would serve as a perfect example to other families by showing how them the “perfect family lived.
The second beat first scene heightened with scenes about two closet racists on a golf course (playing 8 holes, cause 9 is too strenuous and 18 is just ridiculous and only for showoffs) as a their caddy and grounds keeper walked in and out (while they were they were very polite and chummy – yet the moment they were off stage the two let their true colors show commenting on stereotypical nonsense). Then there was a ghost party and finally a family who were living a peaceful life until the Harlem Globe trotters came in and started disrupting their house (don’t ask me where exactly that came from).
We had some trouble with our second group game (as everyone ended up on stage for the globe trotters scene – which some though merged into the game and other didn’t) – yet the peace ended nicely as we discovered the ghosts were kids who had been picked on who killed themselves out of shame – and many different types of bullies learned their lesson (and the globe trotters came back to play the ghosts at one point…which was weird but amusing).
Though there were some hiccups – pretty good over all (and I got to be racist – hooray).
The final group went and was asked to use monologues as their opening. They sadly jumped the gun a little bit and didn’t let the monologues go long enough (or get enough out – they only had three really short ones) – so that left them a little short on inspiration. A number of the scenes were very interesting but some lacked relationships and their second group game was just chaos with a lot of people over talking.
In the end though considering that for most it was their first introduction to improv let alone the Harold (note a form we’re not supposed to fully know till level 4) it went smashingly well.

Then we were told about the surprise exercise. Our teacher asked 6 more people to hop up on stage and bring chairs. She arranged all but two in a line the others she put on the end facing in ward (so it was an incredibly long flat u). She asked us to sit (but told us we could move if we wanted) and let us in on what we were doing. We were asked to do a 6-person scene focusing on tension between characters. She told us that we were in a hospital waiting room and off to the right behind a door was someone very dear to all of us – and they might not make it. However we could not focus on that – the scene was to start after we had all already spent a long time talking about their fate – and now we were to try to not talk about them or the situation at all – but have it in the back of our minds.
We began and quickly discovered we were all part of a big family – with an abusive dad, entitled grandpa, feuding siblings – with the youngest feeling that no one wanted him– a deaf middle child, stuck up sister, and takes after his dad eldest (and an alcoholic uncle). Very tellingly there was no mother present – and afterward we all agreed that rather quickly it seemed unspoken that was who was I the hospital and she was the only glue holding the family together. It went incredibly well – there was great give and take and we never talked about the situation except for the final line where the youngest pointed at the dad and said this is all your fault you put her here which shut everyone up and was the perfect ending.
The next two groups ended up talking about the situation a little too much which kind of hurt the exercise as once it was brought up (the other situations were they just saw a house explode outside the window and are not sure people made it out – and there’s a jumper on the ledge in the building across the street that they can see) tore the focus away from the relationships and toward the situation. Still there was fairly good give and take considering six people on stage- but very quickly into both scenes you could see some characters become far more focused on the jumper or the house than on what was going on stage.
In the end we did a 19-person scene with the same caveat (alien spaceship had landed in a field near us – we had already talked about it to death now it was time for us to deal which each other). Went fairly well – but again a lot of people ended up just speculating about aliens and eventually walking toward the ship.

All in all the exercise was really interesting as it brings up the idea that really in any scene – no matter interesting extreme the situation the focus is about the interaction between the characters (the relationship_ and how powerful either doing something or letting something affect you can be when you don’t talk about it or focus on it.

I have to say I'm very excited to move on to Level Two (I'm taking it with Susan Messing who rocks) and very interested to see how my internship will turn out.
Also though I'm only a few classes deep over all - I'm rather glad I decided to take classes at the Annoyance concurrently since so far they have served as a great compliment to each other - one focusing exclusively on scene work - while the other is gearing me up towards group improvisation and learning specific forms.