iO Level One – Week Seven

Earlier tonight I had my second to last class of level one at the iO theater.

Announcement
Before I get to the details about the class however (Hooray suspense) I have an important (at least to me) announcement to make. As of next week I will be interning for the iO theater – huzzah. Yep, earlier today I got a phone call stating I was on the “short list” for interns and that they would be finalizing who was in today and tomorrow. They conducted a brief phone interview with me and told me they would be in touch – well a couple hours later I got a call and they let me know I was in – woot. I still have no idea what nigh I’ll be working, but this is going to allow me to make a lot more connections at the theater (and within the community at large) and means that I won’t have to pay for level two (huzzah again). I’ll be sure to post information here to let people know what the experience is like.
I have to give major thanks to Jake, Rutherford, Bill, Dan, Linda & My Awesome level One Teacher for either recommending me or letting me list them as references (as a big part of the process is who you know from around the theater).

The Class
Anyway on to the details about the class. Tonight after a quick Crazy Eights warm-up our instructor told us were going to be working on a new opening. She first had all of us get up on stage and explained that we were going to construct a giant human machine (with all of us as moving parts). The key to this exercise she explained was the idea of complimenting each other – as one person steps out and begins making a sound and motion (machine-part-like mind you) everyone else should be thinking how they can add on to that and support it with their own sound and motion (another key she mentioned was keep it relatively simple). This exercise is of course a great metaphor for iO’s approach to improvisation (at least the core values they teach): you’re all part of a group, you must always look for how you can compliment/support the rest of the group (it can also be dissected further with the idea of every show being like the machine in the exercise and your scenes + yourselves being the players, and I’m sure other permutations as well).

This exercise was to get us in the mind set for the Doo Wop opening. I first saw this opening used maybe a year or so ago on a trip to Chicago where I caught the iO Musical featuring the Deltones (this was right around when Baby Wants Candy had moved out of the Theater and they had put a new musical show in their slot I believe) and even though what they were doing as the opening was fairly simple I was impressed. Btw in case you haven’t guessed yet from either the name, or my reference to seeing it in a musical show – this is a musical opening and for those of you not in the know, I’m fairly tone deaf (meaning if you play a few notes on a piano and ask me to try and sing along…haha I’ll fail miserably). Luckily, no piano was present and we were creating our own rhythm (I attribute my meager abilities of following a musical rhythm mind you to hours of free styling during long road trips to festivals with Whistlers btw).
The opening itself is fairly simple (though when done well is pretty cool) one at a time the players on stage simply repeat their own simple phrases inspired by the suggestion over and over again to a musical rhythm.
So a suggestion will be given and one player steps forward singing/chanting a phrase inspired by it choosing their own rhythm. Then another player will step forward singing/chanting his or her own phrase in a rhythm and tone that compliments and fits with the first person’s choice. This continues until all the players are singing/chanting something. Even though this is really just everyone just repeating different phrases because of the complimentary rhythms and tones (some phrases will end up overlapping btw) it comes across as incredibly unified.
Once everyone is singing/chanting one at a time, in any order, players step to the front of the stage and either sing (or if you’re not all the musically inclined share ) a brief monologue inspired by your phrase. Once everyone has gone (and during this the overall singing/chanting fades but doesn’t not stop – and everyone returns to their phrases after their monologue) you organically end the piece (can all end up repeating one phrase, can fade out, whatever you find at the time that leads to an out).
It’s actually easier to explain in person as you can give vocal examples.

The first group in the class that went nailed it – right off the bat. Then me and a few other people went. The first time we tried it we were all basically chanting and lacked really any sort of musical quality, the second time we tried it we ended up with two different main rhythms and it fell apart. The third time we tried it we nailed it (practice makes perfect). The final group to try took only two attempts before they nailed it. Subsequent attempts by groups were far better as we got used to it, but there were still some hiccups.
We ended this exercise by attempting this opening while focusing on different music genres (to give us an overall theme to further tie our piece together). We explored love songs, rock, country, hip-hop, and an awesome Blues inspired opening.

After break we moved on from the Doo Wop opening into some scene work but kept the ideas of working within different genres (fyi I love playing around with genres in improv, it can be really fun). We did a series of two person scenes with each pair getting a suggestion and a genre (or time period).
One thing came quickly apparent as these scenes went on – when playing with different genres in improv (or really homage’s to anything in improv) there is a real danger/temptation of allowing your scene to be too aware of the source material.
I swear there were more bizarre pop culture-esque references dropped in this round of scene than I’ve seen in a rather long time. For example one pair got 80’s as a time period and dropped references to Sixteen Candles & Pretty in Pink (talking about similar situation and even characters names), they popped their collar and some one mentioned going to MTV’s 2nd new years party. Sadly there was very little scene under all those references.
One pair got Film Noir and there were numerous mentions of shadows, smoking of cigarettes, French accents (the French were a huge fan of the genre and made some of their own so it kind of fits), and an audience aside (inner monologue). This was all on top of though (eventually – in the last minute or so) a scene about two prisoners just wanting to escape back to France.
The big problem I see all to often when people do exercises like this (or experiment with genre in shows – this is really prevalent in less than stellar performances of genres the short form game) – is players will sometimes forget that before you had on any fancy trappings (be it a new form, a new genre/style, a song, gimmick, game, etc) you need to have a scene – with relationships and characters (this is my big pet peeve with some of the short form I’ve seen – and admittedly performed - in my time): it’s never about the genre/style/game/gimmick/etc it’s about the characters and how they relate to each other.
Once you get down that little bit – you can slather all the bells and whistles you want on to it and it’ll be fabulous – with out it, you’re just being silly. Heck you can even make the conscious choice to go all meta with the genre or game/whatever and drop those cute references and comment on it – just as long as you have a real scene going on underneath it.

We ended the class focusing on another opening the un-conducted story (like the conducted story short form game but there’s no conductor) – so basically the group telling a story. The addition to this is hopefully the ensemble will also be acting parts of the story out as they are told, switching off between showing the story and telling it.
It was a lot of fun and actually brings up a great aspect of improv which I feel is so important and that we got to touch on in class thanks to this opening: Showing vs. telling. All to often I see scenes where players are talking about doing something, or telling their partners things (such as “I love you,” or I’m disappointed” or even much more mundane things) but rarely do I see improvisers just showing these things (or just doing them – don’t say we should go do Blah blah, do blah blah on stage). It’s so much more powerful to show that you love the other character than to say it – especially if you’re saying something completely different. This really gets back to the stuff we talked about in the Annoyance class: “how you do something is what you are.” The unspoken caveat of that statement being of course is that you have to do something first (even if it’s just stand their silently). And all to often I see improviser simply say something and rely on their verbal wit to carry scenes (and admittedly saying something is doing something technically) but again I want you to show me, I don’t care what you say it’s how you say it – I don’t care what you do it’s how you do it.


Anyway I hope that make sense – that’s all the ranting I have in me for now, as it’s getting late – all in all today was a good improv day.