Annoyance Level One - Week Six

Open Warm-up scenes again to start the class (Is it weird that now every time I go to my annoyance class at the start I think of Pinky and the Brain - note if you don't know about this cartoon, go download some episodes you poor poor deprived people - "What are we going to do tonight Brain?" "The same thing we do every night Pinky.... open scenes to warm up.")

Next Dan challenged us to think of other improvisers you know or admire (or hate) – or if you’re not much into the scene pick a friend – and try to imitate the way they improvise (or would improvise). What sort of characters would they play – it’s not about doing impressions but think of the choices they might make. Vary it up each time.
This actually lead to me making some very different character choices from what I normally use (and especially in class I'm all over the radar with my characters). It probably didn't even come near to how the few performers I picked play, but I just thought of one single trait of theirs I either liked, or at least recalled. One set of characters in particular that I really enjoyed were inspired from a good friend of mine at iO and came about imply because on stage he really takes his time with full deep breaths never rushing to speak, but patiently waiting and rarely jumping in with out a full breath in him.

Next Dan had us do a quick series of two person scenes and once everyone had been in one scene he asked us to keep the same character we had just done for a series of scenes.
From this (after a number of scenes) we transitioned on the fly into a series of three person scenes (sometimes more) with these characters – focusing on entrances and exits into these scenes (sometimes director calls it sometimes it’s natural).
As we got to see these characters interact with each other in the same environment in different capacities.

We then had our break.

When we came back we jumped into some open scenes just to get the juices flowing again and after a few Dan had us pause.

He told us we were going to do a series of Scene gauntlets – each person would be in 10 rapid fire 2 person scenes (few seconds usually) in a row. Each scene we must be a completely different character – if one character is too similar Dan will ask us to do another scene.
This was great (though a few people had a little trouble at first, until they got a few scenes in) - I always enjoy challenges character wise like this - and what was awesome about this was that not only were you forced to do 10 characters back to back in scenic situations, each time you went in for another person you were doing yet another character (at least none of us decided to repeat any).

Then the last 10 or so minutes of class we just did open 2 person scenes where we were free to draw inspiration from any of the characters we did before or from anywhere in general.

A few things we took away from class:
You Can Find Inspiration for a Character From Anywhere
The only limit to how many characters you can play/create are limites you place on yourself
Characters can fit into any scenario
The longer you wait to do something in a scene [snap into character, pick up an object, name an object/activity, etc] the harder it becomes to do something