Annoyance Level Two - Week One

So a brand new session has started at the Annoyance – and I’m in a new class with a new teacher and a bunch of new faces.
It’s crazy how many differing levels of experience we have in this class – there are people on current and former Harold teams at iO (One or two are from a great team that sadly just got cut from the roster), a bunch of people from other ensembles/theaters (second city, PH, CIC, etc) around the city, one or two people who direct at iO and other places as well as a few who’s only training have been Annoyance so far – or limited college experience.
The teacher (is actually who my level on instructor had for level two when he went through) is Rich Sohn – and is incredibly Snarky (can I use that word?), but in a fun way.

Class started off with brief introductions – quick overview of people’s experience and names then we were all asked to hop up on the back wall to get things started.
Rich let us know we’d be doing a series of quick two person scenes where he would call one person’s name and that individual would have to quickly jump out and start a scene and anyone on the back line could hop out to support them.

After only a few of these Rich had us pause since he noticed that sometimes people were hanging back just a little bit in starting their scenes (or jumping out) kind of like they were waiting for something. So he added a few things to the exercise.
The instant he called someone’s name they had to start a scene (basically from the back wall) – id there was hesitation he’d call scene right there (before any words had been spoken) and call out the hesitation.
Next if there was too much exposition at the top of a scene (as though someone was setting up a planned premise) – he’d call the scene – and again call it out.
Everyone was encouraged to leap out there ASAP in order to support the person who’s name is called – as soon as they here someone’s name.

And thus with these additions the scenes started up again – overall it lead to much more interesting offers and tighter scenes for the most part, however the one difficulty was it became very easy to let scenes pass you by (and a few people only got out when their name was called): with everyone leaping to get out there and support you had to really be on your toes if you wanted to get out there at all (though overall that’s a good thing in a lot of ways).

After a number of these scenes – Rich sat us down and we talked briefly about how they went.
During this he left us a few pieces of advice for when we were up there:

“It’s hard to turn your brain off, just cause you’re on the back line – so if you have to think, think more of what sort of energy you might bring instead of a premise”

Your best chance for success is to bring “something” at the top of a scene

Just make a choice at the top – then take a second to recognize that choice and heighten it

The “Rules” of improv were basically diagnosing symptoms instead of causes for bad scenes ~ The Annoyance POV


After this and a short break he introduced the next phase of the class to us. He had everyone keep there seats for this and asked two people to hop up on stage. For the rest of the class we just did super short two person scenes (just the initiation – maybe 3 seconds each) and then stopped and talked about the choices we as a class saw the pair make at the top of a scene (and what they might heighten from there) – and then asking the pair (what choices they made and where they might take it).
It was very interesting to see the types of choices people made and how they were perceived – though it did come at one or two points come somewhat close (though thankfully never all the way there) to choice coaching: where a teacher basically uses the phrase “you should have…” (Which I hate for oh so many reasons). Though again thankfully it did not go there.

As the class ended he left us with this thought from Mick Napier:
Fuck Your Fear