CIC Rehearsal - Finding our Voice

So Tuesday night Was the third rehearsal for the team I'm on at CIC. We have begun the always interesting process of trying to come up with a name for our team - we've been lobbing ideas back and forth over e-mail and just a few days ago locked it down to a solid list of 65 suggestions...sigh. We are currently voting to narrow that list down even further and might just have a name within the next two weeks.

Some of the more "interesting" suggestions have been:

• Princess Powerless McFloppyTits
• Bored and Horny
• Real World: Your Momma
• Johnny Depp-ression
• Balls
• Loser
• Reach Around
• Hoop Dreams
• Mee Mee and the Bottle Rockets
• Live Sex
• Pandas on Fire
• On Par
• Above Par
• Par
• Doogie Howzer M.D.
• Cuddle Puddle
• Otter Nonsense

Keep in mind this is only 17 out of 65 and these were all legitimate suggestions...sigh.
Note: I am keeping the decent names secret for now as I'm not sure which one will end up being ours and I'd hate to have some other group snatch it up before us (and there are a couple that if we don;t take I plan to keep in my back pocket for future teams).

Anyway this rehearsal we've gotten very close I think to locking down exactly how our shows (at least in the beginning) are going to look like. The past week Jorin had been contemplating the problems with the opening we faced last rehearsal and came in with a few new ideas.

We started the night with an exercise we actually do at the top of every rehearsal: the sharing circle. We each go around and share one interesting thing that happened to us the past week that has absolutely nothing to do with improvisation.
After this we did some typical warm-ups and then Jorin had us rock out a short montage to get us in the mood.

After this we tackled the opening again. This time around we completely did away with the idea of half the group having a conversation and the other half supporting in some other way - and instead focused on splitting into smaller group and having interweaving conversations (think the Cock tale party exercise).
Basically we split into three groups on stage and each group has three distinct conversation inspired by the topic - trading focus between each other organically.
It wasn't perfect, but it was far better than last week and we started going from this opening into full pieces right away.

At first the plan was once our opening was done we'd have three distinct scenes pulling inspiration directly from each of the three conversations. Next we'd bust out second beats of each of those scenes and then for the rest of the show we could draw inspiration from anything that had happened before (basically a spineless Harold - and fairly close to the structure Whistlers had worked on for a long time).
The main problem we encountered with this was that the early scenes quickly became almost formulaic - and I think a number of us felt slightly limited - because we almost always ended up with one set (scene from the opening, then the scene it inspired and it's second beat) that was basically just a slightly different shade of the same color.
The problem was in the nature of our opening: with a Harold at least - you have that same, Scene A, B, C followed by basically A1, B1, C1 - however the opening is not set up in that same three section shape - it's it's own entity (a single source of inspiration that then fans out to the three scenes). A Harold is a clear Pyramid shape (or diamond perhaps when you factor in the group games) what we had felt more like three separate lines of inspiration - at least until the last half of our show when we'd be free to tie things together or explore even farther apart.

Luckily Jorin saw this too and so we began tweaking the ideas a little more - trying different things to see how they worked. Finally by the end of rehearsal we found something that we all think just might be the right fit. We modified the opening a bit - so there are still three groups holding different conversations, however the cross fading between them is now much faster - and the groups actually physically faded in and out of the focal point of the stage. After the opening we now have a far looser form - where we aren't locked into any order of second beats or scenes. Also we are always on the look out now for situation where the members of one of the groups from the opening end up on stage ... if that happens it's a perfect opportunity to continue that conversation.
Ironically enough (or perhaps not so much so) in the pursuit of trying something other than an organic opening - we've decided on fairly structured opening that sits on top of a very organic form.