iO Level Three - Week Eight

So this was our last class of level three this session and the official midpoint of my training here at iO (that's right 3 levels of classes down, 3 more to go).

Tonight was a lot about how we play as individuals and namely having Bill challenge us to play outside how we traditionally tend to.
We started off with warm-ups per usual - this time Zip, Zap, Zop ... and then Double Zip, Zap, Zop ... then double Zip, Zap, Zop plus double Me, My, Mine (which is basically the exact same game).
Afterwards Bill had six of us stay up on stage to participate in the exercise which would take up the remainder of the class period. Basically each one of us on stage would get a specific challenge from Bill based on his observations of us from the last eight weeks as well as a few notes about how he perceived our play. That person then did three scenes in a row (with a few of the rest of us up there) focusing on that specific challenge.

My challenge from Bill was not a surprise to me ... it's something he's urged me to try on before and most definitely something I haven't done all that often (especially not up here in Chicago): Try on some dumb characters.
However, his notes on how I've been playing (and thus the reasoning behind the challenge) actually did surprise me a little bit and pointed out something I've been feeling in the back of my mind for the past few weeks or so.

By asking me to try on dumb characters Bill was in fact encouraging me to not worry about what I was going to say next - to stop trying to "win" in scenes as he put it: don't worry about saying the funniest thing or finding the perfect turn of phrase or sizing up the various angles I could work in a scene...just play. I sadly didn't have my notebook for this class (I was running late and it was in my other coat) so I don't have word for word his comments, but still it resonated with me and it's something I didn't expect to hear, even though I should have.

I especially realized what was up after the three scenes when he remarked about some of the things he really liked about my play: my gamesmanship and wit and what not.
I've been on auto-pilot - especially during the past 2 months of this particular class. I've just been sitting back and doing the exercises never really getting up there to just have fun and fuck around improvising - I switched over to my improv robot sometime during these classes and let him drive (it's one of the reasons my gamesmanship has been good - it's the UCB training, that's my improv robot's home sweet home).

I know that part of the reason I switched off a little bit was the format of this class - 20 some odd person class on mostly two person scene work. You are lucky to get basically just handful of minutes on stage per class and it's always in the form of a specific exercise - so that's where the "winning" mentality came about ... I was using my improv robot to figure out how to best play the scene according to the exercise.

Simply put I haven;t been taking chances and not focusing enough on just having fun in this class so far (I had a lot of pretty good scenes this way - but none that were awesome). Something that I definitely plan to fix asap - from now on every time I get up there I'm going to roll the dice and see if I can surprise not only my scene partner but also myself.