iO Level Three - Week Five

To give you guys a head's up - we tend to spend the first five minutes of every class lately talking about shows we've seen around town (and what we liked or didn't like). It's one of the things that most of the training centers (at least those worth their salt) encourage ... actually seeing improv performed as much as possible.
One of the things that came up in this discussion today was the idea of "saving a scene" due to a recent show I saw where there were so many walk-ons I thought it was a new form (honestly there were more scenes with the entire group in them than two person scenes in this show).

The worst part about this was the fact that I recognized that a lot of the players in this group were very talented - the problem was every time it seemed like something was about to get going .... well here came a few more people and things derailed.
Part of it definitely came about form the fact that the audience wasn't really all that responsive early on in their laughter (lots of throat chuckles) and it's a relatively new team. Though as rule I'm loathe to really blame an audience - still it's understandable that early on in the show they panicked a little and then it snowballed out of control.

It brought up a good point in class though: namely that the urge to walk on into a scene is usually the impulse to edit it (in fact ... I'm probably going to do an extra post on just this topic later).

The Class
Anyway class started with some traditional warm-ups - passing the focus around through clapping and snapping - as well as a few pattern games.
Next we leaped into some person challenge scenes, where Bill gave us each a challenge to experiment with for a number of scenes.

My personal challenge was to try on a series of unconfident (even self loathing) characters & foolish characters.

After this we moved into some two person scenes where one player enters tabular rasa (blank slate for those not hip with the Latin) the second player then initiates very simply (ie Mark Can you hand me a Pencil). The first (blank player) then makes a character choice inspired from that simple initiation and begins talking to them selves completely ignoring the other person (pretending that they didn't even hear the initiation). Note: it's not a monologue - it's literally the character talking to themselves (ie "Gahhh did I leave the oven on ...").
After everyone clearly has a sense of that character the second (initiating) player repeats their first line and a scene begins normally.

Some things we took away from this class were:
Roll Some Dice - take chances, Don't be afraid to make "Crazy" choices.
Familiar Situations and Predictable Characters can be a good thing sometimes.
Say How Your Partner is Acting - Don't skirt around the issue.
Scenes fail when things are unclear or someone doesn't make a clear choice & follow through with it.