Annoyance Level Three - Week Four

At the start of class the other day we worked on something that traditionally might be seen as an anathema to "good" improv to many people: Scenes & Situations where you don't automatically have a shared past with the other characters. For those of you who might not know one of the so called rules of improvisation is that you should know the other character in the scene (have a shared past of some sort) - some schools even go so far to suggest a period of time (at least six months) - this is done primarily to eliminate the start of most scenes being an awkward: "Hello, nice to meet you" or "Who are you" while at the same time automatically making it more likely that the characters on stage will care about each other (or at least be able to make assumptions on how they feel towards each other).

Well the first exercise we did instantly put us in a situation where that might not necessarily be true - though that was only one part of the exercise.
Three chairs were set up on stage and Susan let us know that all the scenes would be taking place in an airplane - we were told that we could know each other in the scenes, but were encouraged to experiment with each character being strangers to one another.
The key in these situations as we quickly found was to establish something strong for ourselves (namely a character/ point of view) as soon as possible so that we could comfortably exist in the world of the scene. The input from our scene partners still added to our own vision of our selves, but it was far easier to interact as strangers especially as all the scenes started in silence.

After this exercise - which produced some very entertaining and fun scenes - we moved on to a slightly different take on the idea.
This time four chairs were put up (we were told we could use them or not) and Susan let us know the following scenes would take place in a teacher's lounge and we were the faculty at a school. This time the focus was on shared experiences - something I've mentioned in my Counter Productive Lover posts (in regards to some of the earliest rehearsals: namely the conversation pieces). This was actually something that came about in the Airplane exercise as well - since we were all passengers on the plane and not a mix of employees (flight attendants) & passengers there was no instant status divide and we were all starting out on basically the same page in many ways.
The same thing was true about these scenes - since we were all faculty and not a mix of students and faculty and parents or whatever - we were less likely to focus on our superficial relationships (or even the setting - in this case school - related material) and instead simply interact as individual characters.

After this we moved on to playing board games (well not literally). Three people were asked to get on stage at a time and were then given a game to play: Chinese checkers, Kerplunk, Trouble, Monopoly, etc. As in the above two exercises the scenes never became about the games we were playing but far more about how we were interacting with each other through the game. If we were patient and supportive of person's move or angry and irritated by - it got us focusing on each other instead trying to develop plot or create a "funny" scene/situation.

From this class we took these ideas:
Check out why you enter a scene - often your impulse to enter is an impulse to edit
Watch out if you ever find yourself trying to "fix" things in a scene
No matter where you are (Second City, iO, etc) you've got to take care of yourself on stage
If you find that out that you are not connecting with your scene partners add to something they are doing
If you love your characters time passes and you'll bring them back naturally