In most of improv, absolute failure is basically impossible. You can struggle with some things here and there, but as long as you're enjoying yourself and the audience is having fun, you're succeeding on some level.
In guessing games, failure becomes an option. Most games won't end until you get it right, but there's some small chance that you'll never arrive at the right answer. It took me a long time to trust my fellow improvisers and myself enough to risk that small chance of undeniable failure. In Five Things, that small chance is considerably larger.
You have five minutes to guess five gives with two modifications each. You can only get information through pantomime and gibberish (which is really all you could ever need). Guesses are at a premium here, and every time you make an incorrect guess, the audience and your team howl as though you've burned them with holy water. I've noticed that the fourth consecutive missed guess tends to be my point of no return. My brain shuts down and I want nothing more than to disappear.
Here I am, pretending to be this big brave improviser, when really I'm feeling like a helpless child onstage sometimes. People on the audience are still enjoying themselves, my team doesn't put any blame on me, but I feel like a huge disappointment anyway. The thing that really bothers me is that if I can feel like that in one of my favorite games, why doesn't it happen to me in other forms of improv? Am I not failing gloriously enough or is it just that failing at guessing games still has that new-failure-sting? Even by noticing when my brain goes into lockdown mode, I've already figured out how to avoid those circumstances. Is that me improving or just working around my weaknesses?
I've failed a lot on stage before and I've learned a lot from it, even if I've felt really upset right when that failure occurred. When somebody says to be bold in failure or to fail gloriously, does that mean that we actually have to love failure? Cause I hate it, and that's the main thing that drives me to improve. Or work around my weaknesses.
