Two Improv Groups and What They're Teaching Me

I'm rehearsing with two different improv groups right now and the difference in experiences between them is startlingly pronounced. Group one (let's call them Pros) is experienced and professional and pretty laser-focused. Group two (let's call them Newbies) is relatively less formal and experienced but they grant me this overwhelming feeling of... liberation. The Pros encourage me to improve mechanically as an improviser (editing scenes properly, quickly generating ideas, avoiding common traps in scenes, etc.) and the Newbies allow me to really let loose creatively and do whatever I think is awesome at the time. They complement each other perfectly and I'm very lucky to have stumbled into this situation. The next thing for me to do is begin transplanting my lessons from one group into the other. I'll start with how I can use the stuff from the Pros to help with my performance in the Newbies.

I am already coaching and teaching the group of the Newbies, so my mechanics knowledge is already being rather forcibly injected into the group. My sense of professionalism in that group, however, is lacking. I'm late or barely on time most weeks, I tend to ramble between scenes, and the most grievous of transgressions: I found myself hitting one of the cast members as a joke in scenes. The first two are death by a thousand cuts style problems, but the third is probably the most abhorrent thing I've caught myself doing in a while. The cast-mate brought it up to me (in a very mature fashion) and I was totally mortified that I was behaving that way. 

I was really puzzled as to what would make me feel as though that  kind of behavior was acceptable. In Pro group, I focus quite a bit on making sure my scene partners feel respected and taken care of. Though I now that I think about it, I can recall my Pro directors chiding me for being a bit of a bully early on in my time with them. They told me that I scared my scene partners and that some people in the group were refusing to work with me. That deeply affected me and ever since then I've felt like I was walking on eggshells, just praying that I wouldn't mistakenly become an awful person again in all of my scenes. We create really fun, great work, but I place a lot of limits on myself because I'm terrified of upsetting someone and getting yelled at again.

 Newbie group subtracts all of those inhibitions, though, for better or for worse. I have a lot of fun and get to do basically any cool thing that I can think of. We have a tendency to start a little late and end a little early, but we do really exciting work in the time we're actually doing it. Last week we managed to go right up to time without having to artificially strain to get there. I also haven't done anything hella awful like hitting someone or throwing a chair in a scene since it was brought up to me, so that's... progress? Total creative freedom is really nice, but that doesn't mean you're excused from the professionalism and human decency expected from me elsewhere. Especially not at the price of squelching my teammates' ability to also do whatever awesome thing they want to do.

That was a little more delving than I expected to do here, but I will detail what I'm trying to translate into the Pro group in my next post. It'll either be that or be a post about how I just had a self-revelation that I am possibly a very mean person, and not in a funny way!

Thanks for reading!