Have Fun and Indulge A Little!

I had a workshop with the very talented and insightful Adal Rifai of iO Chicago and he gave me something very interesting to consider. The key to entertaining improv, in my opinion, is fun. If the performers enjoy themselves, the audience will enjoy themselves. However, I've been routinely stopping myself from having the all of the fun available to me in scenes without noticing it. Part of me thinks that I was playing scenes with a fear that fun is a limited resource and if I took all the opportunities that presented themselves to me I'd eventually run out of them. The other part comes from this weird "take your medicine" thought process that I've found planted deep in my brain. It took someone calling it out for me to actually notice how much those thought processes can limit my work.

I'd start by collecting the ingredients for the scene. Defining the location, naming the characters, labeling the relationship, all of that good stuff. Then I'd combine them and work with them but never take the time to really explore or justify them. It was always a mentality of "that's good, but what's next?" instead of just accepting that what's next comes from what came before. My scene partners and I would spend the whole scene generating awesome, silly ideas and would never get the chance to give them the attention they deserved. We go in and bake 40 cakes but get to eat exactly none of them because as soon as they came out of the oven we were onto the next thing.

It's like Lex didn't even take the time to realize I meant metaphorical cake.

That workshop got me to slow down and do the thing that I always wanted to do in scenes but I avoided because I thought it'd come off as too indulgent. But indulgence is the whole thing! Why run from it? Because I might have a good time? Because I might not get to rattle off my 20 other ideas that I also won't have time to explore? It's such a strange, needlessly difficult tactic. Plowing blindly ahead almost assures that I'll never find the joy in what I'm doing, which is a real shame. I'm going to be sure to stop and smell the pantomime roses and eat every single improv-cake that I find myself baking.