iO Summer Intensive: Week One in Review

Hoooo boy what a busy 7 days I've had this past week. I'll give a broad overview here and as I iron out time to write in my very full schedule I may manage to come back to specific things. I took a lot of notes!

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The first day really had its tone set by the welcome we were given to the ceremony. All 143 intensive students were gathered in the Del Close Theatre and Charna (the owner and co-founder of iO) gets ready to enter. We can tell that she's coming because she's preceded, no, heralded by her dog Stella. She then spends a few moments on stage debating across the room with instructors whether or not we should get started. I say debating, but what I mean is Charna wanted to start, they suggested we could stand to wait a little longer, Charna started anyway. It was pretty funny.

I am really glad to be a member of the section I'm in which is filled out with some very talented people from around the world. Our class has people from California to New York to Australia to Sweden (and a couple states/countries in-between) and there's a pretty wide set of performance experience among us. Our week one instructor was Bill Arnett and he essentially guided us into scenework and essentially playing ourselves. From the way he taught, I get the feeling that he was teaching us a lot of dangerous secret techniques that are banned at this dojo. He also kept saying, "believe it or not, sometimes people struggle with this" after we'd do surprisingly well our first run through exercises. We learned a bit about openings here, a bit about scenework there, a little of how to gather inspiration, and a little more about varitions on edits. Then on Thursday (the final day in our week) he drew out a diagram of what the classic harold looks like and then insisted it didn't really need to be that way. We did three harolds which had bright spots and weak parts, but were shining examples of the work we'd done and the amount we'd grown as a class. With week 2 starting tomorrow morning, I'd say that we've only just started to get very comfortable with each other.

It was Wednesday before I decided I was ready to play without reservation and accordingly it was Wednesday before I felt like I did anything really fun in class. Nobody else has mentioned feeling antsy about performing with new people, but I doubt I'm the only one who feels trepidation about it. At any rate, I'm doing my best to get to know the people I'm with better while also stealing all of their good and fun habits while they're on stage.

There's a lot of things I like about the program so far, but my favorite has to be that I've met so many people who I would have probably never met if the intensive didn't exist. I've spoken to a fellow student from Pakistan whose love of this artform is downright inspirational and who reaffirms my idea that improvisation is a life-changing thing. I've done an incredibly silly but very well rounded scene with a classmate from Sweden that felt better than some scenes I've done with people I've worked with for years. I even learned what Lance Storm's wrestling school was like from a Canadian classmate who studied there for a little while! This improv thing isn't nothin', y'all. To bring together this many talented, kind, smart, and wonderful people, it's gotta be a pretty big deal.