Why you owe it to yourself (and your cast) to be kind of a hard-ass

I have been getting caught in leadership positions for the majority of my adult life. I've learned a lot of things about myself through the groups I've been put in charge of. While I believe in kindness as a general basis for all human interactions, I've learned that leaders sometimes have to say and do the difficult and often hurtful things.

In improv it is really very difficult for me to give a note to a teammate. However I am finding myself in a leadership position far more often in improv scenarios lately and I need to grow up and move forward from my position of "I'm improv dumb and I don't know anything that isn't obvious." 

I was looked to as the most experienced performer and therefore the director of a recent improv show and I was too afraid to give notes because I didn't want to mar the positive and fun  atmosphere of the rehearsals. I had several very specific things that I noticed that I never brought up because I hoped we could work them out without communicating about them. I thought that maybe the other folks in the group could figure out the things that weren't working for themselves. I was super wrong and our show didn't magically fix itself.

They needed my help and I was co-signing all the bad habits I was witnessing by not calling them out. Every time someone started a scene with negativity and I didn't make them re-start, I messed up. Every time the words "I have a plan" showed up and I didn't yell "No you don't! You have a feeling!" I goofed. Every walk-on that was unnecessary that I didn't immediately send into exile was a gaffe by yours truly.

Improv should be fun and happy, but rehearsals are also a thing we do to help ourselves improve. Notes are something that help us have fun quicker and more effectively. Your notes shouldn't be mean or personal, but they do need to be direct and as immediate as possible. If something doesn't work, tell that performer and offer an idea of how to make it work. Be honest about the different skill levels in your group, even if that hurts someone's feelings. Help the people who aren't quite there yet if they're hard workers, and cut them loose if they aren't. Don't let being nice drag your shows down and take away from the fun that you could be having.

Accepting Compliments

I've found that even when I feel supremely confident about a performance I've delivered, I'm still very bad at accepting compliments. That's not an uncommon failing of a young, creative person, though. Every time I go to see a show at my alma mater the actors, singers, and dancers deflect my compliments on their performances by telling me how bad they felt on stage and how many things went wrong. 

"Hey, you did a great job!" 

"Ugh, really? I forgot my line in this scene and this person tripped and somebody else missed their entrance by a full beat!"

I used to do this all the time until I realized that it was a total buzzkill to tell somebody that enjoyed the show that they were wrong to enjoy something so awful. My issue with accepting a compliment has evolved in an interesting way that is almost entirely too generous. Someone will come up to me after a show and tell me how much they enjoyed my performance and I'll accept the compliment by saying, "Oh thanks, everybody else is amazingly talented and that's why the show was good." Or maybe I respond with, "Thanks, it was a lot of hard work!"

Those replies might seem okay, but they're not what the audience member wants to hear. You know what they want to hear? "Thank you, I'm glad that you enjoyed it." Don't give them excuses. Don't give them the notes you took for the rest of the cast. Just look them in the eyes, smile, and thank them.

What Do You Want Out of Improv?

I was reading a post on an improv blog and it made me think about what I want out of improv. It's a post on improvnonsense titled No One Here Wants to be Funny? In that post, the point is made that it's okay to improvise just because you want to be funnier. I'm guilty of rolling my eyes when someone in a workshop or a class says that they want to be funnier or quicker on their feet, but that is a totally valid reason for wanting to improvise! My distaste for it comes from me assuming that if someone is here just to be funny or quick then they are going to be doing those things at the expense of their scene partners which is one of the things that made me hate improv when I was younger.

Then I had to sit and think to myself what I really want out of improv. I don't really want to be funny. Being funny is just a thing that happens when you're telling the truth. I want to tell the truth. I've heard it said that good art is lying to tell the truth, and that's what I want to be doing. If it's funny then that's great, but it's not my first goal.

If my goals were just this lofty idea of truth and art then I could still be acting. What does improv have that acting doesn't? I get to do anything. I will probably never be cast as a leading man in a play. I will almost certainly never be a villain that strikes fear into audiences' hearts. I doubt I'll get the role of a doting mother in traditional theater. In improv, I can do all of those things and nobody can stop me. I don't have to be on stage speaking someone else's words while dancing through somebody else's blocking on yet another person's set in yet another person's costume. I'm getting worked up just thinking about how restrictive traditional theater is! Shackled to another person's work. You're not the air, you're the filter. You're not the image, you're the lens.

I also really love that "good improv feeling" that comes when you're fully connected to your cast. There's something hugely satisfying in knowing that no matter how wildly afield you throw something, it will always be caught and returned with even more force. Something about the improv hyper-accelerator that just makes my heart swell with joy. I've spent a lot of time in my life feeling lonely and like there's not a person in the world who's on the same wavelength as me, and improv shows me that everybody else is right there with me. It's like somebody flicked on the light in a dark room and all of a sudden my friends are all here throwing me a surprise party.

I improvise because it connects me to people. I do it because it lets me make up whatever story I want to tell. I do it because it's fun. Whatever your reason is, it's good enough for me as long as it keeps you having fun too.

Top Five Things for Giving Notes

Having to give notes in improv is a necessary evil. We've got to look at our performances with a critical eye if we want to improve at we're doing and make it easier for us to have fun while we're playing and for an audience to have fun watching us. Here are some things that I've found to alleviate some of the awkwardness that comes with giving notes in improv:

1. Ask the performers how they felt about the scene. Did they enjoy anything specifically? Did they feel themselves slip up or succeed? If they noticed a success you can tell them what was great about it and try to encourage any good tactics they've come up with. If they struggled with something, point out what made it difficult and how to steer out of that skid.
2. If you are a performer as well, give yourself the harshest notes. Be the first to admit when you make a mistake, diagnose how you can fix it. Before you give anybody else a negative note, really search your work to see if you can apply it to yourself first.
3. Acknowledge that there isn't one specific way to do things. Rules in improv only represent the simplest path to success, not the only path to success. I know improvisers who break every single rule and create wonderful, hilarious scenes without alienating their partners. If someone breaks a fundamental principle of improv but it still works somehow, discuss what made it work.
4. Give mostly positive notes. Nothing hurts people's creativity more than you telling them that they're bad at playing make-believe. If you see a scene that has 20 bad ideas and 1 good one, rave about that good idea and forget all the bad ones. Yes! You were a genius to come up with that singular moment, let's do more of that awesome stuff! A positive atmosphere begets joyful work.
5. Pay attention and react enthusiastically. Watch everything that happens, watch all the little things, get invested in the scenes and the characters. If something's funny, laugh. If something's sweet give'em an "awwwww." If they make a horrible pun, boo loudly. Don't spend too much time writing down your notes, if the note is that important you will be able to remember it after the scene. If you care about their work, the improvisers will care about their work too.

Those are the TOP FIVE THINGS (pew pew pew) to get you started giving notes. I stray from these occasionally, but I don't think straying has ever made my notes more insightful or better received. If anybody has any suggestions that could help with giving notes, I'd love to read them.

The Struggle:Taking a Break vs. Working Through It

I've been through the cycle of getting frustrated with improv, desperately wanting to quit, and falling back in love with it several times. When I first started feeling this way, my reaction was to grind through all of my troubles. I tend to do this with a lot of things in life. Tough it out, everybody's got problems. All I need to do is improv harder and I'll fix every issue I have.

I should know by now that increasing the intensity of something I'm struggling with isn't generally a good solution to whatever problem I'm facing. In fact, it almost always makes the issues I'm having worse. The reason for that is because I very rarely take the time to actually examine the things that are bringing me down during rehearsals or shows. I just tack on more rehearsals, more shows, more responsibilities and on and on until the wheels come off and I can take no more.

Now-a-days I decide to take a break, which is something I was terrified of doing before. I very much doubted my own work ethic and commitment to anything. I felt as though if I took even one step away from something, I'd continue stepping back until I'd quit entirely. It's a really strange fear when you're talking about improv, because if improv and performing are something I love and enjoy then they would logically not be very easy for me to quit doing. Logical or not, it's still the way I felt (and sometimes still feel).

Here's my prescription to myself and anybody who is struggling to fully enjoy something they usually love: take a breath. Take just enough time away from that passion to remind you why you loved it in the first place. Find something else to enjoy for a little while. Set a firm limit on the break that you are taking and adhere to it (no coming back early or late!).

If you want to work through it, really take the time to analyze what you're struggling with. Identify why you're not having fun and deal with that. Talk to people, tell people how much trouble you're having and ask them to save you when the troubles come up. There's no reason to tough it out alone in improv, find a way to connect with a teammate or fellow student or your teacher. In the end, you'll both be better for it.

You can step back without quitting entirely and you can work through issues with the help of others. Don't collapse under the weight of your own expectations.

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!

Vulnerable Villainy

We were running a long form the other day where one player realized he'd been endowed as the villain, so he went full douche-mode. Earlier, I'd told him to fully commit to whatever position he was placed at in the story. So if he was a hero he'd be brave and if he was a villain he'd be horrible. He followed my note as it was given, and he executed with precision.

He and I spoke after the rehearsal and we both agreed that while his character was infuriating, there was definitely something missing from him. It was hard to think of a form of comeuppance for his villain, part of what made him so frustrating was that he was invincible. I wanted him to be like a putty from power rangers, with a little button on his chest for me to strike when I was done doing cool martial arts flourishes. That kind of vulnerability is an option, but is it actually a good option most of the time? How does he stop himself from being impervious to harm and create an interesting, fun character?

The answer, I've realized, is to begin with a feeling. The answer to why a villain behaves the way they do should begin with how they feel about the characters that they are antagonizing. Feel first, and ask questions later.

The improviser in my group played with detached emotion, he never had a revealing moment and he never made any excuses for his awful behavior. He didn't even seem to enjoy his awful behavior. He was clearly the bad guy, but we knew nothing about him and never got to learn anything. Because we knew nothing about him or his feelings, we had no idea how to deal with him.

Here's me starting with a feeling:

My character despises those guys. Why? Because he is above them. In what way? He's risen in station while they have remained the same. How did he rise? Hard work, clever wit, and betrayal. What does he want? To prove he is better, that anybody would backstab anybody else if the reward was right and the opportunity presented itself.

If a character feels an emotion powerfully enough, everybody immediately starts to wonder why he feels that way. They wonder what happened, but most importantly they know that something happened to make this character feel this way. Not only does that all-consuming feeling answer questions about the bad-guy, it fills in empty spots in the good guys' characters as well.

Perhaps most importantly, if we are able to get some of these feelings out of the antagonist we are able to resolve the story and overcome them. We can dole out poetic justice or give them a chance at redemption. We can even let them win if we know what their conditions for victory and defeat are. None of that is possible without the villain having feelings and acting on them.

Basically, if you want to create something powerful and human: begin with a feeling.

Want To Get Started? Just Ask.

I've had a lot of improv and theatre related ambitions in my life and its surprising how many of them have come to fruition. The thing is, very few of those things just came to me. I had to go out and get them, but going and getting them isn't always as easy as it sounds.

New Idea: Tag Team Car Salesmen

You're the Best Around! Or Nah.

About a week before Christmas I was in the living room with my mom and my younger sister when my sister made the bold claim that I was the best improviser in my company. It's one of those blindly supportive things that family members tend to say and it's generally the sentiment you'd expect from family. What caught me off guard, however, was my mom's response. "No, (this guy) is really hilarious!"

Spolin:A Basic Understanding

I've been looking for some more theory to have rattling around in my brain and I managed to get my hands on Improvisation for the Theater by Viola Spolin. Spolin is regarded as the "American Grand Mother of Improv" and basically all improv theory comes out of her work in some way or another. I haven't finished the book, so if there's a twist ending don't spoil it for me. Here are some

 of the basics that I've gleaned:

Voila! Viola Spolin

Nashville Improv Community

Last Tuesday night I had the honor of performing with three other improv groups in Nashville at Zanies. The line-up was Nashville Improv Company, Sprocket Improv, LOL!Nashville, and Tongue N Cheek Improv (or TNC as their fan page bills them). It was a super fun night and it was very nice to get together with some improvisers who I hadn't really gotten a chance to talk to before. Also we all brought in a lot of people and started practically zero fires, so we'll probably be invited back!

Dealing with Pre-show Anxiety

Most days I feel like I could take on the world and at least go even, but sometimes the creeping spectre of doubt is able to land a few hits on my psyche. Pre-show nerves, it happens to the best and most experienced of us. If you're nervous, that's great! It means you're taking risks and leaving your comfort zone. After the jump, I'll go over a few ways that help me cope with anxiety.

First step: Breathing and wiping down your sweaty palms.

My Mid-Twenties Have Begun--What Now?

This past Sunday was my birthday. I am a fresh-faced 25 year old who is ready to take on the world! It's way better than the withered and weary 24 year old that cropped up around this time last year. It's been a heck of a year and I think it calls for some serious reflection.

Taken at The Basement theatre in Atlanta. Best house lights in history.

Improv Jams and Why They're Great

Wednesday night, I was lucky enough to be part of Nashville Improv Company's most recent Improv Jam. For the uninitiated, an Improv Jam is when you perform a show and invite audience members to join you on-stage. The NIC does these as short form shows that usually run about 90 minutes. Students, prospective students, improvisers from other troupes, and frequent audience members make up our typical Jam crowd. At first blush, it seems like a lot of things could go wrong by just inviting somebody with potentially no training on stage, but a lot tends to go wrong even when have 10 year vets filling out a cast. Instead of asking what the worst that could happen, let's find out what's the best that could happen.Improv Jams rule. They are crazy fun, and I believe every troupe should have one occasionally. Here's why:

Learning to Trust

Trust: It's a pretty important thing in improv. It's a pretty important thing in life, too. It can also be very difficult to earn from and give to other people. Growing up on the internet where everything is a scam and everybody is probably lying to you, our generation is pretty rightfully wary of just trusting any schmo who asks that of them. But you know what? Trusting people feels good, man.

Polar Express Rafi wants YOU to trust your scene partners!

Teacher Post: The Benefits of Building a Blanket Fort

Gonna drop some teacher tips on you guys today! So your class is clipping along at a pretty good rate and your students are pickin' up what you're puttin down every lesson. You're blitzing through curriculum faster than you could have expected because A) you're probably a better teacher than you give yourself credit for and B) your students are geniuses who were created in laboratories. Now's the time to stop and smell the roses, but how do you do it? Sometimes it's as simple as reading stories or playing their favorite games for half an hour, but sometimes you gotta go big. You gotta build a blanket fort.

My second-in-command Callie Mattox and I finishing the Blanket Fort. The students had all jumped inside already.

Improvisers and Responsibility

Improvisers are a diverse group of people. We excel in a wide variety of things and we struggle with an incredibly broad range of deficiencies at the same time. Improv is a job that is often done for free (or very close to it) so most of us have day-jobs that we use to support our improv habits. We have families and friends outside of improv who don't understand what we mean when we say we have to go to rehearsal. I get it, fellow improvisers. It's tough to commit fully to this thing, but somebody's gotta do it.

Blog-O-Ween! A Reflection On My Teaching Style

Wednesday night was my final class before Halloween and I tried something new. Usually my pre-Halloween class is a hectic jaunt around whatever building we happen to be in. I recruit two or three friends to play characters and I have them lead us on a chase around the building dropping candy wherever they go. It is stressful and exhausting and almost always not planned thoroughly enough. I also worry how parents will feel when my costumed friends inevitably give their children floor-candy. This year I did away with all the hubub, and I think it was a real sign of growth for me as a teacher.

Blog-O-Ween! Just do it!

Getting your students interested and involved in class can be difficult. If you're anything like me, you are always incredibly into the theory of what you're teaching and you want your class to be able to appreciate the beautiful mechanics of what they're about to do. While it's great to be so excited about how stuff works, sometimes it's better just to let it work before explaining it. In theatre and in improv it is important to let your students get to creating in a safe environment quickly before even thinking about sharing theory with them. So quit mucking around with vocabulary words in your theatre class and just do it!

Blog-O-Ween! Dealing with Negativity

It's telling that I nearly titled this post "combating negativity." The thing about negativity in your improv or workplace or classroom is that if you decide that you've got to engage it in some kind of combat, you've already lost. I have struggled quite a bit with negativity in my time, both from others and from within myself. Let me tell ya, it sure kills a lot of the fun in stuff.