Improv meets rap in this edge of your-seat hybrid short-form tour de force.
The Basics
At a caller’s discretion, a scene moves from regular dialogue (“Word”) to rhythmic rap (“Kick It”) and back again with players swiftly moving from one style of communicating to the other mid-sentence or mid-word as challenged.
Example
The action begins on a tour bus with Players A and B studiously reviewing a thick travel guide about Greece. They begin by speaking in regular dialogue.
Player A: “I can’t believe we’re finally doing this! After all that saving…”
Player B: (clearly covering something up) “Yes, honey, this is truly a dream come true…”
Player A: (tenderly) “Are you going to tell me what’s on your mind?”
Player B: (anxiously) “There’s something I’ve been meaning to…”
Caller: “Kick it!”
A rap beat drops, and Player B continues…
Player B: (rapping to the best of their ability)
“…tell you, and this is gonna be hard.
I put this whole trip on our now maxed-out credit card.
I should’ve been saving, cause we’re gonna get fleeced
By those less-than-great interest rates, but you really love…”
Caller: “Word.”
The accompaniment immediately drops out.
Player B: (talking again) “…Greece, and it would take years to save up for this.”
Player A: (disappointed) “We talked about changing our terrible spending habits…”
The Focus
Aim to move the story steadily forward in both the sung and spoken sections, fully embracing all the deliberate (and accidental) discoveries.
Traps and Tips
1.) Musician tips. This game sinks or soars a little depending on the rap accompaniment. Clumsy transitions, stalling intros, inelegant samplings, and unpredictable rhythms can all undermine the singers who already have a lot to contend with. If you’re fortunate enough to have a skilled beatboxer in your company, this can provide an amazing sense of polish alongside potentials for nuanced collaboration as the music can stop and start on a dime and gently morph to allow for unique emotional choices and organic rhyme and rhythmic patterns. More commonly, a canned track is used. When the rap is first introduced, a little play in can help establish the beat and tone for the players and audience. Once the scene is underway, however, you don’t want to have players stalling for a preamble to finish as that’ll kill the energy and flow. It’s worth taking the time to find and edit beats that work for the specific improvisers in your roster – a jaunty tempo might set a more proficient player up for joyful success while completely scuttling another teammate. It’s rough when that lesson is learned in real time in front of a paying audience.
2.) Caller tips. Listen, listen, and then while you’re at it, listen just a little bit more. There are lots of fun little shivving moves you can make to heighten the fun (cutting the music out right before the last payoff word or rhyme is a favorite in my current home venue), but the scene can become murky and jumbled if the caller isn’t really serving the needs (and elevating the strengths) of the onstage ensemble. “Kick it” moments are a great tool for heightening and extending, as well as revealing some well-placed CADs. Pay attention to and honor the technical limitations of your live or recorded soundtrack. If the transitions between spoken and sung dialogue are a little clunky due to your technical parameters, it’s probably unwise to try and switch a player back and forth between styles multiple times in a single speech act. (Frankly, that’s probably a tall order even with an accomplished live beatboxer at the helm.) Many of the techniques used in Song Cue apply here, too, and thinking of each rap moment as a short song with its own structural sense and payoff can go a long way to adding polish.
3.) Dialogue tips. It’s important that the audience believes the conceit that the caller is messing with and challenging the team with each musical shift. That being said, the players can stealthily do a lot of the work of setting themselves, each other, the caller, and the musician or technician up for success. If you talk all over each other or in meandering run-on sentences, you’re making everyone’s life needlessly difficult. Clean transitions into and out of the rap are crucial. So, make strong, loaded offers that invite further elaboration. If it’s helpful, think in terms of the lead up to a traditional theatrical monologue in a play or power ballad in a contemporary musical. This type of emotional commitment will also make it much easier to find content in the rap that follows. And don’t forget while everyone is looking for fun switch opportunities, that it’s beyond classy to set someone else up for the big musically infused revelation. Don’t retreat into your head while coming up with your deal or that clever rhyme you want to land. (Is that ever a good idea in our scenes?!)
4.) Rap tips. There are a lot of structural and rhyming tips I could give here – and there are a few of those below – but my first and probably most important advice is to rap as yourself. This has been a conscious development in my own performance circle where once players may have ill-advisedly adopted some stereotypical persona as an overlay. That will strike most aware spectators now as icky (at best) and downright offensive (at worst). I’m a middle-aged, Caucasian, English-sounding dad. That’s the unapologetic vibe I bring into my rap sections. I might use more contractions and elision in my lyrics – as I would in any poetic form where rhythm and rhyme invite creative language tweaks – but I still retain my me-ness. Speaking of poetry, that would be my other major suggestion. Rap is poetry and delights in chasing fun rhymes, savoring repeated sounds, and developing dynamic or unexpected cadences. Enrich these speech acts accordingly as best you can – such a verbal approach also accentuates the contrast between the sung and spoken sections of the scene.
In Performance
Style games such as Kick It can wrestle with complex issues of appropriation and appropriateness that feel different from one community or country to the next. I will tend to quickly and resoundingly make fun of myself if I’m seeing this game up, acknowledging that I’m probably not the person they’d like to see rap that evening. In that way, I’m highlighting that I’m the target of the joke rather than the greater artform itself. It’s a small finesse, but in my experience, it tends to keep the game joyful and light.
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Cheers, David Charles.
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Photo Credit: Kalani Senior
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