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Politics and Improv

I’ve been struggling over the last week or so to find a voice that honors the important historic moment we find ourselves experiencing in the United States – a voice that serves appropriately as an ally without becoming performative, a tone that acknowledges my own privilege and need to grow while empowering and adding important volume to others, a way to express myself honestly as an artist without being blind to or distracting from the critical and timely struggle of the Black Lives Matter movement. I haven’t figured the balance out, and I offer this post with that context in mind, because there are moments when I think it’s important that we add our imperfect voice rather than remain silent or absent for fear of not being the most paradigmatic ally or having the best observation or the sagest wisdom.

I offer this first blog post back from my hiatus from the vantage point of a theatre historian, a lens that I admittedly don’t overtly utilize much in my current life as an improv practitioner, although I’d note my historical and critical musings have very much informed my practice and strategies. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what the role of improv should/could be in the current political discourse and what responsibilities we might have as practitioners as we wield this tool. I’ve also been thinking a lot about Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi, two theatre makers working in eighteenth century Italy during a time of social unrest as the rising middle class sought to grasp power from an increasingly ineffective and unresponsive elite. If you haven’t heard of them before, I was in the same boat until I stumbled across them in my studies. That’s Gozzi smugly smiling at you in the image above.

Many improvisers tend to think of our craft as innately progressive or radical as it has a tendency to question, satirize or undermine institutions of power, and this has often been the case historically. The performer in general, and the improviser in particular, has been legislated and viewed with distrust by the hierarchies that control the means of production: this mistrust and control acknowledges the inherent and potentially subversive power in the act of performance. Religious figures were banned from commedia dell’arte stages across Europe for fear of the contempt or ridicule that might occur, the Mexican carpa and Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed often served and represented voices that were otherwise disenfranchised or prevented from entering social discourse, and Keith Johnstone’s initial improv demonstrations literally defied England’s Lord Chamberlain’s role as theatrical censor for the Crown as there was, in fact, no script to view and control. In these, and many (most) other global traditions, the impetus to “punch up” and take aim at those in power is clear and connected to the very core of the improvisational performance instinct. If you take yourself or your institution too seriously, improv has the critical power to hold you up for closer inspection and to proverbially or literally knock you off your high horse.

There are a handful of examples where improv has appeared in a more conservative manner (conservative here meaning it displayed a clear interest in conserving current power systems and inequities.) Japan’s improv performative tradition of renga poetry became incredibly formalized and elite (although there were instances of a more accessible companion form), carnival traditions arguably serve as moments of temporarily suspending power systems only so that they can shortly return in full force without further question or challenge, and then there is the eighteenth century literary and theatrical feud between Gozzi and Goldoni.

This isn’t the place to get bogged down with too much of the minutia of this historic moment but here are the broad strokes. Carlo Goldoni, also known as the Italian Moliere, was born as a member of the upper echelons of the Venetian “common people” and he had lost patience for the stale traditions of the “improvised” commedia dell-arte. At this time, so much of the craft and lazzi had become essentially set that the audience could almost speak the dialogue along with the supposedly improvising performers. (A quick note that mature commedia dell’arte always seemed to straddle the line between generating and recycling material.) Goldoni also had some issues with the immorality of these shows, and the lack of a true and nuanced representation of the emerging middle-class, to which he belonged. His solution was to breathe new life into these characters by incorporating them into an essentially written literary tradition where he could more deliberately take aim at the useless and out-of-touch aristocracy. Among his better known plays is The Fan which is a good example of how he elevated the middle class while taking some deserved knocks at those who had long since ceased to be of any real service to society.

In response to Goldoni’s efforts to use the commedia dell’arte characters and devices as a sharper satiric tool, Carlo Gozzi emerged as his theatrical rival. In simple terms, Gozzi embodied the very aristocratic leech that Goldoni had so successfully brought to the stage and critiqued. He was the embodiment of privilege, unearned status, and patriarchal oblivious excess. As Goldoni had done, Gozzi also deployed the commedia dell’arte masks, but in many cases he retained their bawdy impromptu nature, allowing particularly the lower class characters comedic freedom in his fiabes or fables, such as The Love of Three Oranges. These plays were sumptuous escapist affairs with little in the way of social commentary or satire: his scripted prologues often set the scene and actively invited his audiences to return to a dream-like and intellectually disengaged childhood wonder.

As practitioners, there are obviously a myriad of paths forward as we contemplate returning to the theatre boards post COVID, and yet this struggle between Goldoni and Gozzi has returned to me perhaps as an historical warning of sorts. Goldoni sought to breathe fresh air and social commentary into his commedia dell’arte inspired characters and plays, and consciously held up an archaic system of rule for ridicule. While you could make the case he greatly diminished improvisational freedom, he retained or perhaps re-inspired an approach to art that sought to give voice to the masses. Gozzi, on the other hand, retained the guise of improvisational freedom, but pursued an escapist tradition in an effort to sustain the status quo. He maintained an appearance of improvisation, but arguably, inverted its inherent promise or responsibility, deploying it as a means to appease and ultimately control the masses with frivolity and fantasy.

There are several lessons I take from this distant historical moment. Our art will always be framed, inspired and informed by the political landscape. As improvisers and artists, we can adopt an apparently non-political stance, as Gozzi did, but often our unwillingness or inability to face sociopolitical realities merely results in us upholding the status quo. Escaping into the theatre or our craft may strike us as necessary or appropriate — “everyone needs a break from what’s going on in the world” — but this also smacks of un-interrogated privilege as not everyone is able to or wants to put aside this moment of import. Is this really a moment to blow off collective steam in the theatre (a critique often leveled at Aristotle’s concept of catharsis) or rather a time to find new agency and ways of empowering voices and narratives that need a space now more than ever? As practitioners, do we want to allow our craft to become so stale and “set” that it no longer serves our constituents, as was the case with commedia dell’arte when Goldoni interceded to return agency and vibrancy to the craft? Or do we want to commit to use the unique tools of improv to respond honestly and powerfully in the moment, “punching up” while lending our hands, voices and stages to those most in need?

While I predictably know my own answers to my pedantic questions above, I will confess that I do not know exactly what this reactive and informed improv should look like in my own work. To use my campus troupe as an example, our short-form show is much less likely to be able to interrogate issues of racial injustice and inequality with appropriate depth than our long-form narrative work, although there are also problems here in terms of representation and finding ways to engage current affairs responsibly. As with many improv companies, we still have ample room for growth in terms of racial diversity and inclusion, although we have done better in terms of balancing sex in our casting and have a long history of strong female improvisers excelling in positions of leadership. In general, however, for many improv can still feel closed, inaccessible, or predominantly straight, white and male.

In some contexts, I’m thinking particularly of competitive-style short-form shows, bringing current political issues front and center into our content may feel jarring or inappropriate as it runs the risk of minimizing the issues at hand or, perhaps worse, might give the impression if done without care that we are poking fun at the very communities and tensions that so urgently require our attention. But even in our most joyful and lighthearted enterprises I believe we should honor that the world and stage can not merely be business as usual. I wonder if exploring creative partnerships, organizational sponsorships, pre- or post-show speakers or discussions, offering curated resources and the like could be a first move to frame our improv events in a way that acknowledges our greater responsibilities as artists. And perhaps we should not unduly focus all our attention on our onstage material but also interrogate how we are representing, supporting and building up our larger communities in general.

Regardless of the specific next steps we each take, however, I hope we can all agree that we shouldn’t be a Gozzi, an out-of-touch aristocrat crafting escapist fables designed to draw attention away from the fact that we are simultaneously perpetuating, masking and embodying the very problem we need to address as a society.

Don’t be a Gozzi.

Cheers, David Charles.
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Here’s an interesting article about race and improv from American Theatre.
© 2020 David Charles/ImprovDr

My First Improv Steps in Stripy Socks

As I’m deeply missing playing on the improv stage and eagerly looking forward to the time that will happen again, I can’t help but think about my first steps into this spontaneous art-form that tends to keep its claws in you once it takes hold.

When I reminisce about my teenage years in Dunedin, New Zealand, the images can tend to feel a little Dickensian. I oftentimes describe my family as being “blue t-shirt” rather than “blue collar” as we couldn’t afford the collar to the shirt. My father was an Anglican minister (not a career path for wealth in NZ) and my mother was a solo parent on welfare due to some complicated medical issues. In New Zealand, being poor still meant you had access to a great education, housing, healthcare and a social safety net, and I came from a family that had really never valued “stuff” growing up, but I do recall some pretty bleak holidays and birthdays in terms of material elements – getting a toothbrush and facecloth for Christmas, sharing a tin of spaghetti and meatballs on my Mum’s bed that I had warmed as my birthday dinner, receiving food hampers from the Salvation Army on a pretty regular basis. Luckily, I certainly never wanted for love or a sense of value and belonging, and boy did we laugh, often at our seemingly grim plight.

We had bounced around geographically when my family was still together following my father’s various appointments in the Anglican church, but had settled in Dunedin as family lore goes so that me and my three siblings would have access to better schools and employment opportunities. My parents had divorced by the time I had made it to my high school years, and I followed my older brother and sister to Logan Park High School. I was “painfully shy” as a child, and I credit LPHS with a lot in terms of bringing me out of my shell, introducing me to theatre in general and improv in particular, and opening door after door for me which culminated in auditions for theatre programs in the United States with my high school thespian troupe. We had excellent teachers, a culture where student cliques often evaporated in our theatre auditorium, and as I found connections and friendships in my drama classes it also became easier to find a place in the sea of uniformed bodies.

During the late 1980s Theatresports was in an enviable position in New Zealand. With generous sponsorship from the United Building Society, the short-form franchise was branded as United Theatresports and funding included money to pay for local improvisers to train and mentor high school students taking their first steps. In my sixth form year (US junior) I fond myself in such a workshop with the formidable Stayci Taylor as our teacher, and the rest, as they say, is history. Suddenly I was in a space where all those weird things I liked to do, like make up original songs while walking down Pinehill Road to school, had a name and a value. I recall volunteering to try improvising a song in one of those early sessions, and much to everyone’s surprise, including my own and certainly Stayci’s, I sort of did. Needless to say, I was hooked.

I don’t completely recall how we banded together, but soon I was in a team with three fellow students: Jason, Sarla and Jane. If I am remembering correctly, when it came time to settle on a team name, one of the ladies (I think it was Jane) offered that she had a large collection of long stripy socks, and so these became our dress code and our title. Much like these socks, in all the best ways, we were a rag-tag collection of folks you’d probably never consciously put together on a team, but we were relentlessly playful, and my teammates were willing to put up with my type A tendencies that were already amply present, making jars of ask-fors pre-written on slips on paper so we could just quickly draw one to inspire our rehearsal scenes, and the like.

Yes, I still have those jars. Thirty years later. They are in my quarantined office at work or I’d provide photographic evidence.

Theatresports had a pretty limited set of stock games in those days at least for those in the high school league (in addition to a snappy anthem extolling our sponsor) and we certainly did better in some of those structures than others. Our penchant for songs, and the luck of the draw in our local competitions got us to the first high school national finals and a trip to the North Island where the fates of improv did not smile as brightly on us! We certainly lacked the polish of some of our northern countrymen and women. I don’t think they quite knew what to make of us and our costuming choices. We placed third.

I owe a lot to those early Theatresports instructors, Stacyi Taylor, Patrick Davies and Martin Phelan specifically, as they also quickly opened doors for me into Dunedin Theatresports and soon my first paid gigs as a performer. They also taught the craft in a beautifully nuanced way, privileging story and connection, and were kind but unflinching in their feedback. I am also deeply grateful that from the get-go I had strong female role-models in the craft. My high school drama teacher, Denise Walsh, certainly deserves mention here too, although she is worthy of an entry all of her own.

And so, as the blog title states, I literally made my first steps as an improviser in knee-high stripy socks on an improv team of the same name.

I leave you with this refrain etched into my brain that we all sang before each performance from those days: “A story or verse, you just can’t rehearse, The sort of a sport you improvise… It’s United Theatresports. It’s United Theatresports.” Let it be said, it’s also the only sort of a sport that I’ve been able to play with any modicum of success. What sport has improv saved you from?

Cheers, David Charles.
www.improvdr.com
© 2020 David Charles/ImprovDr

Zip, Zap, Zoom: Focus and Online Improv

I’m teaching a couple of classes through Zoom for SAK University at the moment (one on narrative and the dramatic arc, the other on Shakespearean language and style, – thanks for asking!). During my spring semester at Rollins College in Winter Park, I also had to suddenly move an Acting course and Fundamentals of Improv class online with little notice as well. Needless-to-say it’s a steep and daunting learning curve to make theatrical performance work through an often less-than-reliable online medium. I know I’m not telling you something you don’t already know there! Putting aside the discussion for perhaps another day whether such a move is advisable or laudable, online platforms certainly pose new challenges (opportunities?) for live improvisers. (I do think it’s important to note here that companies such as the Hideout Theatre and Impro Theatre here in the States have been making valiant and exciting experiments in this area.)

A current student posed the question with this new technological reality in mind as she’s exploring a new project of her own: “What exercises have you found to be best for working on sharing focus in a scene?” First, I should contextualize my following musings with the disclaimer that, like many of us, I have been thrown into this new performance reality with little warning and that my experience in this world is no deeper than most. But here are a few focus-related discoveries in terms of what has seemed promising to me when working scenes and games in the digital classroom that has become home to so many of us overnight.

1.) Keep it small. At first I aimed to keep my syllabus and structures as planned, but I quickly found that the more students or improvisers that we used in a scene, the more likely communication missteps undermined the veracity and flow of the action. When I simplified nearly all of my scenic work into pairs (sometimes with a third waiting with “camera off” in the proverbial wings in case they were needed), the process and results became noticeably stronger. In this way, actors can also set their scene partner as their exclusive focus on the screen and have a fighting chance to make a more honest and fruitful connection. If you are playing in a larger group, turning off your camera as your character leaves is an obvious but helpful choice as well to minimize visual clutter.

2.) Don’t ramble. A move online has, for many of us, made us rely too heavily on our verbal gifts as improvisers and it’s easy for our bodies to become disengaged and for our words to lose specificity and agency. If we are cognizant that our words must carry the majority of our meaning and offers, then we must be economical and deliberate with those words. We should use each word with care, and make sure that we are providing clear and dramatic final punctuation. As our partner(s) await behind the screen, it doesn’t set them up for success if they are constantly unsure if we have, in fact, finished our sentences… or if… we’re still contemplating… how we might finish… our sentence. You get the picture.

3.) Use old-fashioned gives. My introductory improv classes always include a unit on giving and taking focus as I note, without a playwright or director in the traditional sense of those terms, we are responsible for always knowing where the focus should be on stage at any given moment. Especially if you’re in a larger group, throwing the focus carelessly into the air will typically create either a prolonged awkward silence or a cascade of overlapping dialog as your teammates try to figure out who was organically next in the scene. Use character names often (or familial equivalents, honey, son…) to mark the next likely speaker especially as the scene is being established. Clearly shift your focus and the target of your emotion on the screen to designate your focus throw, and explore tonal shifts to provide clues to your partners: most of us don’t talk to our parent with the same energy/voice that we talk to our significant other, and we can mine these distinctions to help share focus around.

4.) Scenic painting can help. If you can find simple ways to refer to your environment, and the people in it, you can set each other up for clear entrances and initial dialog exchanges. If we’ve been sitting at that restaurant table waiting to be served for what feels like an eternity, observing the carefree waiter who seems to be avoiding us, when we note that “I’ve finally caught his eye” and “he’s coming over,” we have set this actor up for a clear focus transition. If you don’t have the technology or skill to make clever green-screen background changes or add ambient sounds, heightened scene painting strikes me as a must in general as it allows for more fully fleshed out worlds to play within.

5.) Err on the side of interruption. This may be a personal preference, but the dead air between speech acts in zoom-based improv is one of the features that makes it most uncomfortable for me as an observer. If we’re using some of the strategies above, we then need to jump into the scenes with abandon thereby risking cutting off our partner(s). If someone interrupts you, embrace that they clearly thought you were wrapping up (or that you should have been wrapping up). If, as a group, this becomes too caustic or combative, check in afterwards and adjust the aggressiveness of your takes accordingly. Connected to this is making sure that your scenes have an energy that would justify such a strong approach to focus gives and takes. Deadpan or under-energized characters are equally as problematic on the screen as they are on the stage.

6.) Use the technology. For good or evil, this is the way many of us are improvising at the moment. If your audio cuts out, that needs to be justified. If you didn’t catch what someone said, you need to honor that and ask them to repeat it or make an assumption. If you’re a professional at changing backgrounds or have someone who is adept at wrangling different improvisers and screens onto a common online stage, then make sure that person is deeply thanked and use those dynamics to the best of your abilities. Again, perhaps a personal preference, just note that meta scenes about characters using zoom have largely been played out so look for content elsewhere.

It’s a little difficult for me to pinpoint precise exercises to develop each of these strategies as, in most cases, it strikes me that it’s largely about getting in reps under these new performance conditions; however, I think moving through each of these ideas as the point of concentration would help a lot. “We’re going to do 2-person scenes exclusively for this next round,” or “Let’s do some vignettes with strict limits on word counts,” or use the short-form game “Speak in Turn” to practice using a deliberate and repeating order. Then rinse and repeat, focusing on the techniques that feel most useful to your particular group and circumstances.

For those teaching and performing improv online, do these strategies resonate with your own best practices, or have you found other ways to make the most out of your zoom room?

Thanks for the question! Feel free to pose others in the comments below or by emailing me HERE.

Welcome to ImprovDr.com

Hello! Let me take a moment to introduce myself and welcome you to ImprovDr.com. I’m David, and I’ve been an improvisational practitioner for over 35 years now. I’ve spent the bulk of my professional and academic life writing about, dreaming about, and figuring out different ways to use improv in my teaching, directing, and on the stage as a performer.

Take a look around the website to learn a little more about me and my various experiences and projects. I’ve called my blog “The Short and the Long of it” as I’m one of those improvisers who likes to play on both sides on the fence, and as many do, believes that skills learnt in one style truly make you stronger in the other: are there still (m)any folks out there who don’t agree that these are really two parts of the same thing despite any posturing to the contrary?

A little about my journey: I was introduced to improvisation through Theatresports in my home nation of New Zealand during the late 1980s, and those lessons have deeply shaped my view and approach to the craft. (Shout out to Logan Park High School and Stripy Socks where the passion began – more on that in another post!) During the early 90s I came to the United States to study theatre and was a financially poor but artistically enriched student at Roosevelt University in Chicago. While I played with ComedySportz and later studied at the Players Workshop of the Second City, I now kick myself looking back on those days that I didn’t have the time and money to fully take advantage of all the amazing things that were happening at that special time in that dynamic place.

And then, as I often joke, I followed the Mississippi river (loosely) to Western Illinois University in Macomb for my MFA and then to Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge for my PhD. Because, of course, nothing makes more sense that someone committed to improv leaving Chicago in the mid-1990s… These new locations, needless-to-say, had much less access to improv, and so like many have done before me and will continue to do so now, I made as many opportunities as I could, creating shows and organizing troupes as there wasn’t anything ready-made, all the while reading up on anything I could get my hands on to further expand my own horizons.

In 2003, my doctorate fresh in hand, I relocated to the Orlando area in Florida to accept a teaching position at Rollins College, where the improv continued, and I had the good fortune to quickly connect with Sak Comedy Lab. This venue has been my professional improv home for about 20 years now minus a hiatus of 18 months or so when I was in the company of Walt Disney World’s now sadly defunct Comedy Warehouse. In the early 2000s there was little in the way of long-form in the area, and I’ve been doing my part to push that envelope whenever and wherever I can: on my home campus of Rollins, at Sak Comedy Lab, and in other Florida venues when they’ve let me onto their stages! This website includes some images and descriptions of the fruits (fresh or otherwise) of these improvisational long-form labors, and you’ll also see that I’ve never strayed far from being an active short-form player at the same time.

So, that’s the short and the long of it (this was probably more on the long side than I intended, but if you become a frequent visitor, you’ll quickly learn that I love words and am as verbose on the page as I am on the stage despite my best efforts to the contrary!) I’m going to strive to make weekly posts about games or techniques that I’m currently working with or musing on, and I also welcome you to pose any questions or conundrums that you might have in regard to this art-form that consumes so many of us so wonderfully and so completely. Maybe I’ll have a few thoughts that can help you unlock something in a new way.

Cheers, David Charles.
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