Training vs The Universe

Switch off.

Sometimes I work to learn how to play a song. Perhaps a real song that I'm trying to copy, or perhaps something that I've composed and want to get just right. First you need the discipline to work out the music. (Geez, that would be easier if I could read music.) Next you get the fingering right, and work out how to repeat it. Then you play it as many times as necessary to really concrete the song in your head and in your muscle memory.

It's been a while since I've had to learn a song for a cover band, but learning so you can integrate with others adds an extra layer of complexity. First you learn your part, then everyone gets together and you try to gel your individual parts. It should be easy, it really should, but it can take a fair amount of effort and negotiation to integrate those pieces together.

Then you're performing - and until that song is really committed to muscle memory, you need to concentrate. Really think.


I find impro to be quite the opposite. Whether underscoring a scene or providing accompaniment, you're not using the same part of your brain. You're not reproducing a piece that you rehearsed earlier. You're completely in the moment, cooking up something brand new based on what is going on around you. (Well, perhaps you are reusing well known chord progressions. That's just music.)

When you're improvising music, you have lots of freedom to create what you want. You can't make a mistake, and no one is ever going to hear it again anyway. If you're integrating with others, you're all putting it together on the spot.


I've started to wonder what the real source of creative impro brain energy is.

Is it training?

You know how you can drive somewhere, get there, and realise that you weren't really concentrating the whole way? You were speeding up and slowing down and indicating and turning and negotiating with other cars... but without having to concentrate. What happened before, what happens next... they're not important. You're just in the moment, driving. It just becomes second nature once you've been driving for a while.

I guess you could say this is the product of training. You practice your skills, over and over, until you can call on them without thinking. Second nature.

By day I'm a development manager at a local software company. (And by night - the masked avenger, bringing order to chaos on the mean streets of Brisbane city. OK, maybe not.) I had a few days of project management training last week, and the instructor told us a story from his military days. Back in his youth, after several weeks of intense paratrooper training with his company, he and the boys had a night out on the town. After a few tasty beverages in pub #1, they journeyed on to pub #2 on one of those old London buses with the landing at the back. My instructor went to the back of the bus, hung out over the back railing, and pretended that he was going to jump, paratrooper style. Ha ha, very funny. Then one of his friends shouted "GOGOGO!!" and his training kicked in - he leapt from the moving bus and landed on the road. OK, so, maybe not the best application of training, but it illustrates the point: he was trained so he didn't have to think about what to do, he just did it. He reacted without conscious thought. Extremely important in the military.

Is that what you're doing when you do some good impro? Calling on your training? Or...

Is it the universe?

This is going to sound pretty lame, but... I'm starting to come around to the idea that a really great impro performance sort of comes from the universe rather than the performer. The performer stops thinking, commits to being in the moment, and they open up a conduit to... something... and out comes brilliance. I have stage-improvising friends that have observed that sort of phenomenon, that the stuff just seems to come out without a whole lot of direction from them. I suspect this is just as much the case with music; listening back to gigs, I swear up and down that I could never have put that progression together or played that particular thing, but there it is in all its 128kbps glory.

The Zenprov podcast frequently touches on this sort of idea, that a performer can tap in to a source of brilliance external to themselves.

What do you think?

When you're at your improvising peak, is the universe calling the shots? Or do you think "the universe" is just code for "the subconscious"? Since you know your craft and have built up those mental pathways to speed it along, is your brain just handling it the same way it handles driving somewhere? Or have you surrendered control to something else?

Photo by zen

Interlude

Take a breather from your narrative for a minute.

Longform musicals can be quite intense, as the action rockets along from one plot point to the next. You might have multiple storylines weaving in and out of each other, raising the stakes and setting up a big finale. Although a tight, focused show is great, maintaining that intensity can be pretty tiring for an audience.

Sometimes it is worth inserting a scene or a song to take a break and have a rest, to give folks a chance to have a breather before the big final number.

It can be really useful to give the audience a palate-cleanser now and again. If your show has a strong director who really watches the pace of the show and adjusts it as required, a tool like this can really help to push that final scene over the top.

This is really well illustrated with a song from One Bride.

Towards the end of the final act, the two main story threads were rushing towards a conclusion. Throughout the story, Golly (the youngest of seven brothers) finds himself falling in love with Nancy (childhood friend). Nancy falls for Golly as well, but keeps her feelings in check - holding fast to her goal of digging up some buried gold and leaving the town. As the story progresses, she makes a sacrifice to ensure Golly's future security by agreeing to marry the nefarious brother Dudley. Golly finds an invitation to Dudley's wedding, and (unaware that Nancy is the bride) makes his way to the church.

In this scene, Brett, the town matchmaker, is setting up for the wedding. Brett (played by the very clever Luke Allan, of The Sexy Detective fame) reflects on his success at setting up Nancy and Dudley's match, singing To Have A Wedding.

Immediately prior to this scene, the director Mike Griffin (also from The Sexy Detective) realised what was needed was a palate-cleanser, to refresh the audience ahead of the big climactic scene. Rumour has it he practically pushed Luke on to stage whispering "Sing a song about weddings!" Luke forms a really nice song that isn't particularly tied in to the plot; it stands on its own. He was ably supported by the cast providing soft backing vocals from offstage, giving the song a bit more texture.

One thing I really liked about this song was that it was a strong performance that put the focus on a supporting role, giving Luke a moment to shine as Brett. In a show that featured a lot of comedy, drama and even slapstick, Luke held the audience for a few minutes with a gimmick-free, straight solo song. Well, almost gimmick-free; right towards the end, you hear the audience laugh - Luke did a mighty fake-out, motioning that he was going to finish that last phrase, then pulling back at the last second. (I'm glad I didn't take the bait!)

Photo by Al Caeiro

Relying on Tricks

Are rehearsed tricks and shticks ok?

Just because you're improvising a show, it doesn't mean everything you do is new. Most of the time it is. But every improviser has been in the situation where they can fall back on a gag or a shtick that they might have used before.

To some extent, this is just applying your acting skills. If you put on a French accent, or start walking like a caveman, you're applying some straightforward skills to augment your character. You're still giving yourself plenty of room to make stuff up. But... there's a point where it becomes more than that, where you're pressing play on a recording of something you've done before.

We see this often in Song in the Style Of. You might have a smoky jazz number, and the singer has clearly set up that it takes place in a club. So another character comes on during the song as a waiter, holding a tray of drinks. That fits, right? Was it improvised? Not really... There's a stronger example in a gag that we do during country songs. Maybe 50% of our country songs find they're supported by another player miming riding a mechanical bull. (We have that absolutely down pat now. If you need to hire a mechanical bull rider mime, let me know.) Audiences go crazy for this stuff, but it's a routine that you draw on rather than improvise.

Is that ok? I tend to say yes - you're there to entertain, and doing something that supports the scene and entertains can't be bad.

Musicians also have a bag of tricks they can draw on. Again, I'm not sure if it's a completely good or bad thing, but I fall back to those tricks quite often.

The best example I can think of is this: When we do a scene in the style of Shakespeare, I will inevitably call up a harp patch on the keyboard, and launch in to some nice flowy stuff when the scene starts. We quite often kick those off with a soliloquy by a narrator, and the two combine quite well. The harp fits, it serves the scene, but it is probably less improvised than other stuff.

Similarly, I will use a cheesy organ for a soap opera scene. It's a strange choice; I don't think any soap operas actually use cheesy organs. Daytime soaps use strings and dramatic piano. There's just something very melodramatic about using that organ sound; I suppose it reminds me of radio serials.


Are there tricks you use and fall back on? Do you think it's ok?

Picture by Anthony Massingham, used with permission

Impro: Transient, or Permanent?

Is recording an improvised performance a good thing?

Most of the time, we consider an improvised scene to be a fleeting moment, something that is shared between the performers and the audience, never to be seen again. That's one of the things that makes it special and memorable.

Sometimes an improvised scene can become more permanent. Several improvised TV shows have made their mark, including Whose Line Is It Anyway and Thank God You're Here. Countless improvised productions are available on the internet, from websites, YouTube, or as podcasts. Those performances are now permanent, ready for you to watch or listen to, over and over again.

Is recording an improvised performance a good thing?

Problem #1 – Sometimes impro doesn't work. It's perfectly ok for a short-form impro scene to go down in flames – you take a risk, it doesn't work out, you kill the scene and move on to something good.

So… when you record something, do you take the good with the bad? Audiences sitting watching your scene go down the tubes know that you're improvising, they can see your panic and sweat - and they are sympathetic. Someone watching on their PC/TV/iPod won't have that same attachment to the performers, so they'll be more critical. A bad scene is just going to look bad.

So, you edit that one out. Now you're editing. Hmm. Editing impro sounds wrong.

Problem #2 - A really strong improvised scene, seen live, is a wonderful thing for an audience. But if you put that same scene on a television, where it might sit alongside Firefly or The Office or Deadwood? Does a viewer have a different expectation of the quality of entertainment on a television? Again, the home viewer hasn't seen the cast panic and work to make a good scene, they haven't been there for the offers/gimmes/ask-fors, they don't have the same attachment to the performance.



I readily admit to loving impro, from the moment I saw it at high school, to now – more than half of my life. There are moments from shows that I can still remember giving me goosebumps, whether I was watching the show or performing in it. I like replaying those in my head. So perhaps it's natural for me to like the idea of recording shows, for posterity's sake if nothing else. I went through a phase very early on where I recorded musical games in short-form shows, and several of those recordings made it on to the site as Songs and Operas from Theatresports Lightning Doubles. For the last few months, my SOP has been to record all the audio for my shows, and make them available for the cast. Yes, I mine that stuff for material for this site, like Joel's song about the Ipswich Mall or Tristan and Amy's What a Beautiful Day For A Walk. I think there is educational (and also hopefully entertainment) value in those songs.

Do impro recordings have broad appeal to a wide audience? I'm not so sure. Those successful impro TV shows have been engineered for success, moreso than a typical short-form show. Thank God You're Here controls the scenes very tightly, so the narrative can stray ever so slightly from the plan before getting pulled back quickly. And there's a lot of discussion about just how improvised Whose Line really is; at the very least, I imagine it is heavily edited to preserve just the scenes that are excellent.

We had a conversation amongst the cast of Prognosis: Death! about how we might use the video recordings of our shows. Put them out for the general public on YouTube? Or just for our (ahem) private collections? The general consensus was that they would be great for the cast to rewatch, and for dedicated fans to enjoy, but not for the general public. If you didn't already love the show, the performers, the characters, you probably probably wouldn't find the video entertaining. Without a lot of work, impro just doesn't translate well to the small screen, and you risk publishing something that reflects poorly on your company - even if the show was great.

I've had the same sort of chat about audio from entire long-form shows like One Bride for Seven Brothers. If you were there, the audio is great for keeping the memory alive in your head. If you knew the performers or were an improviser yourself, you could probably fill in the gaps and enjoy it. For the general public, though, it's just not going to be engaging enough.

Will that stop me recording shows? Nope. I get a kick out of re-listening to performances, and getting to enjoy my friends' brilliance over and over.

What do you think? Should an improvised show be left in the moment, never to be seen again?

Photo by Scott Meis Photography