Part Three: Hold on to What You Did.

Hold on to what you acknowledged yourself doing and how you did it, and do it more, in every way possible and at every opportunity. Do not let go, and passionately make more of it. Be possessed with what you created and how you are doing it.

In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy must passionately hold on to the notion of going back to Kansas. How she does this is in an innocent way. She must never waver from that innocent desire. She can have lots of things happen to her in that scenario—poppy fields, witches, and flying monkeys—but her innocent desire must grow stronger and stronger. The Tin Man must always want a heart, the Lion courage, and the Scarecrow a brain. They must never change, for if they do the movie's all but over.

This is all so true in improvisation, as well. The only difference is that you are creating the entire Dorothy on the spot.

It is perhaps the trickiest part of improvisation: Hanging on to what we create and heightening it, or making more of it. There are a few reasons I believe this is hard for people.

■ We're too nice.

We have a belief that by driving our point of view home in a scene we are railroading our fellow player. This belief might be true if you didn't use simple give-and-take communication and yelled continu­ously. But simply holding on to your creation and heightening it is not rude, it's expected! Good improvisers want their partners to create a powerful character or point of view and stick to it—not for them to tiptoe around and be polite and fizzle their character and give in. In improvisation, this kind of nice is not nice, it's weak.

■ We reach our fear threshold.

We go for a bit on a particular trek, fear we can't go anymore, and give in on our point of view by apologizing for it or by saying we were just kid­ding or by many other ways I'll chirp about later. You feel like what you are doing isn't working and won't work so you find a way to give up.

■ We think we've run out of things to do.

"There's no way I can keep finding ways to exhibit this character and its point of view in the scene. All the possibilities are exhausted."

All I can say to that is that the possibilities are endless. You could improvise for an hour with that character if you had to. I know because I've seen and done it. When improvisers do the same thing over and over in a scene and feel locked in that thing, all they think is, "This isn't working, I'd better try something else." It's the some­thing else that is key. Instead of changing your entire character and its point of view, create something else in the scene the character can react through. 1 say through and not to, because everything in an improv scene must be filtered through characters.

■ We think that different is funny.

Beginning improvisers often think that different is funny. "Must always be different, do something different. If I create this one character, it must change its mind all the time, or change the reality, or deny the reality, or question the partners behavior, and that's what will be funny." Ouch. The funny of improvisation comes from the choices one makes as a character in the relationship with another character, not switching up the character or relationship or the partner.

Always hold on to the thing that you discover you created. Hell, you created it, so hold on to it for dear life. Not only hold on, but also heighten it and exploit it for all it is worth.

Dorothy wants to get back to Kansas. But she can't stand around singing "Over the Rainbow" for two hours. She has to get on the yellow brick road and experience some wild and exciting adventures along the way. No matter the interesting obstacle, she must filter the experience through her unwavering desire to get home and her undying innocence.

Same with improvisation, but you create your own Dorothy, yellow brick road, witches, and flying monkeys, never talking about why there's a road or even an Oz, just accepting and experiencing it, never ever giving up your desire to get home to Kansas, and never ever defiling your innocence.

That is the play in improvisation. Creating a thing out of thin air, acknowledging what it is and how it does what it does, making bold choices from within that thing, and filtering everything else that comes your way through it, as well.

Дата добавления: 2015-07-08