Wew, whole new teacher creates whole new rhythm. Bill (our wk 2 teacher) describes Alex (our wk 1 teacher) as “more a poet than a technician”. Bill is clearly more of a technician. I wrote down more words of wisdom today than in the entire week.
Warm up games: Circle of Doom (sit in a circle, set up by saying your name with a gesture, then pass it around the circle randomly – your own name (+gesture), then someone else’s. Continue till everyone knows enough names, then just do the other person’s name and gesture (which triggers them to do someone else’s name and gesture, etc). The words of wisdom about half way through – release yourself from remembering everything – between us we know everything, that what team’s for.
Warm up 2: Caligula – everyone must be touching at least one other person at any time. Build scene pictures, tableaux, whatever. Not so cool to watch, nice warm up.
Hey some of you may remember Steve Kimmins who played with scriptless for a while last year. He was mentioned this morning (for some reason Bill was listing English people who had done this course). Small world of impro!
And from Bill’s world of wisdom:
– you just need to be true or intentionally untrue for a scene to work
– you don’t have to be funny if you’re being true
– if you divide the number of laughs in a show by the number of lines in a show, fewer than 10% are funny (I’d say far fewer!) so just be real and build a context/platform for funny to happen
– be like impro hyenas – don’t take any scrap of laughter you can get, instead hunt your prey for days, be patient, and then make a killing
– we’re rarely confused in a good impro scene
– humour is reasonable vs unreasonable, drama is reasonable vs reasonable
– where a scene is set to a scene about relationship (it adds colour, but the relationship is what it’s really about)
We practiced “general agreement” scenes. And then we practiced something which in many workshops I have been warned against – parallel characters. It was explained that we needed to compete to be a better cliche of a charcter than the other (2 jocks “from the same womb”). Bill recommended this for multi-player scenes (4 people on stage, but only 2 charcters, because 2 play 1 “charcter”).
When jamming parallel charcters, the scene “ended” when the second player extended to a new topic which was “equally reasonable” – eg jocks talking about sleeping with girls move on to talking about beer.
Just before lunch we did “interviews” of 5 people in character. We got the characters from the physical thing (walk with a part of the body leading; intensify, change, change, change; make it cartoonish, pull it back to “real”, sit down to interview).
More character after lunch.
