In the last installment of the blog (that honestly was published two weeks ago, but could have easily have been a year ago), I talked about the resistance of improv to criticism - which in this case isn't the gripes about improv culture, but is the aesthetic artistic analysis and evaluation of the value of a piece of improvised theater.
One of the things to get out of the way at the top is that any criticism of improv must endeavor to divorce itself, as much as possible, from personal judgements about the producers of the improvisation. A significant pillar of the practice of Neo-futurism, which, like improv, traffics exceedingly close to the reality of the performer(s) lived experience, and receiving feedback on a piece that is incredibly personal can feel like receiving feedback on the person themselves. This is not the aim of criticism, and shouldn't be, perhaps outside of the acknowledgment, for example, of the influence of H.P. Lovecraft's xenophobia and racism and the types of stories he wrote and how he wrote them. In general though, I'd argue most of the themes that we tackle in improv don't require us to know a lot about the lived experience of the performers to understand what they're doing on stage, at least not the way we are typically teaching and directing it. And at the very least, the immediacy of improv precludes a broader understanding of context, in that we're already coexisting in this context.
We should instead focus on trying to evaluate the relative merits of a piece of work as compared to other improv shows. Since that article, I've been trying to find examples of criticism to see where we're at, before figuring out where we're going. More specifically: what do we as creators of improvisation and, ideally, consumers of improvisation need to know in order to "appropriately" dissect improv in order to judge it?
Improv is unique in that, unlike most of other art forms, has very few enthusiasts or buffs that aren't also performers. (That this is likely due to most improv theater's business models being built primarily around making significantly more money off a student than an audience member is a discussion for another time.) We don't have fans in the same way that sports, film, music, or even furniture has fans: interested followers who partake in discussion and consumption but not deed.
And those contributions aren't insignificant, for while we might listen to Martin Scorsese's opinion of filmmaking, the academic critiques about what makes film "good" really fall to an adjacent class of user; to do something different runs a heavy risk of an incestuous ouroboros of self-indulgence (which, one could argue, improv already has). If you want to do improv for other improvisers, be prepared for a different kind of feedback and support than if you try to get the general public interested. A non-improviser likely wants some different experiences from a performance than an improviser does. Conversely, an improviser not only wants different things, but is also like to ignore some things simply because of how we're trained. We already know roughly how the process is, so we don't or can't "see" the things that might be glaring to other people.
If we consider the question of critique as "what is the most significant thing about this work" (which is, as it turns out, what the average audience is also interested in) through the lens that understands that the work is fleeting and discretely temporary, then the question becomes "what is the most significant thing about the kinds of work this group can produce". This makes our job easier, in a sense. We can look at individual shows or scenes not as the end-all-be-all, but as evidence towards what can be produced.
Since we largely sell a "process", visible in real time, to an audience, we really can only talk about that process primarily, and the ultimate product secondarily. I don't remove the final product from the equation entirely, because if we look back retroactively on shows, all we can truly remember is what we saw and heard (and felt) and that becomes the product. And, consequently, if we look at a tape of a great show, we're seeing that product of what we saw on stage: words, emotion, scenes, we can no longer view the process. The sudden schism between process and product may be why improv shows lack entertainment value (often) when viewed on tape. Those two diametric elements are now divorced, and in doing so, the product now lacks immediacy, presence, and risk.
As I've been wrestling with the nature of critical improv theory recently, I've been working from the angle of what are the limitations - knowing the boundaries and the conformational hindrances are how we can hopefully begin to describe just what the hell it is we're doing all the time.
Friday, May 22, 2020
Friday, May 1, 2020
This Is Not A Review of the Hit Netflix Special "Middleditch and Schwartz"
"I'm excited that so many people are being introduced to Longform Improv thanks to a Netflix special," says my friend Elaine on Facebook. She's talking about "Middleditch and Schwartz" (which for brevity's sake I'll abbreviate M&S), a series of three comedy "specials" that the streaming platform has administered to us, here in the absolute depths of the monotony that has become the current coronavirus pandemic. I only put 'special' in quotations, because for those of us in the longform improv world, a duo doing a one hour set isn't in itself truly special; for many improv theaters across the US, that's a pretty standard weekly occurrence, perhaps outside of the set length. Indeed, the general consensus of my improv friends on social media (~75% of the people whose posts I regularly see) is that there is rising hope that once we can do shows again that audiences will come flocking out to see what the apparently underground local scene is like, a regular regret among local community leaders. (Indeed: in 2018 my parents came to Chicago for the weekend, and we went to see the Second City MainStage show the Friday they got in. When they told their AirBnB host, he, a lifelong Chicago resident in the Lakeview neighborhood, asked 'What's that? Is that new?', of a venerable 50+ year pillar of the Chicago and national comedy scene occupying four floors of an entire city block in Oldtown.)
I have doubts that people will come out, not the least of which is that M&S looks a lot less like the kinds of improv shows that improvisers hold up as paragons of virtue, in the way that some people talk about Cook County Social Club or Parallelogramophonograph or Beer Shark Mice are revered, and a lot more like two already modestly famous actors doing a pretty funny show. I guess if you're already famous (or improv famous), it might make more opportunities for you to hock your show at various festivals and theaters (or possibly Netflix).
This isn't truly a review of M&S - I'll only say that it is very funny, is definitely improv, but isn't an example of what I would show students of what kind of show they should aspire to; for example, at least a few times every show there is an onstage negotiation about who is present, what their names are, and what is happening. Those things come up in typical shows, but it happens often enough here that it feels less like an honest "oops" and more like careless, thoughtless play. Most of the show is really just watching two men goof around with each other playfully, which may or may not be your kind of improv. End of "review".
More than anything though, we don't get to review or think critically about an improv show, and certainly not write about it. There are precious few reviews of improv shows, and the problem is a product of the lack of critical theory we have in popular culture for discussing improv in a critical light.
1. At a Q&A following a screening of "Rio Bravo" (1959, dir. Howard Hawks) in the halcyon days of this past February, Michael Phillips said that the basis of critical thought boils down to three questions:
In improvised theater, for better or worse, most shows would probably answer 'be funny', 'sometimes', and 'depends on how funny it was and how often you're coming to shows'. I've been in a few shows where we tried really had to "tell a coherent story" or "leave no loose threads" and those felt like quantum leaps from the other 90% of shows we did where we didn't even know who the cast was going to be until five minutes before showtime, and the stage plan was "let's do X form" (abandoned three minutes into the set because someone forgot or didn't know what the form was). My point here is not to spend an article knocking how casually we treat improv and how 90% of improv shows are 'meh' to 'nah' (see previous posts and also every improviser's social media ever), but to remind us that if we're going to think critically about shows, there's dearly little purchase to make a case on other than "yeah, funny".
2. Tied into #1 above, improv as a culture has a problem when it comes to what we care about and what we value. If you were to go through classes and read books and try to remove yourself from the macro culture, you'd probably believe that improv is all about mastering the craft, treating your fellows like 'artists, poets, and geniuses', forging interpersonal connections, getting out of your head, facing your fear, and aspiring to art over being funny. If you've done improv for some time, you know that's partially true, but it's mostly false. Being successful in improv is about being funny. Full stop, period, end of sentence. I've sat in auditions where whether someone was good at improv could be a tiebreaker, but at the end of the day, we cast the funniest people, end of story. Even Mick Napier of the Annoyance, the self-proclaimed watcher "of more improv auditions than anyone, ever" has said on multiple occasions that the people who get cast are the funniest. Improv values being funny as absolute currency, good anywhere, and to a lesser degree fame (see any festival ever) and to a lesser degree still whether or not the practitioner owns/operates an improv theater or festival. And that's it. Funny, Fame, Fiefdom. Again, not a gripe about the system that we all occupy and cannot change, but it's difficult for us to square up a craft that believes whole-heartedly one thing on paper, but rewards something completely different in practice. (For evidence, read every improv book ever, which probably has a chapter titled "Don't worry about being funny".)
3. The other glaring problem is one of repeatability; I can review M&S (I won't, but I could. Someone else already has so read them) because it exists in a state that can be reviewed identically by anyone with a Netflix account. Same goes for "Trust Us, This is All Made Up" (The TJ and Dave DVD) or Asssscat (for the record, I looked up how many S's are in it), episodes of "Whose Line is it Anyway?", and a small handful of tapes or uploads of teams (for my money, the tapes of Trophy Wife and 3033 are the gold standard). But for a lot of improv shows, they exist in that moment, and that moment alone (and outside of a few notable exceptions above, no regular audience member is going to watch a single-camera 25 minute video of an improv team playing on a Wednesday night) and then they're gone forever. Being critical of an improv team would require watching several shows to get a feel for the "average" output of the team, and while we as practitioners might, a "reviewer" probably won't. And your average audience member is probably only coming to see a show once, maybe twice a year? Have a bummer, and you've probably lost them forever.
4. The logical extension of the above is "which show(s)" are they going to watch? In my other theater life, I'm constantly writing press releases, begging press (and honestly anyone - are you a member of chamber of commerce? I'll comp you) to come give our production some ink. When they come, they come on opening weekend. This makes sense; if we're only running for three weeks, we'll get a few inches of copy for our second and third weeks, but what do we do for an improv show? I've had a few shows that ran regularly, but most of them have "open-ended" runs with an inconsistent schedule. If I get some press, how the hell are they going to write about a show they watched that will be next Thursday, the following Friday at 11, and the last Sunday at 7pm, and will run at least through the end of the month, but we're still waiting to hear from the theater manager if we'll get any spots in the following two months? And are reviewers supposed to come on opening night of a team? Most teams last a handful of months, are vague reconfigurations of other teams, have inconsistent casts ("hey ya'll I'm going to miss tonight because I have another show at Z theater, break all the legs!"), and are part of "three great teams for you tonight" so which version of your show are they supposed to review? If I was an improv reviewer, I'd wait until a team had been around for 6 months before I even considered coming to see them, or they had a definite end to the run.
5. And what do we want to critique? We don't have sets, costumes, props. usually no music, little lighting design, and our forms are often incomprehensible to an average audience or are simplified versions of extant genres or contexts ("Come see our Improvised Beach Movie show!"). So when a critic does commit some type to an improv show, they often rely on just describing the performer's appearance, which feels at least a little weird and mostly un-necessary. They way we teach improv is probably about 70% writing, 25% acting, and 5% directing, so just what in the hell should we be talking about once we get past "it was funny"? Well, we obviously still have to explain what improv is, so that's good for about a paragraph or two. Maybe worth devoting a paragraph to whether or not it is "silly", "serious", and/or "playful", and maybe another to whether or not the players have chemistry together, but if you're an improviser, you're probably nodding your head and thinking "that's what improv is". We wouldn't expect a critical analysis of "regular" theater to say:
6. Last one, promise. There are no independent reviewers of improv who are also knowledgable students. If you live in a city that has a lot of improv, like NY, LA, Chicago, maybe Austin(?), you might be fortunate enough to have a critic that frequents comedy shows, but (at least here in Chicago) mostly when I see columns dedicated to a non-theater, non-standup performance, it's usually the scripted SC MainStage or ETC shows. In most environments, theatrical critics won't spend their time on an improv show unless it has Fame or a significant word-of-mouth behind it, not when traditional theater is much more "accessible" and is always clamoring for reviewers (and, see all the above, is easier to discuss and dissect than an improv show because of the nature of how theater has organized itself). And then, your theater reviewer probably hasn't done improv, so they probably don't know what they're looking for. Among improvisers, you're either actively doing it or have left it to move into other industries (either your "regular" job or to deal "real acting/writing/directing"). If you've left it, you either left on good terms with improv, or bad terms, and if the latter, you probably never want to see improv as long as you live. If you left on good terms or are still actively doing it, you can't talk about improv critically from inside it. Write a bad line (or hell, even a mediocre) line about a production, and that person/group/theater may never work with you again, and if you don't believe me, just know that all improvisers hold grudges, and their memories are long. Every community has people that are persona non grata to someone, and if they make decisions, they are gone. And obviously, you can't review your own shows - and if you're playing six times a week, you probably don't have time watch anything else anyway (seriously, just try to invite an improviser to an improv show).
Add all those problems, and you have an enterprise that resists review and critique, even from an artistic level. I hope that one day in the future we'll have enough language, distance, substance, and clarity to analyze it as an art form that seems to see itself either above or incapable of criticism. Maybe some hard critique will help in pushing it into the next wave. In the meantime, may I recommend the Netflix comedy special "Middleditch and Schwartz"? It's very funny, and the best example of what improv looks like right now.
I have doubts that people will come out, not the least of which is that M&S looks a lot less like the kinds of improv shows that improvisers hold up as paragons of virtue, in the way that some people talk about Cook County Social Club or Parallelogramophonograph or Beer Shark Mice are revered, and a lot more like two already modestly famous actors doing a pretty funny show. I guess if you're already famous (or improv famous), it might make more opportunities for you to hock your show at various festivals and theaters (or possibly Netflix).
This isn't truly a review of M&S - I'll only say that it is very funny, is definitely improv, but isn't an example of what I would show students of what kind of show they should aspire to; for example, at least a few times every show there is an onstage negotiation about who is present, what their names are, and what is happening. Those things come up in typical shows, but it happens often enough here that it feels less like an honest "oops" and more like careless, thoughtless play. Most of the show is really just watching two men goof around with each other playfully, which may or may not be your kind of improv. End of "review".
More than anything though, we don't get to review or think critically about an improv show, and certainly not write about it. There are precious few reviews of improv shows, and the problem is a product of the lack of critical theory we have in popular culture for discussing improv in a critical light.
1. At a Q&A following a screening of "Rio Bravo" (1959, dir. Howard Hawks) in the halcyon days of this past February, Michael Phillips said that the basis of critical thought boils down to three questions:
- What was the creator trying to say?
- Did they say it?
- Was it worth saying?
In improvised theater, for better or worse, most shows would probably answer 'be funny', 'sometimes', and 'depends on how funny it was and how often you're coming to shows'. I've been in a few shows where we tried really had to "tell a coherent story" or "leave no loose threads" and those felt like quantum leaps from the other 90% of shows we did where we didn't even know who the cast was going to be until five minutes before showtime, and the stage plan was "let's do X form" (abandoned three minutes into the set because someone forgot or didn't know what the form was). My point here is not to spend an article knocking how casually we treat improv and how 90% of improv shows are 'meh' to 'nah' (see previous posts and also every improviser's social media ever), but to remind us that if we're going to think critically about shows, there's dearly little purchase to make a case on other than "yeah, funny".
2. Tied into #1 above, improv as a culture has a problem when it comes to what we care about and what we value. If you were to go through classes and read books and try to remove yourself from the macro culture, you'd probably believe that improv is all about mastering the craft, treating your fellows like 'artists, poets, and geniuses', forging interpersonal connections, getting out of your head, facing your fear, and aspiring to art over being funny. If you've done improv for some time, you know that's partially true, but it's mostly false. Being successful in improv is about being funny. Full stop, period, end of sentence. I've sat in auditions where whether someone was good at improv could be a tiebreaker, but at the end of the day, we cast the funniest people, end of story. Even Mick Napier of the Annoyance, the self-proclaimed watcher "of more improv auditions than anyone, ever" has said on multiple occasions that the people who get cast are the funniest. Improv values being funny as absolute currency, good anywhere, and to a lesser degree fame (see any festival ever) and to a lesser degree still whether or not the practitioner owns/operates an improv theater or festival. And that's it. Funny, Fame, Fiefdom. Again, not a gripe about the system that we all occupy and cannot change, but it's difficult for us to square up a craft that believes whole-heartedly one thing on paper, but rewards something completely different in practice. (For evidence, read every improv book ever, which probably has a chapter titled "Don't worry about being funny".)
3. The other glaring problem is one of repeatability; I can review M&S (I won't, but I could. Someone else already has so read them) because it exists in a state that can be reviewed identically by anyone with a Netflix account. Same goes for "Trust Us, This is All Made Up" (The TJ and Dave DVD) or Asssscat (for the record, I looked up how many S's are in it), episodes of "Whose Line is it Anyway?", and a small handful of tapes or uploads of teams (for my money, the tapes of Trophy Wife and 3033 are the gold standard). But for a lot of improv shows, they exist in that moment, and that moment alone (and outside of a few notable exceptions above, no regular audience member is going to watch a single-camera 25 minute video of an improv team playing on a Wednesday night) and then they're gone forever. Being critical of an improv team would require watching several shows to get a feel for the "average" output of the team, and while we as practitioners might, a "reviewer" probably won't. And your average audience member is probably only coming to see a show once, maybe twice a year? Have a bummer, and you've probably lost them forever.
4. The logical extension of the above is "which show(s)" are they going to watch? In my other theater life, I'm constantly writing press releases, begging press (and honestly anyone - are you a member of chamber of commerce? I'll comp you) to come give our production some ink. When they come, they come on opening weekend. This makes sense; if we're only running for three weeks, we'll get a few inches of copy for our second and third weeks, but what do we do for an improv show? I've had a few shows that ran regularly, but most of them have "open-ended" runs with an inconsistent schedule. If I get some press, how the hell are they going to write about a show they watched that will be next Thursday, the following Friday at 11, and the last Sunday at 7pm, and will run at least through the end of the month, but we're still waiting to hear from the theater manager if we'll get any spots in the following two months? And are reviewers supposed to come on opening night of a team? Most teams last a handful of months, are vague reconfigurations of other teams, have inconsistent casts ("hey ya'll I'm going to miss tonight because I have another show at Z theater, break all the legs!"), and are part of "three great teams for you tonight" so which version of your show are they supposed to review? If I was an improv reviewer, I'd wait until a team had been around for 6 months before I even considered coming to see them, or they had a definite end to the run.
5. And what do we want to critique? We don't have sets, costumes, props. usually no music, little lighting design, and our forms are often incomprehensible to an average audience or are simplified versions of extant genres or contexts ("Come see our Improvised Beach Movie show!"). So when a critic does commit some type to an improv show, they often rely on just describing the performer's appearance, which feels at least a little weird and mostly un-necessary. They way we teach improv is probably about 70% writing, 25% acting, and 5% directing, so just what in the hell should we be talking about once we get past "it was funny"? Well, we obviously still have to explain what improv is, so that's good for about a paragraph or two. Maybe worth devoting a paragraph to whether or not it is "silly", "serious", and/or "playful", and maybe another to whether or not the players have chemistry together, but if you're an improviser, you're probably nodding your head and thinking "that's what improv is". We wouldn't expect a critical analysis of "regular" theater to say:
The play featured complete sentences, scenes where the plot advanced, actions, emotions, and during one particularly pivotal moment, themes and subtext. The actors even memorized their lines!That's what I expect already, and critical theory needs to be rooted in "how is this different" from other examples, and "is it worth watching". The bottom line is, we're just not good at using words to analyze just what we're doing.
6. Last one, promise. There are no independent reviewers of improv who are also knowledgable students. If you live in a city that has a lot of improv, like NY, LA, Chicago, maybe Austin(?), you might be fortunate enough to have a critic that frequents comedy shows, but (at least here in Chicago) mostly when I see columns dedicated to a non-theater, non-standup performance, it's usually the scripted SC MainStage or ETC shows. In most environments, theatrical critics won't spend their time on an improv show unless it has Fame or a significant word-of-mouth behind it, not when traditional theater is much more "accessible" and is always clamoring for reviewers (and, see all the above, is easier to discuss and dissect than an improv show because of the nature of how theater has organized itself). And then, your theater reviewer probably hasn't done improv, so they probably don't know what they're looking for. Among improvisers, you're either actively doing it or have left it to move into other industries (either your "regular" job or to deal "real acting/writing/directing"). If you've left it, you either left on good terms with improv, or bad terms, and if the latter, you probably never want to see improv as long as you live. If you left on good terms or are still actively doing it, you can't talk about improv critically from inside it. Write a bad line (or hell, even a mediocre) line about a production, and that person/group/theater may never work with you again, and if you don't believe me, just know that all improvisers hold grudges, and their memories are long. Every community has people that are persona non grata to someone, and if they make decisions, they are gone. And obviously, you can't review your own shows - and if you're playing six times a week, you probably don't have time watch anything else anyway (seriously, just try to invite an improviser to an improv show).
Add all those problems, and you have an enterprise that resists review and critique, even from an artistic level. I hope that one day in the future we'll have enough language, distance, substance, and clarity to analyze it as an art form that seems to see itself either above or incapable of criticism. Maybe some hard critique will help in pushing it into the next wave. In the meantime, may I recommend the Netflix comedy special "Middleditch and Schwartz"? It's very funny, and the best example of what improv looks like right now.
Wednesday, April 22, 2020
Doom is a Mood
As the world has retreated to its own various holes and out of public spaces due to the potentially significant (and catastrophic) coronavirus (Covid-19), we've necessitated that only jobs and enterprises deemed "essential" have been permitted to continue operations. The list of such essential activities seems to swing fairly wildly from 'no duh' (healthcare, public transportation, grocery) to 'huh?" (WWE, dry-cleaning (no knocks on dry cleaners, but I can't imagine there is much of a need for many suits or ballgowns right now)), but it does seem that the line is holding that most live entertainment - here namely improv - is finding itself to be "un-essential" against in the light of potential morbidity and mortality. Not that I could really imagine what improv would look like at present, were it to continue; a team of eight 24-year olds wearing masks and pretending to drive or conduct job interviews while 50+ patrons (half of which are the prior/next team(s)) sipping BYOB IPA's laugh behind the footlights just feels surreal.
As a result, it seems that this might be one of the longest stretches for most improvisers to go without doing improv. Sure, there are some Zoom jams, some online classes that may fill the gaps - but based on my own experience, and what I've heard from others, these will always be stop-gaps to satisfying the itch, and we're all counting down the days until we can do our Crazy 8's and Harolds in spaces with other warm bodies, preferably a nice hot crowd. For me, I realized last week that this is now the longest gap I've had from doing improv since 2005: the summer and fall immediately after I graduated college and before I moved back to Hattiesburg. And if the lockdown goes as long as the estimates are looking (based on a number of sources, some official and and some not, I'd wager there won't really be an "improv show" until August, and it'll probably be weird), this might be the longest I've gone without really doing improv since I started doing it in 2003.
I'm not sure if everyone else is taking the opportunity to evaluate or reflect on what improv "is" and what their place is in it. Over the last ~17 years, it has been a hobby, avocation, occupation, tool, social outlet, frustration, and aspiration. Through it, I've made some of the best friends that I've ever had; ones that let me crash on their couch, ones that I only see three times at year at festivals, and ones that I've seen get married and start lives with each other. It has also been a crucible through which I have seen some of the worst in people, and discovered which ones are irresponsible, immoral, unethical, and unprofessional, and under what circumstances they are willing to sacrifice their principles for the thing they "love" in favor of a spell of slow doom giving in to their basest instincts. At the risk of this sounding too dramatic ("The worst is not, So long as we can say, 'This is the worst'), I've also known the quietly diligent, the easily talented, people who have no friends but colleagues, and people who've only come to the table for a snack, not the whole feast.
It's gotten me thinking a lot about "improvisers" as a class, and the various ways in which we've categorized ourselves in relation to each other: owners, for instance, those who have legal and administrative custody and stewardship of the business. (It dawned on me that some improv theater owners never seem to start an improv theater with the intention of presenting an improved product, service, or manner of business - only the desire for them to be the ones providing it.) But improv theater owners are not monoliths, because improv theaters are not typical business ventures. The theater does not have many "employees" in the traditional sense, and instead the line is very blurry between an employee (someone who is paid to perform work) and a customer (someone who is paying for work to be performed).
Instead, improvisers often straddle (and co-occupy) many lanes during their "career" from an audience member watching a show, to a student paying for classes/workshops, to a performer not being paid for providing work that people have paid for, to (preciously rarely) a performer being paid for work that people have paid for, to being paid to be a teacher. Even the traditional "staff" at a theater are a mix of people doing work for intern credit, being paid hourly, drawing a traditional salary (oftentimes supplemented by additional pay for teaching and coaching), or merely volunteering their time (as happens regularly during festivals).
As a result, the improvisers at theaters get (justifiably) cranky at theater management who make decisions or rules; it's because everyone lives in a soupy middle zone of employee and customer (an employstomer, if you will). None of them are shareholders (people who hold legal and financial stake in an enterprise) in an official sense, but don't we all feel a rush of joy when a new theater opens or an extant one moves into a new space and an equal crushing blow when one closes or a team is cut? Every employstomer is responsible for simultaneously supporting and being supported by a business they have zero say in.
A lot of writing and thought has been given over the last five years or so to what a community is, and how to cultivate and foster its growth. Of course, communities are interesting in that they can (and often do) span multiple theaters, and really more cleanly defined by who isn't in them. Communities are groups of people with a common geographical, cultural, or value set, so to say the Chicago Improv Community is an amazingly amorphous description to define a group of people who've never been in the same room together - I know there's probably a thousand improvisers here I've never met and never will meet, and somehow they and I currently have enough in common to have the same general needs and goals.
To underline though: not all owners are bad. People don't become inherently bad because they sign a lease or have to make decisions. Not all decisions work for all people all the time, and leadership is about making tough decisions sometimes. True leaders are those that are there for the high times as well as the low; who have values and are willing to risk things for their values. Anything else is a term paper. Leadership in improv must come with the understanding that your customer, employee, and colleague are often the same fucking person. To be in our global improv community necessitates understanding the strange interconnectedness we all apparently have.
I don't know what improv will look like when it comes back. A friend asked me today: 'what's the first meal you're going to have when the quarantine is over?", and I stumbled at the simplicity of the question. It's folly to assume that the current state of affairs will have a clean stop and one day we'll all restart our Level 1's and Main Stage shows. The question 'when will be your first improv show back' is multiple parts: 1) when will we have a full rehearsal again, 2) when is the first show we can sell tickets to, 3) when is the first show that'll be packed, and 4) when will it be "business as usual", as well as another dozen subquestions that'll each have to be answered one step at a time, and the change will be so gradual that we probably won't notice right away that we got back to normal.
Maybe a better question is, what will our relationship(s) with improv look like when things get "back to normal". Will there be the same glut of shows, will we be so casual with our practice (and I mean practice here more in the sense that a doctor or lawyers have a practice), and will we still tolerate and endorse the same shallow negligence as before?
Do we miss improv now?
Will we remember that we missed it when it's back?
As a result, it seems that this might be one of the longest stretches for most improvisers to go without doing improv. Sure, there are some Zoom jams, some online classes that may fill the gaps - but based on my own experience, and what I've heard from others, these will always be stop-gaps to satisfying the itch, and we're all counting down the days until we can do our Crazy 8's and Harolds in spaces with other warm bodies, preferably a nice hot crowd. For me, I realized last week that this is now the longest gap I've had from doing improv since 2005: the summer and fall immediately after I graduated college and before I moved back to Hattiesburg. And if the lockdown goes as long as the estimates are looking (based on a number of sources, some official and and some not, I'd wager there won't really be an "improv show" until August, and it'll probably be weird), this might be the longest I've gone without really doing improv since I started doing it in 2003.
I'm not sure if everyone else is taking the opportunity to evaluate or reflect on what improv "is" and what their place is in it. Over the last ~17 years, it has been a hobby, avocation, occupation, tool, social outlet, frustration, and aspiration. Through it, I've made some of the best friends that I've ever had; ones that let me crash on their couch, ones that I only see three times at year at festivals, and ones that I've seen get married and start lives with each other. It has also been a crucible through which I have seen some of the worst in people, and discovered which ones are irresponsible, immoral, unethical, and unprofessional, and under what circumstances they are willing to sacrifice their principles for the thing they "love" in favor of a spell of slow doom giving in to their basest instincts. At the risk of this sounding too dramatic ("The worst is not, So long as we can say, 'This is the worst'), I've also known the quietly diligent, the easily talented, people who have no friends but colleagues, and people who've only come to the table for a snack, not the whole feast.
It's gotten me thinking a lot about "improvisers" as a class, and the various ways in which we've categorized ourselves in relation to each other: owners, for instance, those who have legal and administrative custody and stewardship of the business. (It dawned on me that some improv theater owners never seem to start an improv theater with the intention of presenting an improved product, service, or manner of business - only the desire for them to be the ones providing it.) But improv theater owners are not monoliths, because improv theaters are not typical business ventures. The theater does not have many "employees" in the traditional sense, and instead the line is very blurry between an employee (someone who is paid to perform work) and a customer (someone who is paying for work to be performed).
Instead, improvisers often straddle (and co-occupy) many lanes during their "career" from an audience member watching a show, to a student paying for classes/workshops, to a performer not being paid for providing work that people have paid for, to (preciously rarely) a performer being paid for work that people have paid for, to being paid to be a teacher. Even the traditional "staff" at a theater are a mix of people doing work for intern credit, being paid hourly, drawing a traditional salary (oftentimes supplemented by additional pay for teaching and coaching), or merely volunteering their time (as happens regularly during festivals).
As a result, the improvisers at theaters get (justifiably) cranky at theater management who make decisions or rules; it's because everyone lives in a soupy middle zone of employee and customer (an employstomer, if you will). None of them are shareholders (people who hold legal and financial stake in an enterprise) in an official sense, but don't we all feel a rush of joy when a new theater opens or an extant one moves into a new space and an equal crushing blow when one closes or a team is cut? Every employstomer is responsible for simultaneously supporting and being supported by a business they have zero say in.
A lot of writing and thought has been given over the last five years or so to what a community is, and how to cultivate and foster its growth. Of course, communities are interesting in that they can (and often do) span multiple theaters, and really more cleanly defined by who isn't in them. Communities are groups of people with a common geographical, cultural, or value set, so to say the Chicago Improv Community is an amazingly amorphous description to define a group of people who've never been in the same room together - I know there's probably a thousand improvisers here I've never met and never will meet, and somehow they and I currently have enough in common to have the same general needs and goals.
To underline though: not all owners are bad. People don't become inherently bad because they sign a lease or have to make decisions. Not all decisions work for all people all the time, and leadership is about making tough decisions sometimes. True leaders are those that are there for the high times as well as the low; who have values and are willing to risk things for their values. Anything else is a term paper. Leadership in improv must come with the understanding that your customer, employee, and colleague are often the same fucking person. To be in our global improv community necessitates understanding the strange interconnectedness we all apparently have.
I don't know what improv will look like when it comes back. A friend asked me today: 'what's the first meal you're going to have when the quarantine is over?", and I stumbled at the simplicity of the question. It's folly to assume that the current state of affairs will have a clean stop and one day we'll all restart our Level 1's and Main Stage shows. The question 'when will be your first improv show back' is multiple parts: 1) when will we have a full rehearsal again, 2) when is the first show we can sell tickets to, 3) when is the first show that'll be packed, and 4) when will it be "business as usual", as well as another dozen subquestions that'll each have to be answered one step at a time, and the change will be so gradual that we probably won't notice right away that we got back to normal.
Maybe a better question is, what will our relationship(s) with improv look like when things get "back to normal". Will there be the same glut of shows, will we be so casual with our practice (and I mean practice here more in the sense that a doctor or lawyers have a practice), and will we still tolerate and endorse the same shallow negligence as before?
Do we miss improv now?
Will we remember that we missed it when it's back?
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