Meditations on Meditation

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I've been listening to the “Zenprov” podcast for a while now, and those guys are way into the meditation as a good way into improv approach. First, as full disclosure, let me say I've never pursued meditation seriously (or semi-seriously, for that matter). I don't feel like my brain is the kind that really takes to meditation well – I can't really sit still with an empty mind much, if at all. I do appreciate some of the things that they talk about that are adjacent in the topic, things that are found in both Zen Buddhism and some improv texts – being in the moment, reacting honestly, and I really do feel that they do know what they are talking about. Just not for me, is all I'm saying.

That having been said, I do have a beef with meditation as a way to warm up before improv. I was in an improv troupe that did pursue quiet meditation, stretching, yoga and other things which I'm sure have names, but I would probably end just calling “that thing where we did the one thing”. Now, I know that one data point does not make a pattern, but I would say that my experience from that group tells me that meditation as warm up may not be the best choice. What are warm ups intended to do? Establish group mind, get energy up, get the mind working, get the players listening – these are all good reasons. Meditation, doesn't appear to do those things. This group would dutifully follow the whole routine, spending 15-20 minutes clearing the mind and whatnot, and then get up on stage and yell at and ignore each other.

I can see the benefit of the meditative approach: spending some time focusing on yourself, the environment, the other player (not necessarily in that order) before you muddle the whole thing up with words. Really paying attention to things, instead of just waiting for your chance to talk, sure, I can get behind all of that. My point is that I have seen much better work come out of a group that has taken the time to focus on the group at the start of a practice with “zip, zap, zop” (which focuses on energy, listening, and responding quickly) or a pattern game (focus, listening, paying attention) that I have with silent solo meditation. There has been a lot of talk from a number of different people who are all saying the same thing, that we must first take care of ourselves, but improv still is a team sport, and we need to still pay some focus to our fellows on stage. Even the meditative approach to scene starting (what my friend calls the “shut the fuck up” method) is about tuning in to what is going on with you and your scene partner.

This whole approach goes back to those very Zen like principles of quieting the mind so you can a) turn of your internal policeman that criticizes and second guesses your instinctual reactions and b) really listening. Ultimately though, a warm up regimen must be selected that fits your groups personal style and benefits them, and if meditation isn't doing it for you (as in getting you do all the good things you should be striving for), then you've gotta try something new.

Improv Metric

I’ve been toying with an idea in my head for a little while, and I can’t quite seem to get my mind into it. Let me explain. In chemistry, for instance, someone might ask me how much of a certain compound is in a solution. Easy, I figure out the concentration (using Science!), and give them the result. If they already knew the concentration, they could grade me based on how close I got to the correct result. This much I understand, but what I can’t, really, is how you judge an improv show.

I can ask a group of improvisers “What is the best show you’ve ever seen?” and “What is the worst show you’ve ever seen”, and will immediately get answers, but the harder question is “Why?” What would also be a fun experiment would be to compare the results of that brief questionnaire to a non-improviser, where you might be surprised at the disparity between the two tastes. My point is simply that there is a concept in science that expectation changes observation, which is kind of tied into Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. (That little gem says that we can never know the position and speed of subatomic particles because by the sheer observation of them, the impact of the light we used to observe them causes them to change. In quantum mechanics (This is an improv blog, right?), we only describe subatomic things by certainties, as in “It’s Friday, so there is a 75% chance that Chris George is at the movie theatre”, but never “It’s Friday, so Chris George is at the movie theatre, because he is lame (only 25% odds on that, ladies.))

But expectation changing observation goes further into the world than the mysterious tale of the quanta; the idea is that because we are looking for stuff (scientific term), we change what we see because we filter it through the current frame of mind that we are observing things. For example, when Gregor Mendel’s pea plant experiments (the hereditary ones that proved recessive/dominant traits) were repeated in modern day, it was discovered that Mendel’s recorded observations were closer to “theoretical” than to “experimental”. Did he forge scientific data? Maybe, but he saw what he wanted (or needed, maybe) because that’s what he predicted. (I may be a heathen, but I won’t call a monk/father of hereditary genetics a liar.) We can never fully, objectively observe anything, because we focus on the things that prove our point. (Experiment you can try at home! 1. Go to a bar and look for an attractive woman/man/woman-man/whatever floats your boat because we make no judgments here. 2. Catch her eye, and watch as you instantly misinterpret a “getting a stray eyelash” gesture for a “Come over here, sexy man/woman/man-woman/whatever. 3. Science!)

Therefore, if we can never truly observe anything, then we can never truly judge anything. Thus, my Grand Improvisational Corollary is: 1.) We are improvisers, so we have trained in classes, workshops, and rehearsals. 2.) The average audience member (excluding those guys who are also improvisers) has not. 3.) Neither side will ever observe the same show, because both have a different set of expectations. 4.) No non-improvisers write improvisational blogs, so we can get away with saying just about anything.

Shortform v Longform Part II

I have previously extolled the virtues of shortform improv on many occasions. It is still, in my opinion, a fine art form, and I have come to understand that each has its place. It would be ignorant and pretentious to presume that longform is the only improv worth doing because of this or that. And to be fair, shortform still has a lot going for it – it’s simple and fun, and most importantly, it is highly structured. Humans (pay attention here, aliens) like structure for the most part. We like rules, even if just to break them, and shortform has got rules in spades. Even better, shortform shows are not just four people goofing off on stage for an hour and a half; they’re presentations, especially the successful ones. Comedy Sportz, and I’m sure others, present some two hours of entertainment as a whole freakin’ show, with lights, sound, and an emcee (usually referred to and dressed as a referee) who dishes the whole thing as a big variety show.

Why do we need to do this? Because shortform is boring. I mean, not all the time, but most of the time. But each scene is referred to as a ‘game’ for a reason. Each game has a different set of rules and components, and it takes time to get them set up. Most importantly, with library of probably more than 200 games (although I can tell you from personal experience that improv groups regularly use maybe 5% of that, strange), it’s unreasonable, and probably impossible to expect the average audience member to recall the rules for even a small portion of the games. Heck, most people probably couldn’t accurately recall all the rules for Monopoly or Sorry, and those are way more common than Scene in Reverse. What this means is that for every scene, there is one to three minutes of informing the audience what the game is, what the rules are, what the catch is, and then finally getting the suggestion for the scene. That’s a lot of setup for three minutes of improv, especially given that for a longform show of several teams will usually do five minutes of set up in the very beginning, and an ask for before each set of thirty minutes. This makes the ratio of improv to setup roughly 10:1, whereas shortform has a ratio of more like 2:1. This means that if you pay 10 dollars for either show, you’re paying 3 dollars in the shortform, versus 90 cents in the longform, just to listen to people talk. Jason Chin famously hates setup; in his opinion, a lot of setup before a show is like a magician telling everyone how the bunny is inside the hat the whole time, and then doing it.

My own personal example is a show I did back in Mississippi with my college group. Our show design was that we had two competing hosts (I was one of them), each with their own games list, and the audience would vote on which of the two games they would rather see. The audience loved it, the performers loved it, but I hated it. Part of what everyone liked was the banter between me and the other host between games. While it may have been funny, it seriously cut into improv time, and worst of all, it involved setup up two games every time, just so we could not use one of them!

My reason for bringing this up is that I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the local improv house. It being the only real improv game in town, I’m keenly interested in getting on a team there, and I noticed a key problem with one of their games. In fact it’s not just any game: it’s their signature game (I mean if iO can have the Harold, then why not?). It’s called “Five Things”, and here’s how it plays out. One player leaves the room, and the audience is asked for five activities. When the player comes back in, the other team members have to get him to guess the activity using mime and gibberish. But of course, there’s a catch: elements of the five things will be changes (e.g. swimming, but instead of water, he’s swimming in tangerines! Are you laughing yet?), and the player will have two and a half minutes to guess all five things (the title of the game!) and the two-three changes per activity. Here’s the problem, and I’ve timed it several times now. The game will last two and a half minutes, that’s laid out in front. But the game requires a minimum of 15 ask fors, and upwards of 20. No only that, but you have to explain the game, and then the team giving the clues gets to pick the order, and then the host reminds the audience of all the “things” again. It takes between ten and fifteen minutes just to get a less than three minute game going.

Now, I won’t argue that the game isn’t funny, because it can be quite entertaining. (If you really want a rabbit-in-the-hat secret for this game though, in class we learn that because the same suggestions come up so often, the players have no trouble with them because they’re so familiar with the clues.) But the problem here is indicative of the whole problem with shortform. It gets in its own way all too often. This entire show runs just shy of two hours, with nearly twenty minutes of introductions, setup and ground rules before the players are even on stage. The entire show has barely ten games for the whole run. So, now the reason for the showmanship becomes apparent. In film presentation, there’s a thing called “persistence of vision”. Essentially, when you watch a movie in the theatre, half of the time you’re watching a black screen, because there’s a moment between each frame when the projector has closed off the light to move the film. We don’t see the gap in image though, because the image lingers on our retinas. The same thing is applied here; in order to keep the momentum going, the show has to be presented as a seamless act of energy in order to keep the image of comedy lingering on our mind’s eye.

So shortform figured this trick out a long time ago, but the lesson has not carried over to longform. My coach Danny Mora would chide us for not beginning a scene the second the previous was edited. If you don’t fill the space, the vacuum of an empty stage threatens to drown the entire piece. We spend a lot of energy getting an audience pumped up to watch us and to get performers pumped to perform it. If we don’t use that energy, we’re going to lose it to the atmosphere.

Keep that image alive, boys.

Ask Fors

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The suggestion or “ask-for” lies at the very heart of the improvising endeavor. The ask-for is our way of proving to the audience that we are authentically creating stuff on the spot. The only group I’ve ever seen get away with not taking a suggestion is “TJ and Dave”, and even they have to open shows with the line “Trust us, everything is here is completely made up.” Alternatively, I once played a show where we tested out a new guessing game, but didn’t take the guessed item from the audience. The player just picked one in his head at the beginning, and audience members were convinced that the piece was rehearsed.

The ask-for is, an ultimately very tricky element; we want interesting, and most importantly, unique suggestions on which to base our pieces. Because we built improv around the concept of suggestions, it almost doesn’t operate without it. The suggestions are our inspiration; our clay and muse rolled into one thought. And while in theory no suggestion has ever been the reason for failure, truth is some ask-fors are better than others. In shortform, we hear a couple of suggestions constantly: Tourette’s, dildo, and Michael Jackson. It’s not that we don’t like these suggestions or that they can’t be used more than once (Well, dildo maybe. But the rest?), it’s that we would like occasionally to explore new ground. (For a fun social experiment, at the next show you go to, listen to the proposal and then silently make your response. I guarantee you that you will hear your response from at least one other person, and a good 75% of the time it will be the one selected.)

Part of the problem is that even though we’ve performed a Michael Jackson with Tourette’s talking to a dildo scene a thousand times (roughly), the audience hasn’t. Also, short form audiences tend to be kind of dicks. They’re filled with a bunch of people who want to shout the most disgusting things possible. Why? Because they think it’s funny. (They are at a comedy show, after all.) To a typical shortform audience member, the suggestion is 90% of the joke. And most shortform troupes rarely deliver beyond the suggestion anyway. Longform largely minimizes this effect by only taking one suggestion for a thirty minute plus show. Suddenly, the onus is on the audience to make it good. In either case though, it is important to respect the audience’s responses. That whole ‘no mistakes’ thing in improv extends to audiences as well.

In a show this past weekend, I saw probably the worst example of ask fors I have ever scene. After the proposal (name a foreign country), the team just allowed the audience to shout responses for a little while, and then cherry picked what they felt was the best one. This goes strongly counter to the entire idea of asking for a suggestion at all. Heck, you might as well just pick all your ideas in the green room before the show. That isn’t improvised any more, at least not in the truest sense; it’s more like herded improv.

I’ve been privy to a number of ways to procure those precious ask-fors over the years; some simple, and some downright complex as hell. There may never be a perfect way to obtain our suggestions, so we may have to live with what we’ve got for quite a while, but the important thing is that every suggestion is a gift from the audience. We must treat each and every one with respect, because we never know where it might take us. (Probably to Dildo.)

Assault on Precinct 13

 Back in 2004, I used to write movie reviews for the USM student newspaper, the "Student Printz". Because I occasionally feel lazy, and it seems a shame that all of five people ever read these, I've decided to repost them here, in the original versions that I emailed to my editor, Noel, all those years ago.
There’s something pleasant about a nice and tidy action movie: no emotional strings, little character involvement, and an ample body count combined with mounting destruction. Best of all is the sense of watching somebody accomplish something under a sort of trial by fire, be it the protagonists or the antagonists. “Assault on Precinct 13” is exactly what it’s made out to be: simple entertainment in the form of violence, and the end result is a typically Hollywood movie with few disappointments.

“Assault” opens with an undercover drug bust gone awry and the only survivor is Sgt. Jake Roenick (Ethan Hawke). Fast forward eight months and Roenick is now a burnt out cop working the graveyard desk shift at Precinct 13. On this particular night though, Precinct 13 is scheduled to close down permanently, and to cap the whole deal off, a busload of prisoners have to be kept at the precinct overnight until the roads clear. Among the prisoners is Marion Bishop (Laurence Fishburne), an organized crime boss, who had a number of dealings with dirty cops, led by Marcus Duvall (Gabriel Byrne). The one thing this group of dirty cops won’t let happen is for Bishop to reach trial and end all of their illegal activities. The result is a full out assault on the precinct and all of its inhabitants in the hopes of killing the key witness.

Granted, this movie is a remake of a 1976 movie by John Carpenter and almost the same overall movie, but what’s even more important is that this is basically just a remake of any old western “hold down the fort” kind of movie. Be it cops or Indians outside the safety of the fort, it’s still the same movie. Director Jean-François Richet’s remake modernizes the original story, giving it new action sequences and even (gasp) adding some new plot twists. Whether these plot twists are there for independent intentions or are merely there to differentiate from the original is a topic that I will ignore for the purpose of being polite. The movie does boast a nice supply of good, wholesome violence and provided you can ignore the convenient plot devices (dark and stormy night, forgotten tunnels, forest in the middle of Detroit, etc.) “Assault” ends up being a pretty solid piece of work. You don’t want to fool around with dirty Detroit cops, since they have more firepower than the army and better high-tech resources than the C.I.A.

Laurence Fishburne is playing the same ubercriminal that Alan Rickman made great in “Die Hard”, only this time the proportions of ruthless criminal to intelligent villain are verging on cartoonish. Gabriel Byrne is there, playing the overanalyzing leader, only this time, he seemed to be a little confused as to exactly what type of character he was supposed to playing; merciless killer one minute followed by a river of deep moral conflict and personal reflection the next. Maybe there were two different scripts; heck, that might explain the minor inconsistencies in the plot.

“Assault” is a pretty entertaining movie all around, especially if you enjoy some good gunfights, big explosions, and a solid film about good guys shooting up a bunch of bad guys.

Patience and Spontaneity

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Almost without argument, one could say that the heart of improvisation is in spontaneity; by it's very definition, improv is merely theater that is performed without a script, therefore, to paraphrase Huey Lewis (and the News), the “Heart of improv is still unplanned.” That's just the name of the game, as soon as you start planning stuff, and honestly trying to achieve what you've planned, it's no longer improvised theater, it's just plain theater. Improv teachers go to great lengths to achieve spontaneity and true artistic inspiration (because this is what improv really boils down to – you can do anything you want, so you need to be free to do anything you want.) Most of what is done, especially to beginning improvisers, is in the name of speed: Story, Story (Die), Dirty Hand Randy, New Choice, etc. are probably some of the most truly improvised games (at least in the short form sphere) because they are intended to move so quickly that the player doesn't have time to plan. You either just let your brain run wild and with abandon, or you get left behind.

The problem with this is it is essentially a crutch we hand to people: just move quickly and it will be improvised. The problem here is that experienced players don't need that crutch anymore – they are capable of stepping on stage and acting without thinking or pre-planning, only they have been trained such that they will step on stage and run so quickly through even the most complicated transactions that they don't really improvise any more. Generally speaking, this kind of speed is okay in the slam, bam, thank you ma'am world that is shortform, where the emphasis is not on artistic exploration but on entertainment, and where that kind of energetic, fast-paced scene work thrives especially well in “games”. But as you move into long form (where you do a scene that may last three minutes still, but you may have to come back to, or make run an entire thirty minutes (I've seen it done, nonbelievers)) that no longer has the gimmicks (or referee or MC to bail you out) that kind of speed works to your detriment.

Longform requires more patient, discovery-based improv, and as my mother and I can attest, you just can't enjoy the sights when Dad is driving past them at 70 miles per hour (a condition which I now believe may be genetic – sorry passengers). Give a group of new-to-longform improvisers a scenario (any scenario really), and they will be done with it in a blink. Give the same scenario to experienced improvisers, and they will take their time exploring every single, tiny moment, and not just tediously waiting for the next big thing to happen, but really enjoying themselves in the pace of normal life. This is where really improvisation lies: moving slow enough that you can actually enjoy and discover things about your partner, scene objects, or environment. A shortform improviser flows from his head, while a longform improviser flows from everything.

I saw some improv last weekend that definitely fits this bill: no one would argue that these were energetic improvisers, capable of editing with abandon, and fast, too. In thirty minutes they probably did 20 independent scenes, but it wasn't entertaining. Sure, the dialog was improvised (at least I hope it was, scenework that bad had better not been written out ahead of time and approved) but it was just manic (well that and nobody was working together, but that's a subject for a different essay all together). My point is this: scenes don't have to fly by and ninety eleven miles an hour to be interesting or even improvised. The easiest way to get yourself out of a “pre-thinking” mode is to truly focus on only the last thing that was said. All improv really should be is a series of reactions to different stimulus, just true, honest reactions. And that's the whole point of using speed as a training tool in the first place. Quick thinking, and just react. And don't rush, or you'll miss all that pretty scenery.

National Treasure

 Back in 2004, I used to write movie reviews for the USM student newspaper, the "Student Printz". Because I occasionally feel lazy, and it seems a shame that all of five people ever read these, I've decided to repost them here, in the original versions that I emailed to my editor, Noel, all those years ago.
At some point, the “green-lighters” in Hollywood will have to figure out that having Jerry Bruckheimer as a producer is not a sure-fire way to make a good movie. For example, “Coyote Ugly” – mediocre, “Pearl Harbor” – mediocre, “Pirates of the Caribbean” – excellent, and “National Treasure” – mediocre. “National Treasure” is like a distilled “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, such that the entertainment is watered down and the history concentrated for effect. Obviously built on the well tried formula for a family movie, “National Treasure” succeeds only as far as this formula will go, which means a few laughs, some mindless chase scenes, and a long, drawn out history lesson.

The movie is about Benjamin Franklin Gates (Nicholas Cage), the current descendent of the family Gates, which for the last 180 years has been searching for a treasure that was buried by our forefathers during the American Revolution. The treasure was started during the time of the Egyptian Empire, and as time progressed, the treasure was captured by different groups and expanded upon until the Knights Templar discovered it. This order slowly smuggled it over to the New World, where the Free Masons hid it from the British until such a time that it could be given to the entire world. But Gate’s former partner, Ian Howe (Sean Bean), intends to take the treasure for himself. Gate’s only option is to try and beat Howe to the treasure with the help of his nerdy sidekick Riley Poole (Justin Bartha) and a National Archives curator, Dr. Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger).

Now, I will even go on record to say when I first saw the trailers for this movie, I was groaning at the thought of a pitiful quasi-“Indiana Jones” movie. Even though that’s pretty much all that was accomplished, I was surprised to find that “National Treasure” was not as god awful as I previously took it for. Granted, the movie should have been wrapped up in ninety minutes instead of 120+ and nearly every plot twist is either to match the formula for an action movie or to prevent making the movie a history channel special on early American History. Regardless, Sean Bean and Harvey Keitel (as an FBI agent) are excellent, even in this cut and dry script and the rapport between Gates and Riley is often the only entertaining dialogue on camera. And in what was probably a last minute script change, the final treasure changes from “believing in your dreams” to some actual gold. If they hadn’t changed this part of the script, the corny factor would have shot through the roof and made the movie unbearable.

Provided you don’t mind the formula of the action movie, chances are you’ll really enjoy “National Treasure”. Sure the entertainment is mindless and the plot just a yard short of ludicrous, but when did that ever stop a movie from being worth a watch? “National Treasure” is entertaining enough, and if you just sit back and relax, you just might learn something.