Improvised X

I took in a workshop a couple of weeks ago on improvised story-telling, which got me immediately intrigued, because it's the one type of improv that I've done very little of. The improvised movie workshop I took focused partly on “linear, improvised story-telling”, but was light on stringent “this is how you tell improvised stories” info. Improv (longform especially) is largely the way it is by the sheer nature of improvising with a bunch of people: the strange, disjointed sequence of scenes tumbled together (like we see in a montage, Harold, etc.) wasn't done because we are as an artistic collective consciousness challenging artists who are interested taking the juxtapositional approach to thematic presentation. We don't want to be weird, elusive and challenging showmen, it's just that improvised story-telling is hard. Keeping a story on track, and having it make sense and be logical is difficult when you have a bunch of players all pulling it in different directions.

What I've noticed though, is that the improvised stories that really seem to work well are ones where there is a mutually agreed upon theme or genre being improvised. This is commonly known as an improvised X, where x equals the genre being done up, be it “Star Trek”, “Zombies”, “Shakespeare”, or whatever. These are the ones that appear to work the best, because there is mutually agreed upon framework that makes the whole process easier, and because everyone is essentially using the same palette. You know walking into an improvised X show what types of stories, characters, and motifs are likely to be seen. When we learned the improvised movie, one of the first things we learned was genre recognition so that we could rapidly identify the genre we were working in. Even the guy teaching our story-telling class has been having success with his show, which he describes as being the in style of Alfred Hitchcock/Twilight Zone. The shows I've seen where the improvised story doesn't work are ones where there is no agreed upon palette, and as a result the audience gets a strange hodgepodge of stories, none of which seem to jive, and then there's a clumsy rushing together of all the plot (a shoehorning, if you will) at the end, seemingly just so the players can say “See? We did it! It was all the same story all along!”.

You could make the argument that this is the same reason why just basic scenework doesn't seem to work. I'm a big advocate of specifics and details giving scenework it's definition and easy-to-follow-itude. Or rather, scenes that are strange and non-definitive are hard to follow. At the same time though, I also promote the idea of “following your obvious”; an obvious being a piece of information that can easily be deduced from previous information. What the obvious is can differ from person to person, based roughly on how his or her brain works. For example, a couple of years ago I was hanging with a friend of mine and his brother, and we were all taking about this story my friend was trying to write. Based on the simple idea he had, I proposed a spy twist and his brother wanted a vampire edge. Neither of us was wrong, but the difference is in what our go-to's or obviouses were. I knew spy stories and his brother knew vampires, so that was where we felt the most comfortable. (Possibly an extension of write what you know?)

Thought of in this framework then, where two people are in a scene together building the scene from the ground up, providing information, the scene converging on being defined (essentially becoming “this scene is about X”) can be thought of as a coalescing obvious. Or: what I think of as obvious based on the known information is now the same as what you think is obvious. We now know we are in the scene where X happens. When the obviouses have not coalesced (which is to say one or more players is confused about the current scene facts) is when moves are made which don't seem to make sense. Looked at from the opposite end, bad scenes arise from two players who have not agreed upon what they are doing. (If my friend's brother and I were doing a scene and were both being either obstinate or non-specific, the bad scene would be because I think we're in a spy scene and he thinks we're in a vampire scene. Possibly very interesting provided we are providing definition like crazy, but a bit complex and confusing to nail down in three minutes.)

The only real problem is everyone has a different obvious, and you need to find a common ground of interest for everyone to do an improvised X. If you're going to be pursuing the same story for 30 minutes to an hour, you want all your players to be invested in the genre. My group toyed with a number of concepts last year, and we never could find a common ground among six people. “What about improvised 'Lost'?” “I've never seen it, but I'll give a shot”. I appreciate the flexibility, but unfortunately, not good enough. If you're going to be picking apart a genre well enough to put it back together on the fly in new ways, everyone has to love and know the style.

No conscientious objectors, only invested and involved people, playing to the obvious.