Commitment Game

One of the great things about improv groups is their mutability; no where in any book or blog does it say that in order for improv to work, it must have “these” people. Improv groups change rosters every now and then, people come and go, and hey, that's just life. Work schedules, moving, just life – all of these things tend to interfere, and often the first thing to take the hit in order for your schedule to accommodate is that one thing you do a week for a couple of hours that you don't even get paid for. Even though these things do happen – there's no reason to say that they have to happen.

This is a tricky artform that we do, and its mutability, ease of doing, low cost, and even worse, it's capacity to be just picked up and dropped just as easily makes it very easy to treat it with a certain degree of carelessness, especially for the 90% or so of improvisers that do it as a hobby. Improv groups, like a lot of other things, go through various periods – there will be times when it feels like everything is clicking, things are going great, everyone is getting a long, and you drive home every time after practice with an electric feeling in your body. At the same time, there will be periods where you can't even remember why you do it, when nothing works right, and when you want to just walk away. Certainly there is nothing stopping you, and that's part of improv's mercurial nature – it's really easy to just drop it, forget about it, and quit, or start a new group all together. “This time, things will be different, because we get to start from scratch, etc.” Keeping improv groups going is hard work – any body who says different is lying. Those same life things that can eventually derail the group altogether are at work everyday; it's just that most of the time, they don't mount up to the point where they mess with your schedule. You have to work late, miss a week so you can go to a family reunion, meet a new boy/girl that you want to spend every moment with – all these things happen all the time.

But what makes the difference, is your commitment to your team mates. No one can decide for you how much you want to play with your team – only you can. Every time one of these life “things” happens, you decide how much you want to keep doing it. You're having a lousy day; do you go to practice anyway, or just stay home, watching T.V. Instead? I can tell you this: as hard as it is to keep a group going, it's much harder to start one from nothing. It's those moments, the ones where you've had enough, where your seconds from the door that make all the difference in a group. It's easy to walk out the door – it's much bolder move to stay. If you don't like a group the way it is, if it's not working for you, it's up to you to make the decision to change it. I guarantee you, if you don't like something about a group, chances are someone else probably echoes your opinion somewhere in the group, and you will get much more out of addressing it and doing something about it than you will out of just giving up. Most groups suffer from chronic internal commitment issues. Everyone expects someone else to do the hard work for them, and the last dying breaths you see out of that kind of group is every week a different person not showing up to practice – the long ride circling the drain. But what we do on stage isn't the only group work we do – it's in the very structure of the group itself. You can't just presuppose that you'll do group work from the time you get your suggestion until the lights get pulled and spend the rest of your time being an individual. You have to play for your team the whole time.

Life things will happen – they are unavoidable. The question is which way will you choose – individual or group?

“If you're not having fun, you're the asshole.” - Rachael Mason, iO Training Center Director