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.
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