They Who Shall Not Be Named

In mid-October, for about 6 hours, the San Diego Impov Collective (SDIC), a Facebook based page for members of the SD improv community, was on fire.  Normally, this would be considered a good thing - high traffic, lots of links, click throughs, comments (and comments to comments), and activity, but as with most conflagrations, heat and energy also indicate destruction.  The origin of this facebook post is multi-varied and long-term, and a story that could fill several blog posts (and has, on this particular blog).  I wish that I could have archived that entire post and everything attached to it, if only for posterity, though it truly would do no one any good should someone ever view that archive in the future.  One could also point out how quickly it devolved into name-calling, attacks on individuals, attacks on people's performative capabilities (all on both sides), and (most importantly), a grave misunderstanding of the underlying issues.

Like the young boy who sticks his finger in the dyke, we fail to understand and appreciate the real problem and instead just focus on going about our day-to-day and fixing only the current crisis.  The central problem in San  Diego is, quite simply:

SAN DIEGO HAS AN US VERSUS THEM PROBLEM.

We have basically two improv communities in town; one with people from one theater, and one with everyone else.  Again, I'll try to not get into particulars as to why this is, or who is at fault, or even to name names.  You'll just have to trust me that this thing exists, and we live under the shadow of it every day in improv in this town.  And, quite frankly:

IT SUCKS.

I miss my friends, some of whom I have known as long as I've lived here.  I miss getting to share in their triumphs and shortcomings, joys and sorrows, and just sitting with them shooting the shit at 2am over crappy food.  But as I was looking through all of the comments, some very passionate, erudite, and thoughtful about the issue (others...less so), I was struck by how much two groups of people who live in the same town and practice the same goofy, fringe artform don't know each other.  It's easy to pick fights with strangers or the "other", it's hard to do so when people are familiar.  We'll always have more in common than what makes us different, regardless of religion, race, sexual orientation, politics, nationality, birth state, class, education, gender, age, or devotion to bizarre theater that you can't fully explain to your coworkers. (It should be pointed out that none of the previous denominations were selected in any particular order, nor should their inclusion or exclusion of other groupings be representative of any percieved or actual status.)

The causal post is gone now - deleted into whatever magic archive all our supposedly "deleted" posts go to for Mr. Zuckerberg or his designated associates to read for their own amusement.  But the underlying root isn't, and certainly the memory of what was said (or wasn't said) will probably linger for some time. (I for the record, stayed out of the fray, an operand largely driven by 1) not wanting to go down the rabbit hole again and 2) the benefits of having a job where access to Facebook is largely impossible.)  But this doesn't change the fact that when you have two groups of people who don't know each other, conflicts easily arise, and not knowing someone else is everyone's fault.

To Err is Improv Part 1

From the very first time we start improv, we are taught that one of the basic rules is that there are no mistakes (or at least I hope you were). The very nature of the craft is that nothing you can possibly do is wrong because, since there is no script, technically nothing can be a mistake. By definition, a mistake is a wrong action, and how can anything necessarily be wrong when there is no “right”? After all, improv is in the interpretive, and what is right to you is correct – there isn't a test proctor who can grade you against what the right answers were. On the flip side however, everyone who's ever gotten notes after a show or class knows that it is possible to make mistakes, but how is this possible? A quick check of scenes that are “right” and ones that are “wrong” shows where the rubric lies: it's not in the individual answers, but in the piece as a whole, and from that perspective, we want something that is entertaining for an audience. But that still doesn't satisfy the dichotomy in mistake making.

“The Buddha said each mistake is a rebirth ... don't you want to get reborn?” - Charlie Crews, Life

Improv is, in a strictly technical sense, a practice that is built for failure. When systems or tools are designed to maximize success and minimize failure, they are built with what are known as constraints – devices meant to block failure. A Phillip's head screwdriver has the familiar plus sign shape that locks into a Phillip's head screw, and as a result it is difficult to use incorrectly because the system doesn't allow for many configurations. This may explain why some people prefer multiple choice tests over essay ones; multiple choice answers effectively constrain the possible answers. Improv has no such constraints – anything is possible, which means there are an infinite number of ways to make mistakes. There are also an infinite number of ways to be correct, and a lot of improv games and forms are actually just a system of constraints meant to block the capacity for making errors, and drive you down a road of success. Because there are no errors in improv, we build the constraint that as information is added to a scene it becomes fact. (The first “Kitchen Rule” - don't deny the established reality.)

Then how is it possible that mistakes can drive a scene off the rails? First, it may be helpful to indicate a few common types of errors: errors of commission and omission and errors of wimping and waffling. An error of commission is one where someone intentionally goes against the scene, for example: calling someone “Dad” when they previously established as “Mom” simply because you didn't like the original decision. Errors of omission are ones where something is forgotten, not seen, or not heard – there is no malicious intent here, just human nature (more on this later). Errors of wimping are ones where a player prefers to keep things vague instead of concrete, for example, compare “Hand me that over there” with “Hand me that rifle next to the zombie head”. This is because when we are going to make a mistake, we would rather make that mistake by failing to do something as opposed to doing the wrong thing. Errors of waffling could also be thought of as errors of committing, where ideas are tossed away because we either don't feel like keeping it in the air or because we want to try another idea. It's also important to look at errors in terms of their significance: minor all the way up to major.