On Monday we had an entire lesson during improvisation activities. There were several things that I realized, and are thus the DO’s and DON’TS of improvising. You must always work with your partner or group, which means to go along with what they propose and then build off of it with your own ideas. My group of Lydia and Mary sometimes had trouble coming up with new ideas, but if we had simply exaggerated our reactions to each other it would have been easier. That brings me to my second point, which is that the most important rule of improvisation is to LISTEN!! In our group there were several instances when another member of the group mentioned something, that on reflection I probably could’ve built off of had I paid more attention to what they were saying instead of thinking of what I was going to say next. The same point was evident with the other group, because they did not listen to Mr. F when he was counting down the time they had to confer with each other. Another thing I learned not to do, was not to get bogged down in the dialogue and get caught in a circle of the same thing. For example my group was given the starting line of “That’s really hard”. I started the scenario by falling on the ground and then saying “That’s really hard!!” ; however we continued to use that same scrap of dialogue throughout the whole rest of the 1 minute. Just like in our commedia production, pace and comedic timing is very important so we could work on our timing in improvisation to know when its time to pull the scenario in a new direction.
On reflection, though I found it just as difficult to begin the process of improvising in the role of Mickey in the commedia piece as it was in the improvisation exercises, once I had a base of some sort in my commedia character it became much easier to improvise his actions. This taught me that as an actor I feel more comfortable when there is something to base my acting off of. For example in the commedia piece my super-objective is to be arrogant, rude, and cowardly and thus whenever I’m unsure of what to do I can think of the over-arching path for Mickey and then follow that. Additionally I found the class time improvisation exercises difficult because I didn’t feel prepared to instantaneously come up with a character, so it was more related directly to me. Another pitfall was the use of our real names, which completely defeats the purpose of improvisation and should be avoided at all costs. The rest of the week followed with a discussion of areas of improvement.
· Add in playfulness in improvisation (BUT still in mask)
· Figure out scene changes (BUT energy was good)
o Could integrate into change like in Oh the Humanity
o Know what to bring on (a specific piece of furniture) BUT characters can still mess it up in improv
· Shorten some scenes: remember order on story (posters on the sides) should cut out approximately 10 minutes
· Get audience involved with signs ( “Boo”, “Ahh”), then improv when exactly to use the signs
· Fix last scene, on the sofa; This is one of the main areas of difficulty because it is the falling action of the piece. We began working on this on Friday, because we need to make it clear to the audience that it is the end of the play.
· BUT the hoover scene dragged on, ON REFLECTION though it worked in rehearsal it didn’t make sense during the performance. We are going to change this zanni scene, though they are still free to improv and do it during the actual performance.
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