Listen with your ears

Listen with your ears

Listening. It’s something we hear taught in our improv classes all the time. It’s a recurring subject because it’s so important, yet I see many improvisers fail to listen on a regular basis, myself included.

After taking a workshop where we talked about the importance of listening, I was performing and found myself not listening. At one point I was paying attention to my doings and what I could do with them and then heard my scene partner stop talking and immediately realized that I had no idea what he had just said.

For an improviser, failing to listen to what’s happening is like a traditional actor forgetting his lines… the momentum of the scene is lost. Seasoned improvisers can usually recover from this quickly, sometimes by calling themselves out on it. “I’m sorry I wasn’t paying attention, what?” But less seasoned improvisers, who may not be as comfortable with themselves on stage find it hard to recover. More often they simply are not aware of the fact that they aren’t listening and push through the scene with their own agenda, bowling over everything in their path, including what their partners have established. A powerful non-listener will essentially then dominate any scene they’re in, dragging their partners along like cans on the back of a newlywed’s ‘76 Chevelle.

If you’ve been improvising for any amount of time, you can easily recall scenes where listening failures repeatedly left a series of awkward, uncomfortable, and disconnected moments on stage. Big, smelly improv turds dropped by improvisers who were more concerned with what their next action, next line of dialogue, or next brilliant moment was than what was going on at the time. I have even recently seen moments where two scenes are simultaneously happening on stage at the same time, with multiple improvisers talking over each other, not sharing focus, and certainly not listening.

How does this happen to us? What causes us to become so unfocused in scenes? The very basic answer is that we are usually pre-occupied. All of us have moments where we “zone-out.” It’s going to happen. It happens to the best improvisers. But if you find yourself thinking of what to do next, or planning out activities while you’re on stage, chances are good that you’re not listening. If you’re thinking about that… you’re not in the scene, and if you’re not in the scene, where are you? In your head and not listening.

When it comes to listening, I love the game, Evil Puppet, which we play in the Go Comedy! All Star Showdown. Evil Puppet quite literally forces the person playing the puppet to listen because all of your lines come from another improviser who is whispering in your ear. You have to repeat what they’re saying, so you have to pay attention. When the game is played well, the puppet repeats the lines fed to them and uses them in their actions and reactions to their scene partner. The puppeteer also takes the actions of the puppet and uses them to further their choices for dialogue. Like a regular improvised scene, everyone uses the actions and words of their partners to create something together.

So you can rightly say that listening involves a lot more than just our hearing. In Evil Puppet, the puppet has no voice of their own. Therefore to influence the scene, the puppet must move, react, or use inflection of speech to have a “voice” in the scene. The puppeteer and scene partner listen by paying attention. So listening involves a lot more than our ears… it involves our whole body. Years ago I took a movement workshop with Susan Messing, a brilliant improviser from Chicago, and she taught us about listening to our bodies. How you are standing, sitting, walking can (and does) influence your work on stage. It is a great example of how we need to listen, or pay attention, to everything going on in our scenes.

And that’s why listening is so important. We listen with our hearing, and our “ears” so that we can react to everything that‘s happening. We listen so that we can build something together. We listen because our script is being created in that moment. When we fail to listen, we miss the script, we miss the action, and we are on our own.