The joy of Discovery

One of the reasons that I love doing Shakespeare or being involved with a Shakespeare production is the journey that the rehearsal process brings with it. Shakespeare was not big on stage direction. In his works we find very little direction for the director, the actors, etc.  We have to dive into the text, discuss it and get it up on its feet to find out what's really going on. I love that process. As the cast feels out their characters, explores the space on stage and works out each moment they find different things that enhance the production. 

The same thing happens for a cast working with a more detailed piece. Here the company has the text to drive them to discoveries of things in and about the play. By taking the direction and playing with the characters and the doings of the work, they can find new and dynamic opportunities.

So these traditional actors, have their text and some direction to help them make discoveries, without that, what does the improviser have to lead them?

Character and imagination
We've heard it a thousand times... know your character, who is she, what does she feel... what is her point of view. But here is the exciting thing about improvising... no one is telling you what those things should be. The improviser has the freedom to discover them in the moment, to make them up and play with them as they go along. It's breaking through our learned constrains to play and allow ourselves to be silly, to discover new things in our environment, to create new things about our character, to experience the joy of discovery as our character and ourselves.

In our improvised scenes, we discover on our own, but we also discover together. It is a shared experience in the moment with our scene partners. Our freedom to play and explore not only enhances our character, it provides material for our scene partners to do the same. As we create things for our characters to use, to do, and perspective to come from, we give the scene life, we give the world we're in energy and we give each other rich material on which we build.

I love watching improvisers and actors discover new things in the moment. I love doing that myself! It is one of the most exciting things about performing and it's something we can take with us in our daily life - at work, at play and in our relationships. Discover something new and play.

Teaching

Wow it's been a long time since I've visited this blog!

Now that I'm teaching at Go Comedy! I have more frequent material for contemplating improv things, so I expect to be much more active here in the near future.

I have wanted to try my hand at teaching improv for quite some time, probably since Second City moved to Novi and some of my friends with whom I'd gone through the SC program started teaching. Now that I'm a full time teacher at Go Comedy! and have my first amazing group of students, I'm seriously loving it.

Everyone says that when you teach it's like you learn as much teaching as you students are learning. It's totally cliche, but also true.

The biggest thing about this new adventure has been rekindling my basic love for the craft. And that's not just improvisation, it's acting in general.  I remember my first days of improv classes back at Second City in Downtown Detroit with my first teacher, Kiff Vandenhuevel - thinking his passion for this stuff was kooky, but invigorating at the same time. It didn't take long for me to realize that I had forgotten the joy of playing, of make believe, of not worrying about how silly or stupid I looked, and just allowing myself to BE silly & stupid, and revel in it.

Seeing this new group of folks learn how to unlearn their internal editors is really amazing. It makes sense why people get hooked on this improv stuff - because we rediscover our youth, we rediscover the joy inside each of us, and we learn how to make believe again.

I'm looking forward to a lot more of that.