Archive for October 2009
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
All this talk of making writers redundant – or making everyone into a writer – I feel a chill wind on the back of my neck – leads me naturally to The Factory’s sort-of-improvised version of The Seagull.
Sort-of-improvised?
The way it works is this. At the beginning of the show, the cast draw lots to see who will perform which role. Perhaps three actors are able to do Konstantin, for example. Every time, in other words, the ‘pack’ of actors is shuffled. No two shows will have exactly the same combination of performers.
The chosen performers then present Chekhov’s great play more or less in the order Chekhov wrote it – except that they do so, more or less, in their own words. They also use their own names and refer to the present-day world around them. (‘Moscow’ becomes ‘London’; there were some funny riffs on crop circles and Tom Baker.) There’s no set, a few chairs, a table, props borrowed from the audience and the actors are dressed in their own clothes. (A lot of them are wearing skinny jeans, as it happens.)
The effect is – at its best – to make The Seagull absolutely contemporary and wholly owned by the performers. It helps of course that The Seagull is partly about a familiar world of actors and writers, that there is an experimental play-within-a-play in it, and that the scenes have a slightly chaotic, changeable feel even in the original. But the urgency and immediacy of the performances was, when I saw the production on the Saturday, startling and deeply moving.
The moment in Act 3 when Konstantin (or here, the actor’s name, Tim) has his bandage changed by his mother (here, Amanda) was played with great stillness and tenderness; Trigorin (here, Jethro) had cool danger and offered a blistering, remarkable fluent justification of his life as a writer; Masha (here, Amanda) seemed fatalistic to her core.
How do they do it?
Each actor boils down their character’s words and actions to a list of units. Each unit must be further distilled into a single word: this list of words becomes the actor’s mnemonic for their performance.
Here, for example, is the beginning of the units used by Simon Muller, who played the doctor (Dorn in the original) on Saturday:
Enter
Hot
Accused
Middle Age
Do
Astound
Idealism
Honest
Improved
Clearly too, the actors must think deeply about their characters, and will have read the play in several different versions.
Yet what we see is, crucially, each actor finding their character in their own words and their own world. Inevitably, Chekhov’s precision and poetry is sacrificed (though there are moments of unexpected poetry); but the rhythm of Chekhov – the ways his characters speak and argue – and the peculiarly Chekhovian way of writing a character – talkative, querulous, changeable, selfish, philosophical – comes through very strongly. Chekhov’s characters seem absolutely modern. (Have we changed so little?)
Federay Holmes, another one of The Factory crew, tells me that the actors feel an extraordinary closeness to Chekhov while improvising. They have to learn to trust to the deep structure of that writer’s thinking. (It’s very good for deflating the ego – I want to come back to this question of improvisation and ego in another post…)
I should add that the version I saw on Sunday – its particular combination of actors and the spur-of-the-moment choices they made – seemed less successful. Thus one of the deficits of improvisation…
Kate Yedigaroff, producer of Bristol Jam, who was also very moved by the performance on Saturday, suggested that it was both the truthfulness of the performances and the combination of vulnerabilities – the rawness of Chekhov’s characters echoed by the exposure of the actors in improvisation – that gave the performance its particular emotional charge.
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Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
The Secret (there is no secret)
So last night I went to see Cartoon de Salvo again, and I have verified that the whole show was COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.
Last night the title was ‘Mollusc and Patch’ (heaven knows who put that one forward) and the story was of rival oceanographers (one with a comedy German accent), a previously undiscovered coral and – best of all – a romance between two molluscs (on a patch of coral), aided by a surprisingly public spirited tiger shark.
They really are improvising.
So today I cornered Alex Alex (Murdoch) and Neil (Haigh) from Cartoon de Salvo and I asked them: just how do you make up a play, on the spot, in front of an audience?
They agreed to reveal all.
We begin with THE GOLDEN RULE -
Yes and . . .
This is the basic rule of impro. What it means is: whatever one of your fellow improvisers does, you have to accept it and then add to it.
Over time, adds Neil, you learn to not have plans in your head. ‘If you start trying to tell the story you want to tell, you’re f***ed.’
Keith Johnstone (the godfather of improvisation, apparently – I’m learning) said: ‘We say no to stay in control. People who say yes are rewarded with adventures. People who say no are rewarded with security.’ (Roughly. This is Alex quoting from memory.)
As you might imagine, it’s more difficult to achieve this than it seems, because it’s scary, and because the instinct to say no is very deep. When people are training, says Neil, they often think they’re not blocking and they are. There’s so much conflict taught in drama training. But in improvisation, it’s not very helpful.
No new trouble in the first scene
What this means is: don’t do too much in the first scene. Take time to establish who are you, where are you, what are the relationships, in as much detail as you can.
We want to see characters happy and healthy in their natural environment doing their thing – so we can start to care about them, before anything happens.
You don’t have to worry about creating the drama. Trouble arrives anyway. Because human beings are like that. They make trouble.
The first two scenes are really the ones you can learn techniques for. We did a four-day workshop in San Francisco (they’ve been doing long-form impro there for 20 years apparently. San Francisco is the mothership for long-form improvisation). By the end of the four days, we’d only worked on scenes one and two. We thought: this is a bit of a rip-off. But then, as they said to us, there really are no rules for the rest of the scenes.
We have spent a lot of time learning how to spot genre (American gothic, historical melodrama etc) as early as possible and using that to help us build.
In these early moments, the performers must make big instant decisions about the world, the characters and their relationships. A big decision (for example of the genre of the whole show) is a ‘call’; a smaller one is an ‘offer’.
Make names a something
Use character names loudly and clearly and repeatedly. You really need to remember the names, so that you can call someone on two scenes later.
A small tip, but a useful one, apparently, and something I notice The Factory did in their sort-of-improvised Seagull. (Of which more in another post.)
Stay calm: Oxygen is your friend
Good improvisers have the confidence to breathe, to be silent, to pause.
Central to achieving this is knowing that you can’t do anything wrong. There’s no such thing as a wrong turn. Mistakes are often the best bits of a show – things coming out of a mistake will often transform the story.
We were in one show all American women in a knitting circle. I used the wrong name for my husband and Brian picked up on it and said – did you mean my husband and then suddenly there was a frisson – was I being unfaithful?
Reincorporate
Generate each scene from what has happened in the previous scenes. That’s how you get satisfying story. By using things that have already happened.
Phelim McDermott said a great thing – an improviser is just a man looking backwards.
We’ve several times had the experience of a big, climactic scene and we can’t work out how to resolve it and then suddenly someone will remember something planted in the first scene.
Reincorporation is the difference between a story and a list of events. Or as Homer Simpson once put it at the end of a particularly self-referential episode: ‘That’s not a story, that’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.’
Train as an ensemble
Like a sports team. We played loads and loads of games, to enable us to really understand how the others think and feel. And to build trust so that you know you will be rewarded for being brave.
Jump and justify
If the story is flagging – hell, even if it isn’t – make a leap of faith, without thinking it out at all. And then you figure out why later. (This is the antidote to the ‘hesitancy’ which CdeS felt caused them problems in the middle of ‘The Black Toe’.)
We’ve all had amazing moments of flashes of insight, when something completely unexpected occurs to you.
In Plymouth we had a 1970s Cold War spy world – and it was a dual narrative. Alex and I were enemies throughout the story. I was travelling to Russia to get her out of prison. And then towards the end I suddenly rushed over and snogged Alex and it became clear that she was a double agent and we’d been in it together all along. The audience were convinced that we must have planned it, but we hadn’t.
Neil: ‘It’s having the faith that any decision can be made into the right decision. Which is sort of not true. But it is true. If you manage to persuade yourself that any decision is the right decision, then you will make the right decision.
On which suitably paradoxical note – true and not true – we will close the toolbox and thank Alex and Neil for showing us its contents.
As they said, one of the great things about this kind of show is it makes everyone in the audience into a writer: because we share in the process of story creation, every audience member begins to think like a writer.
For myself, I wonder what thinking about improvisation, or, indeed, actually improvising, would do to my own writing.
What is the relationship between Jump and Justify and Writer’s Block for example?
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Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
Stephen Brown
Whisked a clown
And sent it to
His aunt in
Istanbul,
He drank his
Bitter in a
Giraffe that was
Full.
I like Giraffes.
The surprise hit of last night was ‘Especially for You’ – a sort of improv gift service run by the youth theatre group at Bristol Old Vic.
The members of the Bristol Old Vic Young Company (7 to 25 years old) set about running this service with an attractive combination of charm, camaraderie and self-confidence. When the theatre was otherwise dark, the Young Company was the only bit still in operation, so these guys are used to having the run of the place.
Emma ordered me a surreal poem from the ‘Writing’ room (you could select Writing, Acting or Music). The result, concocted on the spot in the best automatic writing tradition, is above. I ordered an improvised barbershop piece for Emma on the theme of beginnings, which she pronounced astounding.
By this time, anyway, word had got around, and people were queuing to be serenaded, turned into literature or acted at (I’m not sure what that involved, but I rather wish I’d found out…)
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Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
The Black Toe
Saturday 13:21
Day Two and the Good Ship Bristol Jam has launched. Some of the staff here are feeling a little seasick, after the revels of last night.
Last night I saw Cartoon de Salvo’s brilliant Hard-Hearted Hannah and Other Stories. It’s a long-form improvisation show, which is – I am told – a pretty unusual thing in the UK (and still pretty rare in the US). Long-form improvisation means that the three members of Cartoon de Salvo make up a play – a play, with scenes, changing moods, a story – in front of an audience.
As we came in, the three (2m 1f) are singing songs in a skiffle-style, apparently called a ‘jug band’. The show begins with them asking us for suggestions of titles. From about ten suggestions (‘Coming Home’ was another) they plumped for ‘The Black Toe’, with its vague evocations of gangrene and pirates. Then they had us choose three from a list of popular songs. (The last person to choose was a small boy in the front row, who selected ‘You Sexy Thing’. He will go far.)
Then the lights went down, the three stood to the sides of the empty stage, feeling – I wonder? – like the swimmer faced with the empty pool, or the writer the empty page, before one advanced across the stage and knelt down in some imaginary ‘stocks’, beckoning over one of the others to join him. Then there they were, two men in the stocks in – let’s find out – the 17th century, discussing – what crime is it we’ve committed? – stealing a goose from the squire…
So the story unfolds, featuring two criminals struggling to go straight, an evil squire, a gang of violent revolutionaries, called The Black Toe, a fishmonger’s boy, fish guts, and a falcon, also called Black Toe. The three songs interrupted the action at apt-ish moments, providing a valuable change of tone (and no doubt giving the performers space to think).
What really fascinated me was how watching the performers improvising the show became a drama in itself about the nature of narrative. Things that writers think about the whole time became here concrete instincts and urgent needs: the actors find the basic generating blocks of their story – motivation, conflict, complication – right in front of you. More than that, while remaining (more or less) in character, they share their process of discussion and creation. (The actors have no opportunity at any point in the show to speak to each other outside of the action: their only way of conferring is as characters trying to understand / invent their predicament.)
What do we need to do to kill the squire, one character asks another? In the middle of The Black Toe the group seemed for a little moment to have improvised themselves entirely into a corner, and there was a period of – hilarious and scary – searching for a narrative solution.
Afterwards, I spoke to CdS and they tell me that tonight’s show was a little unusual in having so much ‘hesitancy’ and a ‘Mexican standoff’ in the middle of it, as they wrestled their story to its denouement. Sometimes it just flows; tonight was a more difficult one. ‘On a good day,’ one of them tells me, ‘you [as a writer] should be feeling redundant.’
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Sunday, October 18th, 2009
Here’s another one…
5.24pm: Thirty-six minutes to go, and the theatre is filled with busy expectancy.
On the mezzanine above the entrance to the theatre, Chris and Harriet have laid out great piles of paints, charcoals, chalks, crayons, pencils alongside four large white boards – blank terrain for the ‘The Great Mass Improvised Draw’ over the next 24 hours.
The Factory – the people who are going to be performing their improvised Hamlet and The Seagull over the next couple of days – arrived mid-afternoon. They’ve done their rehearsal – or, rather, as one of them described it to me, their training session. Now they’re eating. At 6pm, they’ll be performing their Hamlet. They don’t know yet who is going to perform which part, or what props they’ll be using, or where they’ll be in the building. (Though I think they’re scheduled to start in the Studio space…)
Amusing encounter between Federday, member of the Factory company, and her friend Simon Godwin, also a friend of mine and associate director here at Bristol Old Vic.
Federay: When are you coming to see our Hamlet?
Simon: I’ve already seen it.
Federay: So?
AAARRRGGGHH!! Simon realises that his obligation to see this play – in this production at any rate – is potentially endless.
To be a real friend to this show, you need to see every single performance.
As a writer, I’ve had the – relatively unusual – experience of seeing a show repeatedly (my own), and becoming fascinated by how much the performances flex – in response to the audience, the actor’s mood, and other, untraceable influences.
What relationship does this, the ‘ordinary’ unpredictability of any kind of live performance bear to the unpredictability of an improvisation? Do we like improvisation because live theatre is not live enough?
I’ve also realised that I should try and see one or two things more than once…
(To see if they’re really improvised, another one of the Bristol Jam team jokes to me later. Imagine the horror if I discovered that two performances were the same.)
7.12pm: The Jam has begun. The white boards are already half-filled with a baroque tangle of drawings: a manga heroine, a stage with attentive audience, a flying saucer, a woman reclining in a swirl of flowers, crosses masked out of smudges of charcoal. People are meeting and talking as they draw alongside each other.
Members of the youth theatre are walking around in character offering us the opportunity to commission individual improvisations. Hamlet is underway – somewhere in the building.
I’ve just been to see the Scots Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre, which was hilarious. We’re going to do something we’ve never done before, said Sock Number One. Isn’t that what improvisation is, asked Sock Number Two?
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