Why everyone should study improv!

Improv acting is about creating in the moment. Creating live, in the safety of a warm, comforting group of classmates, a multitude of characters and roles using monologues, physical shapes, vocalized sounds, songs, and even gibberish.

As a new student of improv, there is a decidedly delicious moment you experience when you learn to let go of your inhibitions and simply follow your impulses moment by moment. In the carefully moderated environment created by the experienced teacher the student learns to think on her feet and lets go of the need for preparation, planning, and hence lets go of anxiety.

Improv is accessible to all. One needs no special preparation or aptitude for it. As long as a student is willing to trust the teacher and literally play the improv theater games that provide structure for learning, he or she develops skills of being present more fully in the moment.

The skills learned in improv class are ultimately life skills. How to be confident, express your creative self, think on your feet! I have been teaching improv for fifteen years now and have taught a very wide range of students, from artists to nuns, accountants to photographers, astrophysicists to Zen practitioners. They have all enjoyed the experience of learning improv and been pleasantly surprised to find how much it helped them succeed in their fields of work.

I think everyone should study improv. And if you happen to live close to Berkeley, come check out my class!

May the pulse be with you,

Abhay

Image: Cluster balloonist John Ninomiya's creation.

Funny Walk

Funny Walk is one of my favorite improv exercises! Here is how I approach it:

Walk. Now develop your own funny walk. You can copy something you see or a part of it. You can change any time. You can use the floor or the table tops, crawl or slide or roll or be up on your toes.

Now add a sound to your funny walk....

Or speak in gibberish......

Or sing in gibberish......

Add words, sing or speak them......

Your eyes are available as you pass others. Sometimes making meaningful eye-contact, having a response, a reaction.

Then we freeze and one person is in focus at a time doing their funny walk and making sounds/speaking/singing/talking gibberish or being silent as they move. When you are done you bump someone else and they take the focus.

Funny Walk works by forcing us to separate the voice from the habitual ways in which we hold ourselves as we talk. It breaks patterns of stiffness that stifles our creative self. It allows the inner goof to speak up and be heard. In song, sound, or just plain gibberish!

May the pulse be with you!

Abhay

Image: John Cleese in the Ministry of Silly Walks.

Play Space: A Manifesto

We are guided along by an invisible force along lines of least resistance. I call this force the pulse. Improvisation involves simply following the pulse down the paths that suddenly appear before us. Artist Frank Stella calls his canvas his working space. I think that a good name for the performance space is play space. Once we tap into the pulse we can feel it vibrate, zoom up and down and sideways at times, linger lovingly on the side at others, sometimes exploding, sometimes still, filling our play space, exploring its boundaries and everything within with a taut, endless continuity.

Far too many approaches to improvisation have made up rules, rights and wrongs. Many even have the cautionary TM label attached to them. I find such approaches limiting and stifling to the natural instinct to find the pulse and follow it.

Stella sees the work of painting in terms of the need to create dynamic space using a still and two-dimensional medium. I see the work of improvisation as the creation of play-space, a space where our natural instincts can play. Anything less I find unsatisfactory. Anything more is too much like work.

May the pulse be with you!
Abhay

Image: Marcel Duchamp's playful masterpiece.

Ten Improv Questions Answered

Over the years I have received a number of questions about my approach to IMPROV. I have selected ten of them and answer them below.

Question 1. What is IMPROV?
Improv is short for improvisational theater. It is a performance art, it is acting not from your lines but from your imagination.

Question 2. Is IMPROV basically comedic?
Improv taps into the most basic of human instincts: the need to create something out of nothing. This process unleashes a great amount of energy while letting go of resistance in the form of social inhibitions. The comedic experience comes from the viewer of someone improvising rather than the improviser himself or herself. It is a joy to see someone create in the spur of the moment, letting go of the usual norms of correct behavior and make something they really believe in. Hence, even an intense and serious exploration of a scene by the performer will be interpreted by the audience as an unusually funny performance.

Question 3. Does one have to try to be funny while improvising?
No. In fact trying to be funny does not really work. You just get involved in your world in a hyper-real way, believing in the environment you are creating with your partners, taking unexpected pathways of your imagination. When you do that effectively, thats when your audience has a good laugh.

Question 4. What is the point of IMPROV class?
To come together with other performers of varying levels of experience in a carefully structured environment of scores and exercises with the express purpose of exploring to the utmost your own imagination and co-creating with others using their imaginations.

Question 5. Why do you not teach a traditional IMPROV class stratified into skill levels?
Improv is not a matter of skill. All that we need to know about improvising we already know intuitively. My students are not looking for one more class in which they master certain skills and pass exams. What they are here for it to be able to explore and grow creatively as performers. There are no 'levels' in my classes just individual explorers of the creative imagination expanding their own capacities for self-expression. There is never any comparision with anyone else.

Question 6. What is your background in IMPROV?
I grew up studying experimental theater and pantomime in India. By the time I was in college at the University of Bombay I started my own hugely popular mime group. After moving to America I studied IMPROV at Second City in Chicago with some of the pioneers of the IMPROV renaissance of the 1970s and other theater arts such as Neofuturism and Goat Island method. Once in california my years of study with Cassie Terman in West Coast Improvisational methods led me in the direction of blending all my many influences over the years. I now belive that Improv can not be copyrighted or be prescibed. It is as natural to humans as sleeping and awaking. The trick is in reconnecting with that inner knowing.

Question 7. What is the most important thing for a student to keep in mind or be focused on?
Am I having fun? Do I believe in this world I am creating, however far-fetched it may seem to others? Do I know that I can't get it wrong, that this is something I was born with?

Question 8. You stress physicality in your teaching. Why?
That is the nature of our art form. It is about using our bodies fully to create and then engage in worlds of our imagination. Let us say you create a world in your imagination. Well you can tell us about it. But if that is all you are going to do why not write a book? If you are in my class you are here not to tell us about it but to show us and what better way to show us than to use your entire body to enter into your world fully?

Question 9. You are a teacher who plays and performs with his students in class. Can you comment on that?
That is how I teach. By becoming a student myself.

Question 10. Why do some of your students keep returning to class year after year?
I think it is because my class is a sanctuary where each person's silly, goofy, weird, obsessional, and tender side is given space for expression and exploration. It is the same reason why I keep teaching the class year after year: I feel so good after each class!

Image: Number spiral.

Improv State of Mind

Improv is not just a performance art. It is an approach to life, a state of mind, that values spontaneity and complete trust in the present moment. I like to imagine that there is a control tower or transmission center that is continuously transmitting the pulse. The improv state of mind involves developing one's abilities to tap into this signal and stay tuned to it.

So how does a person develop this improv state of mind? I have found these three approaches to be most helpful:

1. Keep an improv journal. Keep a blank journal and colored pens (I like Sakura Micron 05) with you wherever you go. Whenever you have a spare moment write, doodle, draw, and color, improvising moment by moment. My student Karen Wang (hi Karen!) left Berkeley and was no longer able to come to the improv class. Wherever she goes she takes her improv journal with her and keeps her improv state of mind active and fresh. Some people like to do this upon waking, first thing in the morning. I like to do it while riding the train to work each day. Remember this is a crazy journal--you can title it that if you want--and nothing is off limits! Just do as your pulse guides you to. It is the improv exercise we do in class called funny walk, except this is on paper!

2. Meditate every day. Many great comic actors practice zen meditation for about 20 minutes each day. Meditation does not have to involve ritual or spiritual/religious aspects. It is simply stilling the conscious mind by focusing upon the breath while seated in a comfortable position with the spine fairly erect. For more on meditation, see my yoga love blog.

3. Participate in Improv Play at least once a week! Regular participation in an improv acting class will keep strengthening your connection to the creative pulse. Many long-time students of mine have noticed that the right brained creative freedom gained in improv class translates into powerful life skills! You evolve into a creative powerhouse not only while playing and performing in class but also at work, in school, and the rest of your life.

So, friends, keep the improv state of mind active! It is the life philosophy that embraces finding joy in the now, as no other.

May the pulse be with you!

Abhay

Image: Moebius band by Charles and Ray Eames

New Improv vs Traditional Improv

It is time to revitalize improv theater. I imagine the New Improv would have to engage the subconscious mind and disengage the conscious mind.

When I watch great performers I see that they seem to be powered by something other than their conscious thinking mind. It is like they have accessed this source of raw creative energy and then are simply basking in it. And I am beginning to think that the reason why watching these great performers is so compelling is because we in the audience get to partake of, even perhaps for just a moment, the delicious and juicy raw creative force.

I believe that the subconscious mind is where the pure, raw energy resides and that the New Improv theater should focus on accessing and drawing out this energy into visible form. On the other hand Traditional Improv has focused far too much and far too long on the use of the conscious mind: quickly framing a scene using words, for instance. There is nothing wrong with the use of language in a scene but when the words come out of the conscious, thinking mind, they contain little power and the actor is not accessing his or her full potential.

In the New Improv I suggest we allow our thinking minds (the conscious mind) to take a hike and allow our bodies to take over the scene, feeling the scene rather than thinking it. You can then feel your mind relax and you give your self a chance to connect with the pulse.

And when you are connected to your pulse and not trying to be clever or quick but just allowing your crazy subconscious self to inhabit your body, you are pure raw creative energy and you surprise your self. When that happens it is such a treat!

The New Improv theater is the theater of the subconscious.

May the pulse be with you,

Abhay

Image: Brian Eno's brilliant creative 'block busters'.

So what's the point of all the exercises?

A student of improv may well ask, what is the point of all the exercises that we do in class? People sometimes assume that the point is to develop certain skills. Develop presence or quickness, for instance.

The truth is that learning improv is really not a matter of learning skills and then honing them. Philosophically, it is not an additive process. It is not as if you come in with skills A and B and then in class you learn skills C and D. If that were the case you could read a book on improv and learn all there is to it.

Learning improv is actually a subtractive art. You are put thorough a carefully, even cunningly, modulated set of exercises that subtract, one step at a time, things that interfere with your perfect and continuous connection with the pulse. One set of execises may work on removing your inhibitions, the next on your resistance, the third on freeing your body to express itself more freely, the fourth on liberating your voice.

You were all born perfect improvisers. We are simply attempting to return to that perfect state.

May the pulse be with you,

Abhay

Image: Radica 20Q Artificial Intelligence Toy

Object Work

Anything that you can create in your imagination, you can create in your improvisation. Have you noticed how your imagination works best if you suspend disbelief and simply allow your mind to create? Well, object work allows you to do just that when you are performing! The essence of object work is believing in the imaginary world you are creating and then inhabiting it to such a degree that it becomes real for you. What becomes real for the performer becomes real for the audience.

Play with this. Pick up an imaginary object. Then answer the following in your mind and feel, really feel the object become real.

1. How would you describe it?
2. How much does it weigh?
3. What color is it?

4. What textures does it have?
5. What is its volume?
6. Is it new or old?
7. Do you like it?
8. Find something odd about it. Can you let the oddness grow?
9. How has the object changed?
10. Do you realise you've just performed improv theater?

It really is that simple! Now play with another imaginary object.

May the pulse be with you!
Abhay

Image: Mathematical peepshow by Charles and Ray Eames

Changing Emotions

Improv exercises dealing with the audience calling out changing emotions are wonderful tools to exploring very different states of being in the same environment. You may have begun a scene using object work to create an imaginary world that you then inhabit. When a new emotion is called you are forced to incorporate the new emotional state into the world you have created.

How you actually go about feeling the emotions and expressing them depends on where your own individual pulse guides you. However, there is a powerful approach you may want to explore called the Stanislavsky Method. In his book An Actor Prepares, the great director Stanislavsky describes how real acting involves really feeling the emotion on a deep level and refraining from making stereotypical gestures. He values emoting internally and finds external emoting to be fake, something the audience simply will not be affected by. For example Stanislavsky would argue that showing the emotion, anger, by rolling your eyes and clenching your fists would be a fake way to go about it, one that the audience will not buy for the simple reason that you, the performer, are not really experiencing the emotion. Instead you should allow your self to really feel that emotion deeply and allow how you speak, how you move, to simply happen in response to how you feel the emotion.

If this interests you, play with it. It can be a lot of fun.

May the pulse be with you!
Abhay

Image: Wabian 2 developed at Waseda University is able to express emotions.

How I Improvise

I have been thinking about how I improvise a piece. Firstly, I let my body do something. It may assume a static shape or start moving in a certain way. I am following the pulse.

Secondly, once the physicality is established, the pulse will move me to what I call one of the four "S"es: silence, sound, speaking, singing. Speaking or singing can be in gibberish. I do not consciously make a choice amongst the four "S"es. When I trust and follow the pulse I seem to be guided along in making that choice, perhaps subconsciously.

Improv for me starts with the physical discovery of the pulse. There is no room for thinking here. If we were to allow for a simplistic mind-body dichotomy, improv definitely starts in the body and stays in the body.

The body has its own logic and sense of direction. That is why it is pointless for me to worry about being clever, funny, or staying on track. I simply take the leap.

Once I completely accept the primacy of the pulse in the body for creating an improvisation, I am also free to explore improv as more than a narrative art. A narrative performance tells a story. The pulse may well guide me to tell a story or be in one but it may just as well guide me to a very different place. A place that has no stories to tell and yet a place I treasure.

Like the small red bottlecap that I loved as a child and played with more than anything else.

May the pulse be with you!

Abhay