Emotional noises

My Tuesday night improv class once again did not fail to be outrageous, uncomfortable and thrilling.

The teacher, Gerri, is incredibly focused on each of us as individuals and what we are working on. The starting point for our "work" is our own idea of what we should be improving, which we shared with her in the first class. She takes that and then observes us with unsettling perceptiveness until she can see our souls laid bare, and then pokes us in all of our softest areas.

Last night was week three and she's got everyone's number at this point. Her singular focus with me: emotional noises.

Several of the exercises that we did were toward this end. One was set up as scenes between old married couples where one of them is chatty and prattles on and on and the other has to be extremely communicative and involved but only use emotional noises. "It feels totally retarded, and it is, but it totally works!!" explained Gerri.

After were were thoroughly primed in using non-verbal communications, she put me up for a scene that she had specially set up to help me work on developing characters. I was to be an old black woman. The scene was me at home with my husband making dinner, and then whatever else evolved. The key, as you would imagine, was emotional noises. You see, old black women, and many young ones, specialize in this form of communication.

It was a little awkward getting into it. I'm not great at maintaining an accent or dialect (inevitably, Mexicans become Indians and New Yorkers become Valley Girls) but I did my best and made way more emotional noises than is actually humanly possible.

The scene was a hit with the class and Gerri was delighted. So delighted that she smacked me on the ass several times, then grabbed my face and kissed my cheek. This is how she gives feedback.

Mmmmmm hmmmm mmmmmmm!

Improvisationalizationorama!

I truly do not know where to begin in describing my new improv class.

The teacher is an energetic and possibly clinically insane woman named Gerri who reacts hugely to everything that her students do, which includes grabbing her boobs constantly. If you sit next to her while other students are doing a scene, you must be prepared for her to grab your arm, maybe your leg, and maybe literally throw herself completely into you as she experiences - intensely - the emotions that the improvisers on stage are working with. This is not hypothetical.

I think she is extraordinary and I am very excited to be in her class. And I would like to pledge publicly that, no matter how strong my natural tendencies towards mimicry are, I will not start grabbing my boobs constantly. Only intermittently. I promise.

A bag full of wheres

Tuesday evenings I have improv class, a highlight of my week.*

Last night was no exception. The plan was to drill scenes one after another for the three-hour class so that we can get more experience doing the improv and spend less time talking about it (this is a challenge for my teacher, who looooooves to talk talk talk!).

To facilitate quick and easy starts to scenes we each wrote down 10-15 "wheres" on scraps of paper and put them in a bag. The improvisers starting a new scene choose a scrap from the bag and that location is where the scene takes place.

From what folks wrote down, you would think it had not occurred to us that we were in fact the same people who were going to have to deal with these locations. We all sat there gleefully writing down absurdly challenging locations imagining someone else's horror at having to do an entire scene under water during in the 19th century, or in a dark cave with no flashlight, or in a torture dungeon, or on a Bollywood movie set, or at Sea World leading a tour of mute children.

Even as I try to complain about these ridiculous locations, I can't help but be delighted with the possibility that each one holds. Because of course, there are no bad locations - only bad improvisers. Except for "in a cat's ear," which is just stupid.


*Other highlights of the usual week include salsa lessons on Wednesdays, live bluegrass at Atlas Cafe on Thursdays and usually something else fun on Fridays if we aren't heading off skiing.

Lean in

Last night my improv teacher tried to make two people kiss. 

The suggestion provided to the two improvisers at the beginning of the scene was a relationship between two people - ex-spouses. The scene evolved that they were at a bus stop, where we discover that each had been taking the bus back and forth day after day hoping to run into the other. Turns out they still love each other. 

The dude improviser in the scene is a jokester type, always playing the ham. As they sit there at the bus stop, he is saying with words that he still loves her but his body language is still that of a circus MC. This inconsistency is irking the teacher who wants us to work on creating intimacy on stage and is very into coaching the scenes, sometimes line by line, movement by movement. (Earlier in the evening she had coached me to physically push another guy to show how frustrated I was.)

"The audience wants you to make the scary choice. In this scene, the audience wants to see you take that leap. You need to kiss." 

Their eyes get huge. Their faces read: This is not what I signed up for. 

"Take her hand lovingly," the teacher instructs. 

Dude takes her hand but in more of a buddy-buddy way and he's kind of swinging her arm around and looking goofy.

"No. Do it lovingly. Hold her hand still and caress it." 

He takes her hand and holds it in his, but looks away.

"Look at her. Don't look away. Hold her hand and tell her you still love her."

He looks at her. We in the audience are squirming in our seats. Every one of us is holding our breath. 

Then there is a moment where his face relaxes from his normal "I'm a funny guy" expression and he looks at her with striking tenderness. 

"OK lean in and kiss her. Closed mouth."

They sit there frozen, staring at each other. Neither moves. 

"Come on. Lean in. Closed mouth kiss."

Very very slowly they start to lean towards each other. They get closer...and closer....and closer...

And then dude snaps back into funny guy mode and breaks away, laughing nervously.  

"OK fine. End scene." The teacher releases them and we move on. But we are all a little bit changed. 

A freedom film

In Improv class last night we pretended that we were in an actual acting class and worked on giving our on-stage emotions more depth by portraying them in natural pairs of opposites. The idea is that we almost never feel just one emotion at a time, but rather we feel the tension between opposed states of feeling.

The exercise was to sit on a chair facing the class and recite a nursery rhyme while vacillating between the extremes of two emotions. The teacher demonstrated using fear and excitement in a dramatic reading of Mary Had A Little Lamb, and then each of us took our turn working on pairings like rage & restraint, joy & sadness and lust & innocence.

One woman was tasked with horror & intrigue, which she executed so compellingly that the teacher literally leapt from her seat to tell us about how she had had that exact experience just the other night. She was watching a movie with her husband and he had fallen asleep. The movie, "A Very Young Girl," includes a scene where the entire screen is focused on a woman's vagina and a man has an earthworm and the teacher just had to wake her husband up because what she was seeing was so horrifying and fascinating.

"So you were watching porn?" a classmate ventured.

"No! It wasn't porn, it was French," explained the teacher.

The guy sitting next to me, who is a sketch comedy writer, took out his iphone and made of note of it.

"I like that," he mused. "Not porn, just French."

Stinky, funny, sexy

Last night in improv class we played a Party Scene game in which one person is hosting a party and three guests arrive one at a time. The trick is that prior to starting the scene, each person designates in her own mind one scene-mate as stinky, one funny, and one sexy. Then in the scene each person's behavior must reflect how she feels about the other guests without actually saying it.

Right off the bat, I found myself in what the teacher later called a classic "Pepe Le Pew" scene where the person I had decided was Sexy had apparently decided I was Stinky.

Then, as I headed over to enjoy the delightful company of my Funny, she attached herself to her Funny and cut me out.

Finally, left with no one to interact with but my Stinky, I tried to make friendly conversation at a generous distance but she too quickly hurried away to "see about opening a window."

I guess some days you're just everybody's Stinky.

I've failed!

Last night I went to my first improv class in San Francisco. There are 13 of us in class and it seems like a good group though I think at least one guy might be homeless. (If there were a place in the world where homeless people signed up to take improv classes, it would be San Francisco.)

About halfway through the three-hour class, the teacher stopped us abruptly in the middle of an exercise and directed us all to step one foot forward, throw our arms up overhead as though doing a circus performer's bow and loudly proclaim: "I've failed!"

We did this several times before she was satisfied.

You see, she explained, it is not that we are failures (except maybe for the homeless guy), but rather that good improv requires a level of risk-taking at which failure is inextricable from success; we embrace failure because that is how we know we are working at our creative edge.

I like how Keith Johnstone put it in our assigned reading:
"There are people who prefer to say 'Yes' and people who prefer to say 'No.' Those who say 'Yes' are rewarded by the adventures they have. Those who say 'No' are rewarded with the safety they attain."

I say Yes! I've failed! And I will fail again! Next week in improv class, if not sooner.