Always & Game

That's an intersection in Improvtown.

I was talking today with an American improv friend of mine (Lisa) who is in London for the summer. We got to talking about improv, specifically the notion of game in the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre context.

I realized in how she was talking about it, whatever was considered the game of an improv scene was something that a character (allegedly) always did. The clue for finding game was listening for the word "always."

For example, say Foxy and I start a scene at a restaurant. I start sharing how I had a tough time getting to the restaurant be-, beco-, because of uh, "Man, I always trip over my words. Because of a nightmare tube ride."

That sentence, "I always trip over my words," is the clue about my game in the scene: I always trip over my words. So the rest of the scene (to an extent) can be "about" my tripping over my words in different ways.

That game may not be all that interesting to watch, so I might play several games in an improv scene rather than just one. And by saying "always" I don't mean literally always but figuratively always. I don't mean thus from start to finish of a scene tripping continuously, (without stop), over your words. I mean doing that periodically, often enough, potentially each turn you take an improv scene, or probably more satisfactorily, at strategic moments. You have to find those strategic moments, and that's part of the art. (It's not a science, as far as I can tell.)

Admittedly, I'm not THAT big of a fan of this kind of play as a total practice (at least I don't think I am), though there's a lot of fun in it, and it can make playing an improvised scene simple (you just make your initial move out to be something you "always" do, and then find ways to do it in the scene).

It is with doing something "always" that we say in improv "there's a pattern." I've tended to teach recurrence and transference as opposed to patterns. That is, make things recur within a characterization, or even transfer some recurring things of one characterization to another character. But I think the "always" approach is a better one. I may try to test it out the next time I teach the UCBT notion of game.

It's amazing how in talking to Lisa I've had some shocking, amazing insights into improv--and I've only seen her a handful of times!