On the Teaching of Improv

Theory

This page is about why we have improv classes, and how we should teach them. 1?

Why Classes?

There are usually four different parts of a performer's education, and each helps in its own way.

Performance
This is where everything comes together with an audience. This is a fun reward for the improvisor, but in terms of education, its main virtue is that it gives the improvisor practice and (uniquely) it provides him feedback about what does and does not work in front of a paying audience. This informs the performer's "audience brain."
Warm-Ups
Two purposes to this: first, get the performer's body and voice limbered up. Second, to remind the improvisor of the skills that she has already developed.
Rehearsal
This is where you develop the skills that you need in performance. You do this through drilling a single skill on its own, and incorporating that skill into practice scenes.

This brings us to the last of the four: classes. And an important, if rarely-asked, question: what purpose do classes serve? Really, you can rehearse on your own to develop a skill. You can remind yourself of it at the last minute before a show, and you can use it during the show. Why does an improvisor need to invest time and money in a class?

The class serves several functions.

First, it is diagnostic. An experienced improvisor who has been watching you work gives you feedback about what you need to work on. 2?

Second, the class informs you of skills that you need. Remember, people come in off the street not even knowing what a block is, so as a teacher you must create the concept of positivity for them. Without knowing what skills you should try to develop, rehearsal can't get you anywhere.

Finally, once the teacher has explained a skill to a student, the teacher should give him 3? some idea of how to work on the skill -- how he'll know when he's going in the right direction, basic exercises he can do, et cetera.

This discussion of what a class is forces us to mention what it is not.

A class is not a place to try to do good scenes. It is a place to start to develop skills so that later on, good scenes can happen. In terms of efficiency, a good scene in a class is a waste of everyone's time. Save the good stuff for performance, or for some fraction of rehearsal. :)

Some Unhelpful Concepts in the Teaching of Improv

1. Improv is a Craft, not Therapy

Current improv pedagogy is centered, right now, on a sort of cultish New Age-iness that is both inaccurate and unhelpful to the student.

Most instruction these days is predicated on the idea that we are all natural storytellers, and that to do good improv, one must simply "be in the moment" and "let the scene happen." These exhortations are repeated, ad nauseam, usually as the panacea that will solve any improv deficiency. Usually it's the first maxim trotted out after a scene in class goes very badly.

This faith in the individual is heartening, in a Rousseau-esque kind of way.

Unfortunately, it's also dead wrong.

Most of us, when we start improv, have a built-in instinct to block every offer, to be horribly negative, and to drive every scene, no matter what, into comic man-on-man lovin'. This is our instinct. This is the first thing that we think to do. This flatly contradicts the idea that "if you just follow your instincts, the scene will be fine."

So, like Ptolemaic spheres, provisos are tacked on to the original new-age-y statement. "You were just blocking then because you're afraid. If you're not afraid, and you follow your instincts, then the scene will happen."

The truth is that improv is not just a removal of impediments to get to the natural "storyteller within." Telling improvisors to "just be in the moment" to do a scene, is equivalent to teaching piano by tossing someone a copy of the "Revolutionary" étude and telling them to "just play the right keys."

Improv is a craft, and getting better at the craft is a matter of developing specific and quite artificial skills, such as properly projecting one's voice, monitoring how the audience is responding to a scene, detecting when any of the classic elements of scenework (character, relationship, objective, location) is lacking, and so on.

The most talented improvisors are innately good storytellers, so no doubt this false description of improv rings true to them. 4? The rest of us, though, have to learn the art.

Learning improv is about developing the instincts to tell a good story. It's learning CROWE so cold that you don't have to consciously think about it. It's learning enough music theory to come up with interesting melody lines in improvised singing, without thinking about it. It's developing all of these skills so that the business, the petty distractions, that occupy the mind of the newbie player, fall away, and the improvisor is in fact able to concentrate on the higher-level "magic if" concerns without accidentally ruining the scene. 5?

This changes the responsibility of the teacher. We go from the teacher-as-therapist, patiently trying to remove the mental blockages or personality flaws that keep the student's pre-existing scenes from coming out, to the teacher-as... well, as-teacher, instructing the student on what skills she will need in order to come up with ideas that are useful.

If you wanna play the melodies in your head, you've gotta learn your way around the keys. No amount of ersatz psychoanalysis will help.

2. Improv is a Journey, Not a Destination

Another counterproductive aspect of improv instruction is its absence of degrees -- not diplomas and cool honorifics to add to one's name, but rather of gradations of things. "You need to stop being afraid" is a rather useless exhortation. "This time, try to be less afraid" is the more helpful phrasing. Again, one should annihilate all vestiges of the notion of the singular 'aha!' moment where all is revealed. One's improv journey is one in which she gets better at a lot of different things, bit by bit.

Instruction in improv should never be about the eventual goal. The improv journey is so long (one could argue that it's endless), that pointing to a distant destination, of coming up with perfect scenes 80% of the time, of always "yes and"ing everything, and always having a brilliant character with clear objectives, is more disheartening and nonplussing than helpful. It's like telling somebody he needs to eat fifty tons of food before he dies. Even if this is what he'd end up eating anyway, hearing that bit of news is enough to make him not even want to get started on such a mammoth undertaking.

Money Versus Knowledge

One thing that always troubles me is that, in any art school, pedagogy and profit are enemies. If you want to continue making money off of your students, they have to have a certain mindset: "I am talented, I am good at this, this is easy and fun to learn, and I'm sure the next $50 class can be the one where I make the breakthrough to being a Great Artist."

The truth is that it's only the most innately talented of us that have these sudden, amazing breatkthroughs of skill, who immediately 'figure it out' in the broadest strokes and then need only refine their technique. The rest of us have to learn the craft.

Learning the craft is hard. Learning the craft is not necessarily fun. And it doesn't happen overnight. It's more about amassing a lot of small skills than having that one amazing "Aha!" moment that was so lionized during the Romantic era that artistic communities have never quite let go of it. Simply put, learning the craft is not a profitable proposition. So, to profit from teaching classes, we follow a different attitude towards the art, and we aim more for being a fun social hour, filled (one hopes) with encouragement and entertaining scenes, instead of instruction.

We also don't assign homework. It may well be impossible to learn a craft without putting in at least a little time on it every day. But, improv is always only a hobby. People put in a few hours in a once-a-week session, and then promptly forget about improv. Classes end up including much of what should be done in independent rehearsal. Instead of taking full advantage of the teacher's expertise and limited time, class is wasted on the drills that students should be doing on their own.

Useful Links

Footnotes

1? ... as opposed to how we teach them now. :)

2? Now, ideally, every improvisor should get feedback from his colleagues about where he could improve. However, it may be that his fellow performers are as much tyros as he, so it might just be the blind leading the blind.

3? The Peter says: for grammatical simplification, this piece alternates gender.

4? Also, the most neophyte improvisor is going to be a mess of self-analysis and self-editing, so a teacher will have to create an environment where the improvisor feels safe, and supported, and willing to fail. Beyond that, though, attention should quickly shift to learning techniques.

5? As a side note, improv is also not about who you are as a person. As a piece of advice, "Try to be less afraid" is counter-productive, in that we are human beings. We can't well change our personalities with any rapidity, if at all. So "be less afraid" is, in that way, as useless as "be funnier" or "be more creative." Secondly, it makes the desired criticism of technique (something like, "Make an effort to say a few things without thinking about the repurcussions; remember that it's only a scene.") a criticism of character. I know this sounds like mere defensiveness, but you can't teach somebody that way. It's wrong.