2 Gays 1 Superbowl
Posted by dandy | Filed under News, Videos
Old time pal of USSRR Ronnie Karam made this very funny Superbowl recap video. So, if you missed the Superbowl last weekend, or you like to laugh. Here you go! Have a great weekend!
Love,
-USSRR
And just for good measure, enjoy The Most Intense Taekwondo Fight EVER!
Twitter: @USSRockNRoll
The Toddler: Improv’s Best Kept Secret
Posted by dandy | Filed under Talkin' Shop - We talk improv, The Vac
(Written by USSRR’s The Vac)
I have a 16 month old daughter. She is without a doubt my favorite kid on the planet. However, I often notice that at 16 months, she is already a better improviser than I am. She is confident, plays game extremely well, and she is very observant.
Take this morning for example. I hear a tiny voice calling “Dada Dada Dada” from the other room. Foolishly I take the bait and enter the toddler’s bedroom.
“Good Morning” I cheerfully muster though I am still half asleep.
“Dada” she replies.
“No baby, I am Mama” I mumble
“Dada” she laughs and points.
“Mama…” I say (deny) with confidence as I get her out of bed.
“Dada Dada” she laughs as she pats my face,
Like a fool I try and deny this gift and stick to my own stupid initiation “MA-MA…MA-MA”
“Dada” she replies as she gives me a hug. Ok, I give in, Dada it is as I look down and notice I am wearing my husband’s Pixies t-shirt.
Twitter: @USSRockNRoll
Camp Improv Utopia: An Interview with Levin O’Connor
Posted by dandy | Filed under Interviews, News, The Dandy
By Nick Armstrong – I’ve had the great pleasure of performing on a team called iO Repertory with Levin and I have to say some of the most magical moments onstage in my career have happened with him performing the JTS Brown. Levin is a true artist when it comes to Improv as best shown in his work with NOW? Improv and USS Rock N Roll. Here he is Levin O’ Connor:
————–
What keeps you doing improv?
Honestly, I can’t imagine not doing improv at this point and I think the reason that it has such lasting power, at least for me, is that improv is so process based. There is no destination to be arrived at. It can not be perfected, only improved upon. The challenges are always shifting, but they are never gone and I like that.
USS Rock N Roll is such a great artistic harold team…What does it take to be USS?
I think more than anything else the thing that separates USSRR from other teams that I have been a part of is our work ethic. We don’t take improv casually and we certainly don’t feel satisfied that we have “arrived” anywhere, which at this point is pretty remarkable. To be on a team that has players who have been playing together for a decade and yet we all still show up to rehearsal every week and we still drive and challenge each other to grow as artists is a special thing.
Do you have an improv mentor(s)?
At the moment Jason Pardo has my number. Before he took over coaching USSRR I felt a had a pretty solid handle on how to approach the Harold in specific and improv in general. But in a few months of working (more…)
Warm it up, Kris (I’m About To!)
Posted by dandy | Filed under Guest Blog, Talkin' Shop - We talk improv
Written by Blake Hogue (Twitter: @BlakiestBlake) - Blake is a proud member of the iO West Harold team Teen Police which performs most every Friday night in the DCT Theater. In addition, Blake sat in with USSRR last night (whoops you missed it!) and will sit in next Tuesday at 10:30 on the Mainstage as well (You still have time, YAY!).
—————–
I think teams should warm up before shows. Whether it’s for 30 minutes of full on warm up exercises or even 10 minutes in the green room catching up with each other and checking in, you should do something before the show to get into that group think and mindset of play.
I went through a phase where I felt I was good enough of an improviser and comfortable enough with my team(s) that I didn’t think we really needed to warm up. And for many of those shows, I found myself and the team not focused mentally and energized physically. Our commitment was sub-par, our moves less inspired, and the show just wasn’t that exciting.
Then, on a new team, we started warming up with more focus and diligence before shows. We took turns teaching our favorite warm ups to the rest of the group. And the shows were tighter, smarter, more connected, and I felt more confident to make ballsier moves.
I walk up the alley to iO West and still see USS Rock N Roll warming up with high energy, even after being a team for so many years. It’s inspiring to see they still care about the show to do everything they can to make it their best work. Even Scottie Pippen gets on the court before the game and throws balls around. I don’t watch basketball, I assume he’s still playing.
So warm it up, Kris. Because that, in fact, is what we were born to do.
Twitter: @USSRockNRoll
Amor Fati
Posted by dandy | Filed under Talkin' Shop - We talk improv, Writing Staff
Written by Drew Coolidge (Staff)
“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it, but love it.” – Friedrich Nietzsche in Ecce Homo
Amor Fati roughly translates to “Love of Fate” or “Love of One’s Fate”. It means not only accepting, but loving things as they are. This stoic sounding mindset fits right into our work.
Improvising a show is like driving a car with a blacked out windshield. We can only look to the right and left and see what we’re currently doing or we can look in the rearview mirror to see what we’ve done. We better learn to love this because it’s all we have. And what’s more, it’s all we need. Onstage, things happen and moves are made in a certain way, (Nietzsche calls it a ‘necessary’ way) and we can either accept them as they happened, using them to create or we can fight against them and create nothing.
This blog is basically just me reminding myself of these simple truths. I’ve occasionally found myself onstage judging moves made by myself and others like a jackass, wishing a different choice had been made. Amor fati. I’ve sometimes scoffed when a teammate knocks a game off track with an out-of-left-field statement. How dare they?! Amor fati. I’ve even written off a show I was currently in as being “stupid and confusing”. Amor fati.
Free To Fail
Posted by Piebenga | Filed under Resources for improvisers, Writing Staff
Written by Mark Piebenga (Staff)
An ensemble I was in a while ago did a form devised by our director TJ Jagodowski called The Fibonacci. You start with an opening scene, A, which goes for maybe two minutes. Then you have a second scene, B, which is related thematically or somehow inspired by scene A. Then you repeat A as exactly as possible, same actors hitting all the main beats and as many of the lines as they can, with the caveat that you are going to flavor it with information from and tone of scene B. You then repeat B similarly, as faithful as possible but somehow incorporating the sensibility of A. Then you do a new scene C, similarly inspired by but contrasting the earlier two. Then you go back, repeat A, then B, then C, and create a new scene D, and go on and on as such until you’re out of time.
One thing I used to love about it was TJ’s analysis: this form is designed to fail. Your brain can’t possibly wrap itself around every single detail, so inevitably it will start to break down once you try to repeat the fourth, fifth, sixth scene. And when it does, it can become transcendent. That bizarre character from scene D wanders into the taut dramatic reality of scene C and then bang, all of a sudden, an unexpected catharsis.
It’s a marvelous release to know that you will follow the form in good faith, it will come apart, and you will inevitably be free to fail, and through failure find the remarkable. Being “free to fail” is a lovely bromide, but difficult to live down. I can’t think of many shows that failed and felt liberating. After a poor show (which too-often translates mentally as “non-laugh producing”) I always feel like a part of my soul has died and I probably should cut off one of my hands.
Apropos of a real reaming notes-session a few years ago, my friend Ben quoted some NFL head coach who said something along the lines of, “the longer I do this, the more I realize that the only difference between winning and losing is how people treat me afterward.”[1] Peaks are nice, valleys are not. It makes sense to me to try to react with detached humility either way. I want to refine my ability to let my wins and my losses be treated with the same determined resolve. This is extremely difficult.
Will you please speak the word?
Posted by dandy | Filed under Videos
This video was submitted to us by friend of USSRR Z Rathore and for that we are all in his debt. If this were an improv scene, it would probably be my favorite one of all time. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have. Have a great weekend one and all!!
-USSRR
Twitter: @USSRockNRoll
Primordial Sort of Tar and Ooze of the Subconscious
Posted by dandy | Filed under Guest Blog, Talkin' Shop - We talk improv
Written by Erik Voss – Erik is a proud member of the Mainstage Harold team Natural 20 at iO West. Yes, it still exists.
——————-
In my short time in the iO West community I have become increasingly aware of a closeted distrust of Harold openings. If we don’t “hate” them, we are at least “burdened” by them, like they’re some imposing obstacle we need to clear before we can get to the good stuff. No one says they “like” them. I hear there was even a debate amongst the teachers on whether or not Harold openings should still be taught at all.
“I think we forget that people are coming to watch us do comedy,” a team member once said. “We don’t want to turn them off.”
I don’t know about that. People are going to UCB to see comedy. People don’t really come to watch us at all. They should call us Natural 11.
One of the big problems I have, and that I suspect many other iO West performers have, is that we don’t have a very clear picture of what a good Harold opening should look like. Yes, at some point when we were students we saw Trophy Wife, King Ten, or USS do a great opening, but we could never figure out how to make it work for ourselves. Every coach and teacher had a different metaphor. Time after time, we leapt into the abyss, fell on our faces, and watched our numbers decline and our teams get cut. The occasional good opening? Surely a fluke. Eventually, we started avoiding “organic openings” – a pejorative term that has now entered our lexicon – and simply gave up, settling for a much more practical Living Room or Pattern Game.
We also stopped watching Trophy Wife, King Ten, and USS. But that’s a different blog.
While at the movies recently I stumbled across a new way of looking at Harold openings that has helped me, at least, give a face to this ambiguous beast. I am probably not the first person to have this idea. And yes, it’s just another metaphor. But if it made sense to me, it might make sense to someone else.
Tatanka: Lessons of the Buffalo
Posted by dandy | Filed under Big Ups - Other improv teams that rule, Coach's Corner
Written by The Dandy
I am the proud coach if iO West’s Harold Team TATANKA and this is the story of how they made me a better coach.
I have been their coach since the beginning – meaning I was in the room when they were not Tatanka but instead a pile of headshots on a table that was being called “The New Team.” When they were first put together out of the Harold auditions nearly a year and a half ago I was not sure I was ready to take on coaching another group. I had just spend the two previous years coaching the team Gypsy Lou, a group that remains near and dear to my heart, and I just wasn’t sure that I had it in me to recommit to the process of building a new ensemble. Coaching, at least as I do it, is a personal affair. It is hard to leap out of one long relationship and be ready to commit to another, no matter how great they seem.
But that is exactly what happened. I decided that they lineup just seemed too good for me to not take a chance on. So I said yes and boy am I glad I did. The roster looked a little different back then, but the core remains the same. And over that time we have added some key players to become the team that they are now: Chris Lee, Matt Cavedon, Andy DeYoung, Brett Guennel, Ethan Newberry, Carrie Barrett and Thom Vacca.
Since the beginning they have been the most intimidating group I have ever worked with. Intimidating because I feel more like peer and less like a teacher. The team is full of players that I have watched perform for years and admired from a distance. Plus, Brett is a pretty big guy and our first rehearsals were at Second City where he teaches and…you get it, intimidating. But they are also intimidating because each member of the team has so much skill and experience that my job is not to teach them how to improvise, but instead to try to help them to get the most out of all the skills that they already have. To help them understand each other better and in so doing, to allow them to give into each other and thus shine together.
The thing that separates Tatanka from most teams, and my own team for that matter, is that they don’t appear the fit together. Individually they are kind of all over the place in styles and backgrounds and aesthetics. I remember being doubtful after the first few weeks of rehearsal that I would ever be able to get them on the same page. (A fact that I have not, until now, shared with them.) But they stuck with me and we kept pushing at it, and now I would say that the opposite is true. The differences that might have caused them to fall apart as a team at the beginning are the reason that they are as dynamic a group as they are. It has been this process of transformation has been one of the most challenging and rewarding artistic journeys that I have ever been a part of.
When we started out together I felt confident that I knew how to build a team that would play the way I liked teams to play. But I began to notice that the harder I pushed them to play “my kind of shows” the less joy they had in their work and as a result, the less their own individual skills were able to shine through. About this time USSRR was also going through a coaching change, and so I was being challenged to view and approach the Harold in ways that felt unfamiliar. But it proved to be perfect timing. As my horizons broadened as a player, I felt my flexibility expand as a coach and I made a terrifying leap.
My Biggest Improv Influence
Posted by dandy | Filed under Resources for improvisers
In an effort to get to know the new USSRR writing staff a bit better I have asked each of them to submit an article about their biggest improv influences. Last week we shared Mark Piebenga’s piece, You are beautiful when you are free, about TJ Jagodowski. This week Bryan Minh Troung shares his thoughts. Enjoy!
———————-
Written by Bryan Mihn Truong (Staff)
When I try to narrow it down to one person I have too difficult of a time. So I’ll talk about a time period in my improv career. 2004 I’ve already taken over a dozen improv classes from Groundlings, Second City, iO West(Just finished my second cycle of 3 and was an alumni), and various other indie improv classes. Even though I was still taking classes, doing practice groups, performing in indie shows and cagematches. I was getting better slowly and consistently but I still had a drive, a need, an obsession that I had to be great at improv now! or yesterday already!
King Ten(iO West Harold Team) Cast at the time was- Jon Crowley, Josh DuBose, Kim Garr, Sarah Gee, Dave Hill, Dave Holmes, Jason Pardo, Irene White. One day I was watching King Ten and was blown away how amazing their shows was and wished someone taped it so I could see it again! I thought to myself why couldn’t I have taped it and watch it over again to see what I could learn from it like game tape for sports. So I asked King Ten for permission to tape their shows and in exchange I offered to make DVD copies to keep for themselves(back then it wasn’t so easy and it would take me hours every week). They (more…)
