Trying VS. Doing
Posted by Plague | Filed under Guest Blog, Talkin' Shop - We talk improv. Any questions you want discussed can be. Email us @ captain@ussrocknroll.com., The Plague
Welcome our guest blogger for today, Drew Coolidge! He performs regularly with the iO Rep and Lester Diamond.
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Crap! Ok, make a choice, make a choice. Old man character! I’ve done that before, it got some laughs. This line will get ‘em “Not without my medication”. No laughs…well f*@k. What did my partner say? Something about something I bet. Wait for him to finish. Perfect, my time to talk… “Not without my medication”. Two chuckles, not terrible. Two guffaws would have been better but…crap, my partner said something again…why does he keep talking when I’m trying to think!? Ok, you can do this. You can make this funny. I think he said something about Baltimor…Christ it’s hot up here. Is the air conditioning on? The audience probably isn’t laughing because it’s too hot for them to hear me. That makes sense, right? Say something funny! “Not without my medic—“ Edit. Oh glorious edit!
All improvisers have been in this position at many points in their career. We find ourselves trying so hard to improvise well. The irony is that there is no greater gap than the one between improvising and trying to improvise. We go through 5-6 levels of classes trying to improvise. We also all have that one day in class or practice when it just seems to click. It feels great to be onstage! Everything coming out of my mouth surprises me, but it’s more perfect than anything I could have thought up. This is so much fun! It feels right! I feel good! I FEEL GREAT! The next class is back to drudgery. How the hell did I do this so well yesterday? I’m terrible! I must not be trying hard enough. Try harder! There must be some improv rule that I was doing well yesterday that I can’t seem to remember today. As long as I’m remembering all of the rules I should be great at this. There is no greater gap than the one between improvising and trying to
improvise.
I saw a cartoon in a magazine about a year ago that I sketched in my notebook because I thought it was exactly what I needed right then (funny how that always happens). It showed a fork in the road with two possible directions to travel. A signpost labeled the two paths. One direction was labeled “God” and the other direction, “Concepts of God”. This was a revelation to me at the time. Down one path is God, all that God is. Down the other path are our ideas about what God is. Even the word ‘God’ conjures up pictures of a man with a white beard on a cloud judging his creations down below. God, Brahma, Allah, Nature, the Universe, the Tao, etc are all concepts that describe the idea of God, but not one of them IS God. The Tao Te Ching states “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” But we as humans conceptualize everything. We cannot understand something until it is named,
categorized and described. This is an evolutionary benefit for us as animals. The problem comes when we mistake the concept for the actual thing. Then we argue, fight, and kill each other because ‘they’ named, categorized, and described something differently than we did. The saying goes “A finger points at the moon. Do not confuse the finger for the moon.”
This struggle, which plays out between faiths and countries every day, is also raging inside the improviser, albeit on a smaller scale.* We think there’s a RIGHT concept and a WRONG concept and if we could just try harder we can improvise correctly. Trying to improvise is merely reenacting the description of improvisation. It’s looking at the fingers instead of the moon. ‘Good improv has no questions, it never denies, etc…’ Do you think that if you are doing all of these things that you’re improvising? Remember back to that day in class when you felt you ‘got it’. Any amount of describing wouldn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what you were doing. You didn’t think about yes-anding, or whether you asked a question. You just did, you just knew, you just spoke, you just acted, you were improvising. You felt the creative force flowing through you. You felt one with everything. In short, you felt God.
So then, how do we get to this point? How do we improvise? It’s like asking how to sit in a chair. You just sit. You don’t try to sit in the chair. You sit. You don’t try to improvise. You improviseª. You can use all of these concepts as helpful hints along the path, realizing that they are nothing more than concepts; they are fingers pointing to the moon. Does it feel better for you to focus on your partner and give them gifts (IO style), focus on making strong choices for yourself (Annoyance style), focus on finding a scenic game for both partners to agree to play (UCB style)? All are right and none of them are the entire picture. All roads lead to God, which can only be experienced.
*You know what, fuck it. I only added the ‘dramatically smaller scale’ part so that no one who read this would think I was over exaggerating. It’s exactly the same struggle and if we learn to let it go on any ‘scale’ than we’ve done our part to better humanity by bettering ourselves.
ª – Improvise is a verb. Part of the problem came with the phrase ‘doing improv’, which assumes that ‘improv’ is some cut-and-dry noun that means a very specific thing that you can either do well or poorly. “Hey, are you running?” “No, I’m doing run!”
Tags: Drew Coolidge
4 Responses to “Trying VS. Doing”
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the mouth Says:
November 22nd, 2009 at 1:13 amlove it. thank you.
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Hawkins Says:
November 22nd, 2009 at 3:19 pmI think Eric Hunnicutt says it best "listen, react, respond"
anything else you're doing is effort, and will show
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Drew Says:
November 23rd, 2009 at 8:18 pmThat's funny, I wrote this after a Hunicutt workshop. Fantastic.
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andy Says:
November 24th, 2009 at 1:07 amthis is so marvelous. well said, drew! very well said (particularly the asterisk section). when i get geeky about improv, which is my favorite way to be about improv, i really believe it can be blown out to be a parallel with life. improv as life. life as improv. afterall, what are we doing in life but improvising? particularly when we're really living, really tasting and seeing and hearing and subsequently reacting. when we're in our heads about it, we're not really experiencing it, and it can cripple many lives just as it can, scenes. those who live best or improvise best just DO it.
