A few years ago, I got involved in learning long-form improvisation. That’s long-form, by the way, not the short, hilarious improv sprints you see on “Who’s Line is it Anyway?”
Long-form improv is a lessor known, but––to a fiction writer––vastly more interesting form of improv. In a long-form show, what the audience sees is a team of 5 or 6 improvisors spontaneously creating a piece of improvised theater 25 or 30 minutes long, with an underlying structure that presents characters, relationships, and situations, moves through “beats,” or levels of complication, and ultimately resolves in a compressed coda of revelations, “callbacks,” and thematic full stops.
When skilled improvisors are at work, it’s hard to believe what you’re seeing wasn’t written–and written by a genius playwright. You feel you’re seeing a great work unfold–a human symphony with the pure authority of a dream.
There is no way for non-improvisors to understand how this process occurs, or how much skill and experience underlies it, beyond throwing oneself into an improv class at one of the growing number of good improv theaters around the country.
In a typical entry level class, you learn that the qualities you thought made good improv–facility for clever jokes, the ability to delight an audience with a lot of witty chatter or slapstick physical skills–are not at all what it’s about. You learn that saying, in effect, “no, it’s not like that, it’s like this,” gets you nowhere in an improv scene, where instead the traction comes from “that’s true, it IS like that, and here’s another aspect of it.” It’s the first principle of improv, a basic tool of scene building known as “yes-and.” If you progress up through the higher level classes, you learn good improv is about listening, about character relationships, supporting your scene partner, finding “in the moment” a shred of a notion that you can build a character on, suggest a scene with, then committing yourself with manic focus to that character, that scene.
There are usually 5 or 6 class levels before you’re qualified to perform in a “house team”–metaphorically, the equivalent of being an improv graduate student. At that point, you can get through a Harold, or a Armando, or a monoscene (examples of underlying longform structures) with competence, and if you’re good, occasional moments of brilliance. But it’s a long time before you can perform with the brio, confidence, and sustained brilliance of the top teams at UCB, Imrov Olympic, DSI, Annoyance Theater, The Groundlings, or any of the other top rang improv theaters.
Here’s the point: there’s a lot novelists and short fiction writers can learn from plunging into the discipline of longform improv. There’s so much, in fact, that I won’t even attempt to encompass it all in a single post. In fact, my word count is so high already in this one, but I’ll just say, before signing off, that in the weeks and months to come, I’ll be revisiting this subject. When you see the banner above (which I created by ripping the logos of several top theaters), you’ll know it’s another improv-based observation that fiction writers will profit from.
Check in tomorrow for the first in this occasional series, “The Game of the Scene.”
