having been in three of those four shows...for me at least, the risk was half the reward. the fact that those formats scared the shit out of me made them all the more worth doing. i had never done improv like that before...and i'd also never played to so many consistent sold out shows before. so yeah, i think in Austin at least, you can have both.shando wrote:As usual John, I'm with you on most of what you say, but this little assertion I think isn't borne out by some recent Austin programming. Off the top of my head, I think Austin Secrets, Live Nude Improv, Showdown, and False Matters were shows that had a marketable format but also were really "something that hasn't been done enough to ensure its success." Austin Secrets in its innovative way of including meaningful audience input; Showdown in that it was a serial and embraced ensemble-driven narrative rather than a hero-driven story; False Matters in that engaged a structure where the internal logic of the created worlds could shift repeatedly within the show and still hopefully cohere, LNI in that it embraced wildly unpredictable levels of audience participation and also boobies and dicks.ratliff wrote:No, but one definition of "experimental" is that you're trying something that hasn't been done enough to ensure its success.York99 wrote:I get frustrated by how some people define 'experimental.' I see people doing shows or moves within shows where they're trying to be experimental or avant garde and what it really is is self-satisfaction for the performer(s) and truly boring for experienced audience members.
The easiest example of this is going meta. 99 times out of 100 it's a fear-based choice and/or pandering. Rarely is it an intentional move that best serves the piece.
Just because a show has marketability doesn't mean the people involved are playing i t safe.
Is it theoretically possible to do daring work in a slick, marketable format? Sure, almost anything's possible.
Does it happen very often? No, and for good reason.
In other words, I think all these shows embraced the challenge of bringing heretofore unseen ways of making improv to audiences while still having some core hook that at least attracted audiences to come check out the potential trainwrecks in the first place. That's not too shabby a record for the past 9 months of Austin improv. And I can't speak for the Hideout cats, but I know with the Gnap! shows in question we didn't know if they would work but we were passionate to find out if they could and were willing to take a chance with the programming slot and our money to find out.
