ratliff wrote:
It is one of the great ironies to me that this community of people, all of whom are clearly using their right brains like crazy onstage, retreat entirely into the left brain when talking about it.
I'm not sure whence your feeling of irony. You're right that I think any improviser worth his or her salt is going to play from an open, spontaneous, "right-brained" place onstage. But I don't know what is served by talking about it in that way. It gets all wispy and platitudinous if you talk about art from that same place, IMO anyway. "You're in your head." "Group mind is important." Those kinds of statements don't mean squat to me as points of discussion because either you're feeling it or you're not. The analytical stuff I find more helpful--after enough time being right-brained onstage, you start to wonder why certain things worked great and others didn't. Yes part of why certain things work out is maybe you were more in touch with your spontaneous side, but I don't think that's always the case. I think there are times when you're working from someplace deep from the Jungian whatnot but your scene partner wrongfoots you or makes a lame gag and the scene goes down in flames anyhow. And besides, saying get more in touch with your Jungian whosits isn't very helpful--I don't know what it feels like to be in your skin. But I can talk about external, analyzable, discreet bits of technique that if you internalize hard enough, I suspect will make your right brained experience more predictable.
Or let's put it another way. I'm all for the mystical aspects of improv. Personally I think there's something spiritual, religious almost, about doing it well. But I think you can get your mystical group mind rocks off by taking mushrooms in a field with some friends. That's great, but I don't want to pay to watch it. So I find these discusssions constructive about what are the analyzable parts of improv that make us want to watch that but that doesn't make a group of 'shroom addled heads seem audience worthy. And then when I go back to the well and am not thinking about it, I've already extended my interior range. I don't know if other people feel that way, but that's how I work.
ratliff wrote:For me, improv is an expression of what's going on right at that moment in that room, period. The more you restrict it by rules or preconceptions or rigorous format or assumptions, the less expressive it is of that moment.
You should go read that Dave Pasquesi interview. I've looked at part of it, and I think you guys would see eye to eye on a lot of this stuff. For me, form is there both as a structure for the audeince to hold on to, and as liberating barrier. If it's all up to you, that can be daunting, but if you think of it as you playing the game, the rules of the game give you permission to go outside of yourself. I love playing non-linear, flowy shows, but for me at least it's always like catching lightening in a jar. Feels great when it comes off, but when it doesn't work, everybody gets burned, especially the audience. If I wanted to have a higher success rate with that kind of show, I'd want to work at it and find structural, formal ways to make those things get better. I know Erika has described doing Harolds as the equivalent of ab crunches for theme-driven shows. So I'd probably be all over that if I wanted to do more of those kinds of shows.
One of my favorite painters is Philip Guston and he had this quote that he either came up with or at least really loved from another source, which was "Form leads to doubt, doubt leads to form." I really love that quote and is how I feel a lot of the time. These analytical, "left-brained", observations, at least on my part, are in essence the visible rhetorical remnants of the kinds of oscillations between doubt and certainty that take place internally where the real work transpires.
