Intensives and classes on the road

[slappywhite]

Frank

Frank?

FRAAAAANK!

Oh push the button.

[kristin]

Re: UCB Intensives

The class that Trew/York took was a traveling class (in Toronto?) advertised as an "UCB Intensive" (also as part of a festival or something?), where they tried to teach some experienced folks game or whatever in a short amount of time.

These away-type classes are taught often by whoever is already going to be in the area for a show or whatever and aren't really part of the "official" UCB curriculum.

The "Intensives" that you'd take in NYC are structured a lot differently, and they are part of the core curriculum (as in you can mix and match "regular" weekly classes with intensives and progress through all the UCB levels). They begin at the basics with 101 and move onto game (201) and more game/Harold (301) work.

I began my UCB training with 3 weeks of intensives (then enjoyed myself so much I canceled all my other flights and stayed for a year and a half) and I believe Jill recently took one or two of the regular intensives as well.

It is a little tough to absorb so much in a short span of time. There will be other people there brand new to improv. It is highly dependent on the teachers, but at least for the NYC intensives you get one teacher in the morning and one in the afternoon, so you do get more exposure to different folks. And you get to see a bunch of free shows while doing the intensives, though I think they changed the policy up some since I did it, so maybe not as many.

[Marc Majcher]

UCB: Great tools, but learning game in a week is impossible.

"UCB Intensive".. where they tried to teach some experienced folks game or whatever in a short amount of time.

I keep hearing stuff like this about UCB and "game". Is this something different than what various folks (Buckman, etc) teach here, or am I missing something? Every time I hear the words "UCB" and "game" mentioned together, it's made to sound like some incredible Shaolin Improv Black Lotus Dragon Technique that only the lucky few can acquire after decades of painful training, and every time I hear people here talk about it, it's like, "bam, bam, bam, and that's how it works? got it? go!" I mean, it sounds easy conceptually, right? It just takes practice to get good at, like anything else.

Not saying anything against UCB or its adherents or blah blah blah, but if there's some Hundred Finger Death Palm out there that I don't know about, gimme the scoop.

[kristin]

I think being taught one day of what game is could compare to doing the story arc game (once upon a time, and every day, etc. etc.) and being told "and that's what narrative improv is".

There's more to it then the basic structure, takes awhile to get good at it, you still need to be able to surprise the audience, etc.

[Asaf]

I think learning what game is can be quick but then it is a matter of exercising that muscle yourself. And within a week of training, you get to see a lot of examples of games that worked and see scenes where there were opportunities for games that you might have otherwise missed. That's all.

[York99]

I keep hearing stuff like this about UCB and "game".

I'll take a stab at this:

Game is recognizing tendencies and patterns in a scene (in the dynamic of the relationship, within your character, within your scene partner's character, in the situation in general, etc); then repeating those tendencies and patterns in the same way, in different ways in that scene or in another scene with the same characters or different characters; and finally by heightening (often to a ridiculous extreme) those tendencies and patterns.

When done well, the end result is very funny and often very smart.

The difficulty of game is getting used to recognizing the patterns quickly and being able to play with them.

Anyone else want to build on that?

[Marc Majcher]

The difficulty of game is getting used to recognizing the patterns quickly and being able to play with them.

Okay, cool. That all meshes with what I understood. Like Asaf said, it's primarily the practice that's the long road, not the understanding of the basic idea.

If there's more, hit me, but I think we're good, here. Thank you for indulging my digression - back to hooking up the danger.