Assumptions

[mcnichol]

a more experienced improviser has told me that, to many people, the harold symbolizes the arrogance and insularity of the chicago school of improvisers, but i find that explanation uncompelling.

(from this thread.)

You know, this breaks my heart. Really, I'm just sad upon reading this.

To read that there are people in this community that not only believe something as ludicrous as this, but have gone out of their way to warn John of something like this is just baffling.

I don't even know how to respond when i read this. And it's hard to not separate my personal feelings from reading a statement like this when (1) this is obviously driven by someone else's personal feelings and (2) there are so few improvisors here of the "chicago school." (whatever that is) I truly like and trust everyone I've gotten to know through this community in the last year, and hearing this sort of viewpoint causes me to think that those feelings are not reciprocal, no matter how nice people seem to act in person.


...the idea that the Harold = Chicago in any fashion is just wrong. The Harold is taught at IO, and many teams perform it at IO, because they have to. However, there are many more theaters and training centers in Chicago that have their own ideas and forms and training which may or may not include the Harold (most likely, not). There is no "chicago school" that exists. It's a bunch of different ideas and theories and theaters and people. And even the people that had to perform it at IO (ie. Erika) don't often care for it as much as other forms.

Second, the idea that a specific improv form symbolizes arrogance and insularity is baffling to me. How could performing an improv show in a certain fashion mean that those people... that doesn't even make sense. Confidence and passion for an approach, however counter or foreign that may seem to another person or philosophy, is not arrogance or insularity. To me, arrogance and insularity would be symbolized by someone who dismisses a form based on something other than actually attempting to understand the form, but rather attributing personal issues or feelings to it, or to an entire group of disparate people. ...like saying that because it comes from somewhere, it represents something about those people.

I don't understand why anyone would choose to actively build walls in this community (based on absolutely nothing of substance) when it seems like we've come so far with the AIC. Whoever went out their way to warn John of this, it would be great if you could actually explain what you are talking about since it doesn't really make any sense and is just plain wrong. These are the kind of assumptions and baseless biases that I'd hoped would be gone. I sincerely hope for and invite open discourse on this if you do feel this way.

[arthurina]

Harold raped me!

[ratliff]

ooh, shite, i need to make this really clear: the person who told me this was NOT warning me against the harold. she was trying to contextualize OTHER people's resistance to it. in other words, i have yet to talk to anyone who has actually expressed the view that it represents arrogance et al.

bob, i apologize for causing you tsuris. please know that nobody is pulling me aside and trying to poison my mind against other people, approaches, or groups. i respect everyone's strong feelings on the subject, but i have yet to actually encounter them outside the bizarro world of the forum.

[vine311]

I've been following this thread (the one started on Justin's class post) and I haven't chimed in because I've never seen or performed a Harold before. However, all of this hype has got me dying to try one. If I were not moving tomorrow, I would be at Justin's class front-row-center ready to learn this thing called Harold. I don't care what school it came from or who taught it to whom, I want to learn as much as I can from as many sources possible. My ultimate goal to is soak up all of this knowledge and experience so that I can eventually invent my own styles and teach them to others. I am a sponge soaking up all of the amazing information that you guys have to give. I don't care what other's opinions are of any given style, I want to try everything new that I can and fail my way to success.

[kbadr]

Even though I wasn't the person who said that to John, I feel the need to reply.

I love everyone in the AIC and truly mean it.

The only thing that I found to be arrogant about The Harold is the way it was presented in (the introduction of?) Truth in Comedy. The form is just a form, like any other, and I don't care if someone wants to do it for every show they have until the day they die. If they're improvising and they love what they're doing, more power to 'em.

I don't want the Chicago transplants to think there's some seedy underbelly of the AIC that meets in dark alleys to slag off the Chicago people. I think the coldness of communicating over an internet forum has turned this discussion into something uglier than anything that exists in the offline world.

As such, I am now a Luddite. Down with computers. Where's my hammer?

[ratliff]

no kidding. in a way, it's comical, because my offline experience with the improv community is that it's supportive and accepting to an almost unreal degree. i scoffed internally a little at first, but now i'm realizing how much i've benefited from it already and really appreciate it. so the idea that i inadvertently triggered a fictional schism fills me with awe and horror.

as does arthurina.

[shando]

Whoever went out their way to warn John of this, it would be great if you could actually explain what you are talking about since it doesn't really make any sense and is just plain wrong. These are the kind of assumptions and baseless biases that I'd hoped would be gone. I sincerely hope for and invite open discourse on this if you do feel this way.

Well as John has established, it certainly wasn't me. I have nothing against the Harold in the slightest, and having heard Chris's, Erika's, and your eloquent explanations of it's usefulness (ie, a way to create a show without using traditional narrative that can still hang together in a satisfactory way and not end up just being a random grab bag of scenes--succint explanatiosn I've not seen before) makes me interested in dabbling with it, having done many flowy shows that hevn't hung together.

I think any resistance to the Harold amongst other impovisors is not so much a resistance to the form per se. It's more like allowing that one may like the music of the Grateful Dead while not particularly being down with the aethetics of Deadheads. Also, I suspect there is a certain civic chip on the shoulder, however ill-informed, that doesn't want to see Austin become a pale imitation of other places but one that has it's own identity. That's a danger of a small city--the reverse (perverse) provincialism. Those are maybe distinctions without differences, and also lame, but they're real and human responses.

As far as this goes:

when it seems like we've come so far with the AIC

I'm not sure what that means? Come so far from where? Austin's always been a place where new forms and experimentation have been welcome (see the entire career of one Jeremy Lamb and the Well Hung Jury or GGG, or the rapidity with which recent transplants have been absorbed into the community). To attribute to the community some previous benighted, segregated condition as has been alledged in other posts recently seems equally uninformed about the realities of Austin's improv history as many Austinites may be about the improv community in Chicago.

And Bob, I probably can't take your forms work shop, but I'd love to talk with you about the Deconstruction. I think Apollo 12 may have done one last year at OoB, but I'm not sure.

Rock on, all forms.

[shando]

I don't want the Chicago transplants to think there's some seedy underbelly of the AIC that meets in dark alleys to slag off the Chicago people. I think the coldness of communicating over an internet forum has turned this discussion into something uglier than anything that exists in the offline world.

Word to this sentiment.

[mcnichol]

Thanks for replying to this thread so far.

when it seems like we've come so far with the AIC

I'm not sure what that means? Come so far from where? Austin's always been a place where new forms and experimentation have been welcome (see the entire career of one Jeremy Lamb and the Well Hung Jury or GGG, or the rapidity with which recent transplants have been absorbed into the community). To attribute to the community some previous benighted, segregated condition as has been alledged in other posts recently seems equally uninformed about the realities of Austin's improv history as many Austinites may be about the improv community in Chicago.

I'm not referring to anything other than my experience with how this community has changed over the last year that I have been an Austinite. When I arrived here, there was no AIC. Andy was the sole person who arranged the schedule, and I barely met anyone who I was not performing with. Things felt to change around last year's OOB -- I met more people and felt more a part of this community. And then we all started meeting together, before we ever called it the AIC, and started discussing what we wanted to do with this community. Lots of people's feelings were aired and (hopefully) resolved, and we started making decisions and changes as a community -- the AIC. And that's all I was referring to. I guess I thought we were past thinking of people as "Chicago people" or that so-and-so type of people are arrogant and insular because they were trained in a certain way. ...or anything like that. I wasn't referring to anything prior to June of 2005, just my own experiences here.

I don't want the Chicago transplants to think there's some seedy underbelly of the AIC that meets in dark alleys to slag off the Chicago people.

Thanks for saying what you said Kareem (not just what's in that quote above). Although I don't think people meet in alleys to slag off Chicago improvisors, I do get the sense from being a member of the discussions on this board over the last year or so, that there is a very "us vs. them" mentality with Austin improvisors when thinking of Austin improvisors who happened to have trained elsewhere and have a different set of formative experiences. Everyone's experiences, in my ideal world, should be shared and built upon, not used as a device for categorizing and separating. And IN THAT, in sharing our unique improv experiences, we can start to build and form our own Austin-specific type of style or forms or whatever. Not in calling people "Chicago people." There are no Chicago people here -- everyone here is an Austinite, as far as I'm concerned. A majority of people I know here aren't from Austin in the first place -- I know some New Yorkers, Alabamans, Iowans, Georgians, Californians... and that's just who posts on this board. And for the record, I'm a Philadelphian.

While my original post may have been a bit reactionary, please trust that it is truly heartfelt. I wouldn't have written it if I didn't give two shits about the community and the people I've grown to know and love over the last year. ...And the desire to continue to grow and welcome more and more new people into it.

[sara farr]

Blah blah blah.

I am sorry, but I am kind of tired of hearing about this "mythical" improv-population that is snidely belittling "Chicago Style" improvers. I don't see it. I have never seen it. My only exposure to it is people talking about this creepy feeling they have gotten. Therefore, I refuse to believe in it.

However, I do beileve in creepy feelings, and I tend to waffle in my belief in ghosts. So maybe it is an IMPROV GHOST. It's probably that guy who died onstage during the last Big Stink. His troupe was breaking up (some going to LA, some going to NY, and some going to Chicago) and he had a brain annurism (sp?) right at the end of the show. Everyone thought it was funny and part of the show, but he really died. My guess is that he is hanging around the Hideout trying to break up the Austin Improv scene out of SPITE. Bad ghost!!!

Haven't you all noticed the mischievious havock that has been going on lately? And, in case you hadn't noticed, there are a few unaccounted for people on this forum. Maybe there is a ghost in the machine???

[shando]

I wasn't referring to anything prior to June of 2005, just my own experiences here.

Cool cool. When I think of the dark times of Austin improv, as Erika talked about yesterday, I think about not the period she refered to, which was before I was here, but the period from roughly the end of 2003 (when the Jury hung it up) and the period right before last year's Out of Bounds. It wasn't that there was no sense of community or interest in one, it's that there was hardly any improv going on with any reliability. Staring last summer, an amazing thing happened. We had a whole bunch of people come through Andy's classes who were really interested in performing, Andy had found his legs scheduling the Hideout after much inattention of the Hideout from Sean, ColdTowne and Tight showed up, Christina showed up, other people started getting in the game, Jeremy moved back and everything blew up. In that my experience of the past year or so is no different than yours. It's been an awesome thing to behold, and I feel much less central to it than I'm sure a lot of others do.

And I agree. We're all Austinites and I feel lucky to have such an amazing crop of people on the scene. I hope I for one have not contributed to any us vs. them appearances on these boards, although I sure I have. I have some strong opinions about improv, but anything I've posted I've always, in my head anyway, intended to be a beginning of a discussion and not the erection of a barrier.

And I for one welcome this:

we can start to build and form our own Austin-specific type of style or forms or whatever

while hoping others recognize that the development of this thing, whatever it is, well predates the explosion that started last summer (again see all my references to the Jury in this regard).

[HerrHerr]

When I think of the dark times of Austin improv, as Erika talked about yesterday, I think about not the period she refered to, which was before I was here, but the period from roughly the end of 2003 (when the Jury hung it up) and the period right before last year's Out of Bounds.

Yeah, blame me. The end of 2003 is exactly when I started doing improv.

Kidding. Seriously, kidding.

I did wade through the "dark days" of improv. I did Micetro back when we had to cancel a show once a month or play to eight people. I did the first two Start Trekkin's and eventually helped form a troupe that went defunct quickly (Bedridden). Andy coming back with lots of enthusiasm and getting classes going regularly helped a bunch. Andy starting a Friday night show for the few troupes in town helped. Our "Chicago" friends arriving injected me with a new sense of improv and helped me refocus my energies. Mac's workshops also helped a bunch. Coldtowne exploring so many avenues of comedy is invigorating as well. And through those dark...NO SHAME was a place of refuge for me. I started doing sketch at those crazy shows and haven't looked back (gosh, can't we get No Shame going again...?)

The students coming out of Heroe's classes these days are very fortuante because they have a strong base of supportive improvisers to encourage them to form troupes. And those troupes go on to help the brand-new troupes.

Go ahead and puke, but we are a melting pot of improv. We've got veterans and newbies playing together, folks who have moved here (or back here) from various parts of the country and we occasionally get troupes from out of town to play. This is only the beginning folks.

[shando]

And through those dark...NO SHAME was a place of refuge for me. I started doing sketch at those crazy shows and haven't looked back (gosh, can't we get No Shame going again...?)

Hey, don't talk to me about it. I was told there wasn't room for it any more. When I asked to move it to Thursday at 9 I was told it would interfere with classes, so I decided to hang it up. In that time, I've sort of moved on artistically, but I do hear sentiments like yours, Chris, from time to time.

[chicocarlucci]

This is awesome! I'm glad there are people in the community that have such strong feelings about "the Improv" as I have heard it called. Makes me want to take a class from you. Seriously. People with passion about their craft are the best teachers.

The other thing it tells me is that even though I feel Improv has rudely and abruptly begun to take over my life (almost every night of the week, what the hell?), there's this whole other world that I am still oblivious to. Like the whole Improv gang scene that apparently has sprung up.

I've never heard anyone say anything bad about anyone to anyone. But then again, if they were gonna say something negative about someone, they probably wouldn't say it to me.

But that doesn't mean I don't want to have us split up into bitter factions. I think that would be fun! Each "improv gang" with it's own bling and signs and "gold teef" and hydraulics... sweet. Where's that show?

SO I'm gonna start actually ragging on different people and see if we can get some division amongst the ranks. That's my promise to all of you. I'll start in this forum.

FACT:
Each of the members of TIGHT eat a live baby before every show -- for luck.

FACT:
Keith Johnstone communicates with Shana Merlin telepathically and tells her to burn things.

FACT:
The Harold was created by the French, and is considered one level below "mime".

FACT:
Pgraph is NOT cute and adorable.

FACT:
Coldtowne worships God.




-eric

[arthursimone]

FACT:
Coldtowne worships God.

SLANDER!!!!!!!!


oooooooo, eric, you found that button and you pushed that button. Look above, you might just see a tiny piano become a whole lot bigger.