Summary of Improv Goals 017

In both title and nuisance, John is creative director at the Roving Imp Training Center, and challenges all of us to keep a journal, yet I have made no post about my goals for improv in a month, conflicts in my scheduling caused me to miss class for two weeks.

On the site today: SWF seeks SM to sleep on other side of bed; the history of Snoopy; and some reader mail. bit.ly/pD8gt6

— Timothy McSweeney (@mcsweeneys) April 4, 2012

Over the last five days, each day, I have been arriving home for the evening one hour earlier, but I am still going to bed at midnight.
Source: Fleur De Lis (Friendship is Magic)

Why, yes, the image above is an interesting pun, which was my appropriately used technique in one of the warm-up games in class on Tuesday. On which necessary care and time were given, we played Emotion-Location Circle with the requirement that we are adding a detail about our environment. For the location, we received, ‘dove blind,’ and the emotion may have been,‘distraught.’ Most people thought about the silly animal or the chocolate, yet I was only slightly more clever.

“I can’t see anything! Where is the soap?”
John responded, “You can’t see; we can’t see anything either. Tell us more about where you are and why you can’t see.”
“I should have replaced the light bulb in the bathroom. I can’t see anything! Where is the soap?”

Last week, we worked on listening and adding detail to a scene.
We played Respond and Reveal.

Source: Heart attack, indeed.

The first person initiates. The second person responses emotionally to what was just said, and then reveals something about his or her character. With the gap of a week in my memory, I can not remember any specific example, but dedicating an entire class to that game was very effective to the understanding of everyone in class. Later in class this Tuesday, John gave us a location, and three or four people painted the scene: they described items in and around the environment, and sometimes moved the blocks.

Oddly, my two scenes in this run were both with Mary, a shorter, older lady with a love of hats; who takes good care of herself, and her husband; and does workplace training, touring the country, lecturing professionally.

Three blocks had been longitudinally aligned on stage, and David painted them as a boat, a rather small boat.
Mary sat with her legs crossed, and soon established us as an older couple, and her character wanted to go for a romantic ride in the boat.
Responding in a Jewish accent, I recited some details about the boat, noting that the rope was approximately seventy feet, and the anchor was about a hundred pounds.
The oddest thing that David had painted were ‘row paddles’; for some reason, he did not call them oars. Of course, my dyslexic mind caused me to call them ‘paddle rows.’
I revealed my fear of commitment.
Mary said that she knew, considering that I had taken seventy years to propose.

John did pause us to call attention to our game in the scene. My second scene with Mary was more about the weirdness in a scene and its going unnoticed.

The scene took place in a fireworks kiosk, which the two previous scene established was in a tent, when Mary mimed a cigarette in the beginning the scene.
I was trying to slowly build my reaction, but others soon added to the scene with a campfire and welding equipment.
John soon called to our attention, “Smoking near fireworks is about the dumbest thing you can do. When the weird continued with no reaction...”
We ran the scene again and I said something about the smoking.

I had such fun in the rehearsal for Nerds.

Source: Fleur De Lis (Friendship is Magic)