Impro: narrative skills

Notes/quotes from the next chapter of Impro. Maybe I should just buy the damn thing, course then it would clutter up my house, and I'm sucking it dry right here anyway. The more of these posts the more I interpret and paraphrase the book, the earlier ones were straight quotes, these later ones not necessarily as true to the original.

Content lies in the structure, in what happens, not in what the characters say.

When King Lear really gets going- the mad King, the man pretending to be mad, the fool paid to be mand, and the whole mass of overlapping and contradictory associoations-what can the spectator sensibly do but be swept away on the flood, and experience the play, instead of trying to think what it 'means'.

Ignore content, don't bother trying to make something 'mean' something. If you improvise spontaneously in front of an audience you have to accept that your innermost self will be revealed. The same is true of any artist. An artist has to accept what his imagination gives him, or screw up his talent.

Listening to a story, You are waiting for another activity to start, not free association, but reincorporation. Going from one thing to the next in a story is open ended and never ending, it doesn't become a story until you start weaving pieces from earlier in the story back into the current moment, making a pattern of some kind. A story is finished when enough pieces have been sufficiently linked back up.

A game: free associatefree associate random unconnected things (a duck, eiffel tower, pastel colored mountains) and then reincorporate the duck climbed the eiffel tower hoping to see the pastel mountains it came from. A knowledge of this game is very useful to a writer. First of all it encourages you to write whatever you feel like; it also means that you look back when you get stuck, instead of searching forwards. You look for things you've shelved, and reinclude them.

One way to free associate free from the internal censor. Write a paragraph unpremeditated, while counting backwards outloud from 100.

When you act or speak spontaneously, you reveal your self, as opposed to the self you've been trained to present.

The brain constructs the universe for us, so how is it possible to be 'stuck' for an idea? The student hesitates not because he doesn't have an idea, but to conceal the inappropriate ones that arrive uninvited.

One way to trigger off narrative material is to put the students in groups of three, and have them invent a name for a character, and see if they can agreee on what he's like. Get really developed character's this way.

An iproviser can study status transactions, and advancing, and 'reincorporating', and can learn to free-associate, and to generate narrative spontaneously, and yet still find it difficult to compose stories. This is really for aesthetic reasons, or conceptual reasons, He shouldn't really think of making up stories, but of interrupting routines. Many people think of finding more interesting routines, which doesn't solve the problem, it may be interesting to show brain surgeons doing a particularly delicate operation, but it's still just the routine of their lives. If instead the brain surgeons went nascar racing, then that is likely to generate a narrative. Red Riding Hood presents an interruption of the routine "taking stuff to grandma's". As a story progresses it begins to establish other routines, and these in their turn have to broken. It doesn't matter how stupidly you interrupt a routine, you will be automatically creating a narrative, and people will listen. The scene in the Tespest where Caliban hears the clown coming works marvelously, but it's ludicrous. If we treat it as routine that the clown sees the monster hiding under the sheet, the it's obvious that the clown should run away. What he does is incredible-the very last thing anyone would do is to crawl under the sheet beside the monster. It's actuallyl the best thing to do, since it spectacularly breaks the routine.

Many students try up at the moment they realize that the routine they're describing is nearing it's completion. They absolutely understand that a routine needs to be broken, or they wouldn't feel so unimaginative. Their problem is that they haven't realized what's wrong consciously. Once they understand the concept of 'interrupting routines', then they aren't stuck for ideas any more.

An audience will remain interested if the story is advancing in some sort of organzied manner, but they want to see routines interrupted, and the action continuing between the actors. Don't let the story get deflected off stage, don't talk about 'them that are coming" or "my car in the garage", instead prepare the set for "them" or yell for assistance because your foot got run over by a car.

Don't cancel. Don't solve an idea right after you introduce it. I'm thirsty, I get a drink of water, problem here problem solved. Better I'm thirsty, oh no the tap's dry and there's nothing in the fridge.

The rules are: (1) interrupt a routine; (2) keep the action onstage-don't get diverted on to an action that has happened elsewhere, or at some other time; (3) don't cancel the story.

The last chapter is on Masks and Trance. Really interesting, but maybe not for animation reasons. But if I ever wind up pursuing psychology more I should re read this book for that