<aside> 💡 Please note this post is part of the Seven habits of highly effective improvisers series. Please click here for an overview.
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All tea comes from the Camellia sinensis. Just that one plant. Whether you’re drinking black, oolong, green or white tea - you’re imbibing the same basic vegetation. The vast differences in flavour profile come from variations in the oxidisation process, how it was grown, the soil quality, the amount of sunlight it got…
I love tea. When I gave up sugary drinks in my early 30s, tea became my favourite drink precisely because it can provide such startlingly different drinking experiences. Ceremonial matcha whisked by a bamboo chasen in an earthenware bowl? That’s tea. Smokey lapsang souchong served in a bone china tea pot? Totally tea. PG tips slopped in a tannin-stained Sports Direct mug and drowned in milk? Still. Technically. Tea.
I’m talking about tea because I really want to talk about truth in improv and explain why it’s such a powerful choice to make as an improviser. My main improv team is Project2 and our show is based around the science fiction genre. So usually I’m playing a robot or a space invader or a telekinetic badger made entirely of lasers. And yet those characters often like tea. Because I like tea. And when I talk about it, I become animated and joyful. It grounds these extraordinary characters in a shared humanity that in turn allows the audience to relate to my character more readily.
Improv is an art form that asks you to bring a lot of yourself to the performance. That’s one of its strengths. I’ve watched half a dozen people play Hamlet (men, women, people of colour, Doctor Who) but, aside from a few nuances of speech & staging, the character has remained very similar - they’ve said and done the same things (moped around, expounded on the nature of existence, stabbed up their uncle). Not so in improv - you’ll get entirely different performances based on who is embodying that part.
Every character you create, and it doesn’t matter whether you habitually play close to yourself or if you’re the most talented chameleonic actor in existence, is a version of you - created from your values, your preoccupations, your experiences, your understanding of what makes the world turn. The only perspective we have is the only one we’ve ever known - looking out from our own eye holes.
I’m here to say - lean into that. Glory in the marvellous minutiae of what makes you YOU. Bring all of that to the table when you step on stage. There are stories only you can tell. I want to hear them. I’m not really bothered about seeing another wacky surgeon who accidentally left their Apple Watch in their patient’s chest cavity. I’ve seen that so many times. It doesn’t come from the well-spring of who you are as a person. I want to see ancient gods who are worried about their house plants. Or pocket monsters who love scrapbooking. Fill your shows with climate change activist police officers, pirates who are obsessed with home renovation and single-celled amoebae who really stan Dakota Johnson.
We’re not even the same person from day to day - be gloriously alive to the human being you are right now. Make new choices and create different worlds. What you had for breakfast, whether you went for that run, what someone said to you just before you got on stage - that’s going to make a difference to the outcome of the performance.
Because improvisers are like tea - we’re all basically the same raw material but where we’re grown, how we’re treated, what we consume - that will end up giving us a flavour all of our own. And that’s what the audience deserves to experience.
What do you think? Have I expressed this idea in a way that make sense to you? What have I left out? Let me know at [email protected] - it’s always so nice to talk to fellow improvisers.