<aside> đź’ˇ 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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Improv is an art form that is simultaneously created and presented in the self-same moment. That’s pretty unique. As a rule, you don’t go into an art gallery and watch as an artist puts the finishing touches to a painting. Sculptures aren’t continually refined and reinterpreted in real time - chiselled away by degrees until there’s no raw material left.
Even a traditionally live artistic endeavour like a scripted play is really more about the past. Actors remember lines, blocking, emotional memories of moments past that drive the action in the present. Six months into a West End run, your mind and body are to some extent going through the motions - responding automatically as each participant in the show follows their preordained path like a well-oiled machine. It has to be that way for the show to work. And yes, there are theatrical practitioners that work to discover the text anew each night but in improv we get all that for free.
We are responding in the moment. At the instant that it happens to us. The whole show is created in that metronomic heartbeat of the now.
So the trick is to revel in the nowness. Embrace it as a friend. Because when your character is surprised in a scripted play, you have to use all your subtle skill as an actor to convey that shock - even though this is the 30th time you’ve been “surprised” this month. As an improviser, you are as surprised as your character and this is a glorious gift.
One of the great joys of improv happens when you, your scene partner and the audience all work out what the scene is really about at the exact same moment. And oh the exhilaration of a room full of people laughing together in that instant. It feels intimate. It feels special.
Because liveness is a precious commodity in the modern world. There are vanishingly few experiences where people are truly in the moment. Catch-up TV, a galaxy of phone screens at every music gig, sunset selfies where we turn away from all that splendour to try and capture the moment - we don’t allow ourselves to fall from tick to tock, to sit and be present very often. Somethings needn’t be recorded for posterity, others actually lose their power in retrospect. Try watching an improv show that’s been recorded - it feels different - because you’re not there with the performers, discovering the show as they do.
And good improv should feel like discovery, not creation. A truly great scene feels effortless, as if you opened a door and the characters were already there, going about their lives. It’s a phenomenal feeling but it asks a lot of us - to not plan our scenes in advance, to stay alive and interested in our scene partner throughout, to nurture a keen awareness of our character’s own emotional journey. Sometimes it’s so much easier to do improv by numbers - this is where the callback should come, this is the bit where we do a group scene, I guess I should do my hilarious butler character soon!
The more rewarding path is to step out onstage as a blank slate and trust to the moment that is now … and now … and now … and now … and let the scene take care of itself.