When you start studying improv (or really any new hobby, sport, craft, skill or art form) - there’s three distinct phases you go through as you grow as a practitioner.
Come with me now as we explore the mysterious and beautiful three-fold path ahead of us.
You are at the start of your journey. Every warm-up exercise is new to you. Every scene technique blows your mind. This is the embarrassment of riches stage before you cultivate a sense of yourself as an artist. Everything is useful because everything is untested and represents additional information. During this stage just throw yourself into as many classes, jams and workshops as you can. Be a sponge! Absorb everything that is given to you. Take notes on how it made you feel. What did you discover? Glory in the rush and the overwhelm of newness. It’s never going to be like this again, soon you’ll have opinions and … taste - now everything has worth by dint of its innate novelty. The longer you can stay in this state of wonder, the better. Legend has it that there are some improvisers who never truly leave. They are constantly searching for new thoughts, new perspectives, new ways of doing things.
Once you have amassed a large collection of exercises, tools, theories and games - now is the time to sort through your pile of treasures and make some choices. This isn’t just about what to use and what to throw away. It’s about understanding those techniques - thinking what they can be used to achieve. You may have learned I am a tree as an accept and build game - but with a few tweaks it can be used to teach platform, narrative, group mind and A→C association. You can arrange your bounty into categories and collections, design lesson plans, assign them multiple tags to resurface them at the right moment to help other improvisers. You can start thinking about what tools you might want to use in scenes to achieve a specific genre or performance outcome. This is where you stop following specific guidelines and deploy techniques instinctually at a moments notice. So when a scene starts spiralling out of control, you automatically reach for the right tools - you slow down, you say less, you let the silence breathe (or whatever you judge the scene needs - use specifics, state the game clearly, have an emotional opinion about your scene partner’s character, move more etc.)
The holy grail. This is the point where you no longer look for an exercise to teach clear initiations (for example), you make one up on the spot. You use everything you’ve learned, your experience of what works in any given situation and you make something new. Sometimes they will work great, sometimes you’ll need to iterate a bunch of times before you’re happy. But the point is you have the confidence to try. It’s where you look around, spot a need or a lack in the community and instead of shrugging your shoulders - you fulfil that need yourself with something you cut from whole cloth. This can be anything from a new warm-up game to a new indie night, an improv metaphor, a succinct piece of advice. All that matters is that it comes from you and that you’ve added your perspective to the sum total of all improv knowledge.
Now obviously, this isn’t actually a linear path - as I intimated in the first paragraph, a good improviser will move backwards and forwards between these modalities all the time. But I really love it as road map to learning new things. What do you think?
With thanks to Ben Medder for introducing me to this concept.
<aside> 💡 Hey, my name’s Chris Mead. I write an article about improv almost every week. You can get the latest in your inbox by subscribing to my newsletter. Or check out the archive.
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