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There are five pillars of movement practice that I think translate quite neatly into improv practice.
They are:
**Stillness Joint Articulation Coordination Improvisation Voice**
Over the next few weeks I’m going to look at each one in turn. This week …
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There’s a difference between doing a pull up and climbing a tree. Coordination is about putting multiple techniques together to achieve whatever you are aiming to do.
By design, it takes a limited range of muscles to do a bicep curl, but dozens of muscles throughout your whole body to throw a ball. That’s coordination.
It’s demonstrating that you can move smoothly through all the exercises and techniques you know in theory and utilise them in practice.
There’s a lovely idea in the natural movement community that true fitness lies in being faster than the body builders AND stronger than the sprinters. What that means in practice, is that we shouldn’t specialise one muscle group, one task or one set of skills too much.
Most improvisers have taken classes at a school where the prevailing technique is heralded as the only real way to improvise. True devotees of a school like that end up getting really good at doing one thing - and that leads to a kind of confidence and consistency that actually doesn’t take too long to learn. It feels amazing to progress quickly, and even more so, to start crushing it on stage right from the very beginning.
But in my experience, that myopic focus leads to problems later on. If you put all your time into developing in one area, then your skills in other areas tend to lag behind. And that’s how we get to two guys standing on stage, trying to out-funny each other - their bodies motionless from the neck down, no sense of scenography or character or story or emotional connection. Or the opposite, an interminable dramatic scene where the improvisers are only interested in the emotional stakes and have no control over other aspects of the scene - no moments of levity or mischief, no pacing, no awareness of how the audience is feeling.
My point in summary, you can’t concentrate on one technique, and make it the centrepiece of your performance style, without neglecting everything else. We are linear beings with limited resources. If we are to become rounded players, we need to spread our focus somewhat, marshal all these techniques and coordinate them together in new and delightful ways.
And then maybe we can be more empathetic than the comedians AND funnier than the dramatists.
<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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