Location: a writer's studio. The writer is at his desk. He is sipping his coffee and starting to write...
The first improvisator is a fiction writer. The other improvisators will have to impersonate the characters in his now-starting novel. For now, they are visible, but they are not onstage. It is the writer's choice when to introduce each of them in his story. It is also his choice to assign each fellow improvisator a character in his book.
Preparations:
This exercise is for advanced trainees, so the preparations will go down at a fast pace.
Step 1: choosing the title. The "writer" will name 3 random people in the audience/ trainee group. Each of them will propose a title and the rest of the audience will vote for the best one. The title needs to be a phrase consisting of 2 long words and the necessary connectors. It should hit the zone between common and enticing. My random example is "The Hole in the Wall". A hole in a wall invites all sorts of questions. As a title, this phrase does not give away the genre of the book.
Step 2: choosing the genre of fiction. The same procedure will be followed, with other 3 trainees being selected. Variant: choose a title that already induces the idea of a particular genre, and select one that contradicts this expectation. My random example: "The Eyes of My Baby" - historic fiction.The larger the gap between the title and the genre of fiction to work with, the larger the field of logical possibilities and emotional expectations that the "writer" improviser can work with.
General directions for feedback discussions:
Everyone needs to treat the improvisation exercise like a real, timed onstage act.
You need a reasonable time frame. Outstanding or just average, the act has to go down completely within a reasonable frame of time. Show managers would never wait for an improviser to warm up; at some time the curtain has to go down. Training must include these circumstances.
Ensure the possibility for quality feedback. The time frame will be applied loosely, but will be applied, even when the trainees who are onstage do an excellent job. The more successful may stay a little longer; but all groups of 3-5 trainees who go onstage must be given similar circumstances, otherwise the quality of feed-back will suffer.
Expect individual fluency. Since we are dealing with advanced trainees, too much silence due to lack of inspiration is unlikely. Each trainee knows ways to gain time while onstage, without stopping and without a genuine audience being aware of that.
Expect quality interaction. This group exercise alternates small solo solutions with pair interaction and with group interaction. The writer coordinates most of the action, but a successful act will be the result of fluent interaction between all members of the onstage group.
A quality overall story. Fluent interaction is the minimal goal of this exercise, since everyone is entitled to a bad training day but ultimately improvisers don't go onstage to be hard-working, i.e. fluent and boring. It is reasonable to expect a quality overall story, because an entertaining story frame is the ultimate expression of quality onstage group improvisation.
Additional observations:
The first "paragraph"/monologue. The first air written/ uttered sentence must be a surprising one. If you brought a member of any genuine (i.e. non-professional) audience on stage, chances are you would hear a story that starts either with "One sunny day... ", or with: "The writer was sitting and sipping his coffee, when..."(self-reference). But that is why these people make up audiences: to be offered more than that. Advanced trainees don't waste the first replica on a common sentence to gain time. You don't need time when you have too little elements to work with, but more elements that can trigger a dynamic story, and a reasonably large field of logical and emotional possibilities. The gap between the title and genre can grow, while the elements to work with gather, if the first replica commonly belongs to another genre than the title and the selected overall genre of the improvised novel.
When should the writer speak? The writer never gets up from his desk and rarely watches his characters enacting his creative ideas. This exercise needs the actors to create a rhythm of acting together, without the writer ever disrupting his fellow improvisators' work. The key to this is not in the writer's hand. The characters should start each time by enacting the writer's proposal exactly and should strive to modify it as much as they can. It is ideal if they can change it into a completely unexpected situation, or into its exact opposite. This is where the writer will intervene.
Story coherence. The story will seen rich but coherent to the audience only insofar as the writer accepts to be incoherent. The writer needs to propose an idea and wait for the characters to modify it. Then, his next proposal will be a reaction to the new situation created by the characters. The improvisers can surprise each other and their audience with every change they introduce to the story.. While this rhythm is kept, the story stays coherent.
Rewriting the story. The writer is half writing, half daydreaming, so he is entitled to change his mind and rewrite certain actions. The writer should interrupt when everything goes fluently and well between characters, and should impose an opposite frame of interaction. Here's a random example. After the writer announced that one character had been shot dead.: "...in fact, he was not dead. He was desperately in love with the woman... (Meanwhile, the formerly shot character jumps up and promptly falls in love with the onstage woman). Naaah...; not this woman, but the one who had been watching them all the time. (Enters new female character, male promptly falls in love)." Doing this too often is boring, but doing it at the right time can stimulate the other improvisators and entertain the audience a lot.
Andrea A. Rosian is an ex-teacher, ex-teenager drama club coordinator and now a full-time freelance writer. Andrea writes articles connected to her activities and her hobbies, because she believes that quality content contributes to a quality online environment.