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13
Jun
Testing feed issues…
07
Jun
Extended break
The job hunt leaves me with little time to make meaningful blog posts right now. I’ve had three different interviews over the past two weeks and have another this week. As soon as I free up more time, I will return to business as usual.
“What had always been more interesting to me was improvisation because I was more interested in being funny with other people, and as it turns out, when you’re doing a volume business like the Late Night show, there’s such a large amount of it that’s improvisational, and that was huge for me. Doing all those years of improv really helped, and learning to listen, and learning to react, and learning to let things happen. I don’t pretend that I’ve learned the true craft of improv, but what I did learn is that people respond to something that happened in the moment much more than they will respond to the most brilliant thing that was thought of ahead of time and prepared. There’s something in us, and they’ll find it someday, it’s like a tiny piece of zinc in our cerebral cortex, they’re gonna find out what it is. But when we see something that unfolds naturally and is real, people love it. The biggest laughs I’ve ever had in my life are something going off the rails, something going wrong, something happening that wasn’t supposed to happen. And improv teaches you not to fear those moments; that’s where the gold is.”
-Conan O’Brien
It’s been a busy last few days for me and the blog took a hit for them.
- I hosted the Geeks Who Drink pub quiz at Opal Divine’s Freehouse on Sunday. It was my second time flying solo as host and my fourth time hosting overall. It was a good learning experience in dealing with people questioning the correct answers to obscure questions. I also thought I had a strong perfomance in terms of crowd control and witty banter. You can read more about it at my GWD post here.
- The Starter Kit (my improv troupe) updated its May/June schedule. We’ll be performing shows on 5/28, 6/6, and 6/26. For more information, check the sidebar on our website. I’m excited as our June 6th show will be the first time TSK performs at Salvage Vanguard Theater (aside from Out of Bounds 2008).
- I finished Dan Schwabel’s Me 2.0. Dan is a personal branding expert and I highly recommend the book for recent graduates looking for employment. Even if you’re not a member of the recent college grad generation, Schwabel’s book offers good advice on how to generate publicity for yourself and raise awareness. With all the recent layoffs in multiple fields, now is a better time than ever to get the word out about YOU. I wrote some previous posts on it here and here.
- Up next on my reading agenda: Never Eat Alone and The Year of Living Biblically. I’m especially excited for the latter book, which is about one man’s quest to follow the Bible - as literally as possible. As one would guess, it definitely has a humorous spin to it (the synopsis references a section about stoning an adulterer).
15
May
Automatic Writing
One improvisational concept that really intrigues me is “automatic writing” (coined by Keith Johnstone in Impro).
Automatic writing is one way of getting students to understand that there is ’something inside them besides themselves’. … You just look at a blank sheet of paper, and ’see’ a word, and then write where you ’saw’ it. I’ve filled many exercise books using this method, partly to see where it led me, and partly to know what happens if you go past the point where you feel impelled to stop. I’ve learned a lot about myself this way. Again there’s a great gap between what I would choose to write, and what actually emerges.” - Keith Johnstone, Impro (pp. 121-2)
Stare long enough and, eventually, words will start appearing. For me, they started out unrelated and the writing seemed to resemble an odd poem. Eventually, I got to the point where my brain wrote complete stories.
I like to alternate this concept with one I learned in a creative writing class: free writing. In free writing, which many renowned authors swear by, you sit down and write whatever is on your mind for around thirty minutes a day, every day. With free writing I tend to write more consciously about topics that enjoy me. The two practices are closely related, yet distinct in their execution. For me, free writing generates more content, but automatic writing provides more unexpected ideas. Often, I later free write about those unique ideas.
14
May
Who subscribes?
It’s clear from my Feedburner stars that I have quite a few subscribers. I’m curious to know more about you all and how I can keep you reading this blog. Please introduce yourselves via a comment or an e-mail and let me know what all you’d like to see from this site. Feedback is key to growth, I’ve found..
The mission of the Austin Improv Collective is to promote improvisational theatre in Central Texas and develop sustainable performance, practice, management, and teaching skills for Austin’s improvisational theatre community. We believe that improvisation is a vital and viable art form which provides unique and invaluable benefits to the individual and the community and we strive to raise awareness of improvisational theatre through performance, teaching, and community outreach. - AIC Mission Statement
A few weeks ago, I was elected to the position of Managing Director for the Austin Improv Collective. I look forward to promoting the image of improvisational theater in Austin and helping to further develop our rapidly growing community.
One of my first goals is to make sure the Austin Improv website gets updated and constantly promotes all improv shows from EVERY theater in Austin. The great Jon Bolden is already hard at work on transitioning the site to an identical layout in Wordpress, but with one major exception: a revolutionary new calendar system. We’re trying to find the best way to aggregate all the show information from The Hideout, Gnap!, ColdTowne, and other theaters. Ideally, it would be nice to have a way to constantly export the calendar data from their sites (via an RSS feed) and convert them into our own Google Calendar format. If anyone is extremely familiar with Google Calendar and/or XML, please contact me. Your help would be much appreciated.
As I discovered when researching my thesis, most of the reading material on the benefits of improvisation rely entirely on anecdotal evidence. This is especially true in the case of improvisational acting. While there is some merit to be had in sharing great stories on the subject, I don’t find the arguments as compelling as those based on scientific studies.
I may interview some improvisers from time to time, but I want to stay true to what I find most compelling: actual hard data. If anything, I would like this blog to serve as a touchstone for such evidence. Over the next few weeks, I will focus on finding and sharing scientific studies on the subject.
In order to better grasp the concept of applied improvisation and its many facets, I regularly check a few different sites. First, The Applied Improvisation Network is an absolute must. The site serves as a central hub and networking tool for anyone interested about the topic. I found the forums particularly useful and even used many reading suggestions as a springboard for research on my thesis. Next, a rarely updated site, appliedimprovisation.org has links to quite a few decent essays on the topic. There is also an excellent book on the subject, Organizational Improvisation, written by Ken N. Kamoche. The book focuses on jazz improvisation and its parallels to organizational structures, and I found it more helpful than any other source when I wrote my thesis. Furthermore, one can find a plethora of sites dedicated to educating businesses about the benefits of improvisation. In Austin alone, I know of three. Improvisers who teach seminars tend to be good sources for anecdotal evidence of the benefits of improvisation. There are a few more sites out there, but the above links provide the best start for anyone interested in the subject.
Another busy day at work today, but that didn’t prevent me from logging in some quality time to work on the site. I finally uploaded my thesis and you can learn more about it here. I posted the abstract, a little background information, and a link to download the entire paper as a PDF file.
I also quickly hacked together a contact page. It’s not pretty, but it will get the job done for now. I plan on making it into a nice contact form with lots of pretty icons soon. In the meantime, enjoy cold hard text and hyperlinks.
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