Framework

The Schwa show tonight was a success, in the sense we had fun and the audience liked it. There were only four of us there tonight so we did a Shotgun, a rudimentary form where you start in a car. It turned out we were on the way to the Sidney Opera House, we put on a mix tape of opera songs, and would periodically cut out of the car to enact them.

It was a simple and playful mechanism which both we and the audience really enjoyed. The move of setting up a number from an opera and then cutting to it came to us pretty early in the piece and we kept using it till the end of the show. Sometime improv shows can be a bit rudderless, a collection of disparate scenes with no connection, no unifying theme or idea. This, theoretically, is a problem that an improv form is suppose to solve but I've found as time has passed old forms are performed in perpetuity but new forms aren't necessarily being created, and improv itself seems to be evolving quicker than its underlying mechanics.

The solution, seems to me, is to free ourselves from this notion of rigid form and move towards the idea of a simple framework or framing device. And this frame can be applied before a show(ie deciding on a specific opening, goal, style etc.) or discovered within a show typically early on(some pattern, theme, or idea that emerges that then becomes the show). In the Schwa show tonight we did a little bit of both, we decided to do a Shotgun before hand which basically boils down to just starting in a car and then relatively quickly found the opera through-line. These two things are kind of atypical for teams to do. There is kind of an unspoken reticence to put a deliberate lay on to a show(even though many of the most popular improv shows have thick stylistic lay ons) as well as maintain a game throughout a show in favor of creating ever-new scenes/characters/situations and only making connections towards the conclusion. I think this reticence comes from a fear of doing things "right" and the misconception that the type of play I'm advocating strays from "pure" improv. The reality is that improv is an ever evolving, malleable, mercurial artform that is heavily influenced by its constantly changing practitioners, and thus should be allowed much more freedom. Not constrained by some nebulous and nostalgic idea of what improv is or rather, what it use to be.