Maintain A Little Mystery

One of the best and worst things about improv is its ephemeral nature and as an outgrowth of that, as a practitioner, this process of consistently striving but never arriving. There is no end point, no mastery, no perfect. And because of that it, for the most part, retains a challenge and can, potentially, consistently deliver satisfaction. So the path of someone who does improv is riddled with small victories and discoveries(as well as elongated plateaus and petite defeats). I had a little victory, a little epiphany at the Deep Schwa show tonight.

Although every couple years we incorporate new members a lot of the people on the team have some substantial time together. And after literal years of performing together it becomes much easier to identify your habits and go-tos. With time comes awareness and with awareness you can slow things down and make more deliberate choices.

The first scene I did in the show tonight was with Andy we were a father(me) and son(him) and it was his fifteenth birthday. As was custom in the family I gave him a long-ago shed rattlesnake skin that he had to wear against his skin tied around his belly. The suggestion for the show was psoriasis so my pull was basically just "skin" for the scene. I had read a fantasy book years ago where there was a shapechanger that in their human form had a snakeskin wrapped around their bare torso, so that was where my head went. The thing being although my intent for it was to have some kind of magical connotation I didn't explicitly say that however the way Andy played it and the way it was called back later implied and played with the idea of magic and mystery. Although I didn't state my intent explicitly it was discovered and explored organically by the team.

In a later scene with Jeff I was a student and Jeff was my teacher. He was talking to me about a test I had taken, kind of reprimanding in tone, and I said that I had drawn a raven on it. My idea was that this kid I was play was trying to do magic(I was on a big magic kick for the show, don't know why) and I was trying to evoke Odin's ravens Thought and Memory to help me with the test. I didn't explicitly say this but it was clear there was something kind of odd about what I was doing. Jeff kind of translated that as my character being "creative" and sent me and another student(Craig) out to solve mysteries telling us we were beyond school and had bigger things to do.

In both instances I had a clearer idea than I ultimately put forth and the result was something much more fulfilling. Without me machine-gunning out every specific of my idea, the idea was able to coalesce in a much more nuanced and organic way. I was able to catch myself and only reveal a part of what I was thinking, giving my character some subtext an internal fuel as well as allowing my fellow players to interpret my words and actions with more alacrity than they could have had I been more concrete and specific. And the payoff was not only that it worked, the scenes were successful, but that the team kind of got it anyway maybe not my exact thought but the spirit of what I was going for. I checked my instinct of spewing all my ideas out at once and the result was something way more satisfying.