Different Venue, Different Style

Last night Thunderdome was particularly rowdy. It was college themed dubbed Thunderdorm with Carmen joined by Danny and Max doing collegiate sketches with the improv mashups being given campuses to inspire them. Carmen has created a very unique and fertile space for performers to experiment and go-for-broke in front of a bizarre audience. Half of it is college kids the other half improvisers and even in the seating there is an unspoken segregation. There is an irreverent, raunchy, hungry energy about the show. The college kids come to be entertained, come to be raucous. We come to mess around and maybe push some buttons.

Carmen called me up to play for the last improv set of the night and I noticed I was playing differently. Hands in my pockets most of the scenes, lots of references, lots of retorts, lots of talking. At Thunderdome you're not going to play how you normally play. That, seemingly, is the idea. You are free from improv rules or predisposed form. You are playing with people from a variety of experience levels and perspectives so you need to adjust accordingly. The idea almost always with improv is to get laughs, barring that to entertain, so when you're in front of 50 drunk college students who most likely don't know a thing about improv what do you do? Its striking at Thunderdome when someone is sucking, it's an audience that is very vocal about what it likes and very silent about what it doesn't. 

Different venues and different crowds necessitate different playing styles and alternate approaches. If you're confident in your abilities you can paint with a variety of colors. A good performer is malleable and finds enjoyment in whatever he/she is doing but also finds how to elicit that same enjoyment out of whatever weird, hodge-podge crowd he/she finds him/herself in front of. 

At the Upstairs tonight a brand new team opened up for Big Trees and Dead$$$. They started off with personal monologues, a common counter-intuitive opening for new teams, and kind of crashed and burned from there. The Upstairs is also a place to be free and unencumbered. This new team was struggling to get things right and was clearly working very hard and taking little to no pleasure out of what they were doing. Their set was laid in stark contrast when Drennen and Daniel had their set and even more so when dead$$$ began and in the first couple minutes Scott came on and started executing people. Above pictured Brunlieb screaming "HIT ME AGAIN" after being repeatedly shot by Scott. The more veteran teams embraced the low stakes, the absurdity, milked the pleasure from a show going into total insanity.

Every show, audience, venue, suggestion, and circumstance is different. If you go into it with confidence, commitment, and little to no expectations you will most likely have fun ipso facto it will be fun to watch.