A new year, new you? Looking to supercharge your improv with some tips from great improvisers? The Improv Chronicle has got you covered. In the last four and a half years, this podcast has spoken to a lot of improvisers and gained a lot of insights. This podcast and chosen a few of those insights, some of which haven't been heard before, and put together a series of tips and things to think about for 2024. Here's to a great new year of improvisation.

Guests (in order of appearance):

Rob Norman - The Backline Podcast / Second City

Patti Styles - https://www.pattistiles.com/

Dave Pasquesi - TJ and Dave https://books.google.com/books/about/Improvisation_at_the_Speed_of_Life.html?id=zyjWoQEACAAJ

Kathy Rinaldi - ImprompTwo https://www.facebook.com/ImpromptuSarasota/

Colin Mochrie - Whose Line Is It Anyway

Help the Improv Chronicle make more episodes. The smallest of donations can still make a big difference. https://ko-fi.com/improvchronicle

Expert tips for 2024 - Transcript

Rob Norman talks about how external factors can affect your improv

Lloydie: This is the improv Chronicle. I'm Lloydie. The turning of a new year is essentially an arbitrary measurement of time. But I can't help getting caught up in thinking about what has been and, what is going to come. And that's made me think about my own improv practice and what I do. And that got me searching through a bunch of interviews I'd done for this podcast, both in this season and the last season. And there's a bunch of stuff that I'd only partially used, and there are some really good tips in there that I thought I would share. So, some of this stuff has been on the podcast in part before. Some of this stuff is completely brand new and unused material. All of it is tips that improvisers can use and take forward, I hope, into the new year. Needless to say, I'm fiercely competitive and wouldn't ever wish to talk about another improv podcast on this podcast. That would be dreadful, wouldn't it? But I'm going to. Rob Norman is one half of the Backline podcast, and also a fantastic improviser and a really good guy. I had the opportunity to meet him a couple of years ago, and it was one of those moments where you end up talking to someone and, think it's going to last a couple of hours, and then all of a sudden it's half two in the morning, and you're drinking whiskey and putting the world to right now. I spoke to Rob quite some time ago for the improv Chronicle, and we were talking about external factors that, if you're not careful, can end up influencing your improv. So whether it's the audience, the space you're playing in, the tech that's going on around you, I spoke to rob about external factors and how to stop them adversely affecting your improv.

Rob Norman: There's a ton of different factors that could inform a show. For example, what if there's an agent in the audience at Second City? It's possible that someone from SNL is sitting in the crowd. sometimes you're performing for a, ah, celebrity. sometimes there's a giant leak in the roof, and the stage is covered in water. And between scenes, you have to find ways to mop in a creative way. All of these are things that have happened to me personally. And, I think there's a way to look at those things as like, oh, no, these outside forces wrecked my show, or these outside forces changed the show that I normally do. And I don't think that's the healthy way to look at it. The shows that I remember, the best times of my improv career aren't the times when I did a mediocre show and everything went the way that they were supposed to. My favorite memories are when everything went to shit, and, like, me and my friends get together, and those are the stories that we tell. so even when things go wrong, it's still kind of right.

Lloydie: Yeah.

Rob Norman: I also think it's really interesting to try and figure out how shows work. One of the external factors that we don't really talk about is, like, a show's culture. We used to do this show called Mantown, and the premise of the show, it was like an improvised frat party. So it was a big party show. People would show up ready to have a good time. They were drunk and they would call out. And that was just kind of part of the culture of the show. And it was challenging for new people to play that show, because the rules of audience and performer were just so different. And we had to give a disclaimer to guests that we had to say that if the audience is yelling at you, that's actually not heckling, they're not criticizing you. That's actually a compliment. It means you're doing a good job. So any kind of noise or people shouting out, keep going. That's how it's supposed to go. And, that's a very extreme version of a show's culture. But every time you perform in a different show, that's not your home base. There's different rules, there's different kinds of jokes, there's different crowds, there's different expectations. And so figuring those things out is a blast. It's so fun trying to navigate the audience and what they want from you and what you want to do in that space. so, yeah, I think those external factors not only are not an, impediment to a good show, that's where the good shows are hiding.

One thing that a lot of improvisers talk about is finding the formula

Lloydie: One thing that a lot of improvisers talk about, and this is not just beginners by any point. This can be improvisers who've been improvising for years and years, and that is finding the way to do improv, or having their formula that they think works for them. And if we're not careful, that can completely kill exploration. And surely that is an essential thing that we need in improv. I had the absolute pleasure of talking to Patti Stiles, who has been one of my favourite guests to have had on the podcast over the years, and she had some really good stuff to say about this that I wanted to share.

Patti Stiles: If you actually research deeply into, know, spolin, close, Johnstone, shepherd. Ah, sills, Campbell. what they were actually doing in their work, none of them were being formulaic, none of them said this is the only way. They were all exploring ways and making discoveries and revising their work as they went. And if they discovered something new, they'd go, Oh, right, okay, we learned something new. What we knew yesterday was yesterday, today is today. But when they were working, there wasn't an improv scene in kind of our modern day improvisation. Right. Let's understand that. There's improvisation that goes way back before american, canadian or british. And there's a little bit of arrogance in the improv community to assume that that's where it started. It didn't. It's a very ancient form, and there's a lot of cultural traditions in Latin America, in Ireland, in Asia, in the Middle east, of using improvisation differently. But in talking about these teachers, and kind of the language around that, the rules that developed the formulaic play, this is what you have to do. That's not their teaching. That became language that was invented in schools and companies, which was very much about selling classes and forming identity and trying to be good.

Dave Persquezi talks about multiroling in a duo show

Lloydie: One thing I've spoken about to people who are doing two person shows, duos, two prov, whatever you want to call it, is how you transition from one character to another when you're multiroling. When people see a duo show for the first time, one of the things that often fascinates them is the fact that two improvisers can often be juggling six or seven characters in a show, sometimes even more than that. So who better to speak to than Dave Persquezi, one half of TJ and Dave, to find out his view on how you can best move seamlessly from one character to another and embody them on stage.

David Pasquesi: I know people have been doing two person improvisation for a long time. I had not seen anyone really doing it. So, I didn't gather a lot of this from viewing, just from the experience of doing it, and we're just doing what works for us. and we decided to play other people as they were needed, not as a task that we had to have other people. Sometimes we don't, or sometimes there's very few. It just seems to be as needed. I don't know. There's nothing that determines why we're playing others, except for seemingly a need or that, oh, there would be a person there. If we have been in this space for this long, someone else would be here. so it's just to be, again, it's responding honestly, given everything that we've established up until this point.

How do you differentiate those characters in the audience's mind and your own

Lloydie: So how do you differentiate those characters in the audience's mind and your own?

David Pasquesi: Well, I, think one of the helpful bits is to give each one a certain mindset, but also a certain physicality, so that's easier for everyone to distinguish. It's just a shorthand. So when you see a person, making a particular, specific gesture, oh, now I know that's that person that we saw before.

Lloydie: So there's kind of mindset, and physicality. Yes.

David Pasquesi: Right. And the hard part. The easy part is the physicality. The hard part is to try to think like these different people. And that's not as easy. I mean, if I'm the same person, and all of a sudden I start speaking about a certain thing a different way, I might be the same guy, I might be the new person. So the physicality is the most helpful to differentiate, I think, in a shorthand.

Florida improviser Kathy Rinaldi offers some tips for younger improvisers

Lloydie: In a more recent episode of the Improv Chronicle, I spoke about being an older improviser, being an improviser over 50, something that I'm suddenly experiencing for the first time in the last few months. And Florida improviser Kathy Rinaldi had some really good tips for maybe newer improvisers, certainly younger improvisers who were improvising with someone who may be a generation or two older than them.

Kathy: Is that something that we should be exploring more and talking about as we get older, in these group settings, in classes, in workshops, to say, hey, young people, that person is not going to play your grandma for the next 2 hours. And don't make them exactly right. Yeah. Or, when you get into a scene, I want you. I was in a scene. Did I tell you this before? I was in a scene in Sweden, and I was with a young man who, you know, I won't mention him. Lovely, lovely. but we did a little romantic scene, because I made it a romantic scene, and he's 20 something, and I am not. And at the end of it, he said, why did you make yourself my girlfriend? And I said, why not? And he said, because nobody, like, I'm not used to doing that. And I thought, isn't that interesting? Is that a conversation that should be had more often? I know that I bring it up in my classes because I want to push that more. But anytime I have been in a place like that, with particularly women who are older, you can hear this resounding. Yeah. Yeah. We don't want to be your mom. We don't want to be your grandma. We want to be anything but that, because that's what we do all the time.

Lloydie: In a second, some tips from whose line is it anyway? Star Colin Mochrie

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Colin Mochrie says making new improvisers feel comfortable is important

In the meantime, back to Colin Mochrie I asked him the best advice he'd ever been given in his improv career.

Colin Mochrie: One of the important things for us, because we use so much audience in our show, is to make the audience as comfortable as they can on stage. they're not professionals, obviously, and they're thrown up on stage, there's lights in their eye, they barely listening to the instructions you give them. So we always spend a little time before that, just sort of getting to know them, getting them feel relaxed. We usually bring two people up at a time, usually a couple, so that at least they're with someone they know, and there's a little more comfort there in that area. That was very important for us. I guess the most important thing, I ever heard was don't let your ego get in the way. I always found when teaching new improvisers, that always seemed the most difficult thing for them to do. If their partner, scene partner, comes up with the idea of the scene, you could see them go, oh, but my idea is so much better. And try to shove it in there somehow rather than, well, they got it first. Let it go. Let's make this the best scene ever. so that was really important for me, and I've been very fortunate to work with a lot of improvisers who sort of live by that. Ryan Stiles, who I've known for years. one of the things I loved about him was he got as much joy setting you up for a joke and having you get it as if when he got the laugh. And I try to keep that, in the foremost of my mind.

Kathy: Oh.

Lloydie: Ah, yeah. I love setting someone up for the funny. I don't know why. There's a real sense of satisfaction that you've mind melded somehow.

Colin Mochrie: Yeah, exactly. When you have an idea for the joke, you have to set up, and when they say the exact right punchline, you just go, wow, that was amazing.

Lloydie: The improv Chronicle is produced by me, Lloyd James Lloyd. It comes out every two weeks. Please do subscribe. In the meantime, if you're not already signed up, get the world of improv in your inbox every single week on a Tuesday when you subscribe to the newsletter. For more, just go to improv chronicle.com.