Extended interview material from 2020's Improv Chronicle recordings plus some words of wisdom worth repeating.

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This episode features:

Susan Messing
Rachael Mason
David Pasquesi
Louis Kornfeld and Rick Andrews
Michelle Gilliam
Improvisers from Off Key Improv, Vancouver
Mara Joy

The Improv Chronicle Podcast is produced and hosted by Nottingham improviser Lloydie James Lloyd
Theme music - Sam Plummer
Logo design - Hélène Dollie

Episode Transcript:

This… is the Improv Chronicle podcast. I'm Lloydie.

Lloydie James Lloyd: 2020 has been a year most of us would care to forget, but in the midst of a global pandemic, there have been some wise voices telling us things worth hearing and worth acting on. 

This year, rather than travelling to interview guests, most of what I've done has been done online. But I've been grateful for the technology to do that, as well as for the generosity guests have shown as ever and giving their time and their thoughts. 

As we close the year out, here are some of the bits we didn't get a chance to include in this year's podcasts, partly because they were slightly at tangents to the subject we were covering, plus also some extended bits of interviews that you heard and even a couple of nuggets that I thought were worth repeating.

So, before we greet 2021 with open arms and fervent hope, let's pack a bag of wise words to take with us… Hmmm, metaphors. 

Susan Messing is one person I know will always give me a straight answer. And back in January, when we spoke about whether to give an improv team note, straight after a show or not, she didn't disappoint.

Susan Messing: I have a very strong opinion about that. I don't think you should be giving a hell of a lot of notes after a show, because I think people are coming off the stage with the with the adrenaline of having just had a performance. And when somebody sits down and gives – I've seen this happen so many times backstage before I'm going on stage, I see a bunch of people sitting there listening to their coach who has all this information that he wants to impart or he wants to impart on somebody right at that moment. And these people I don't know if they're able to absorb it. 

I think that why don't you wait until the next rehearsal and go over what that is? I don't see the reason of vomiting a bunch of feedback right away. It can be overwhelming and it might make people defensive at that moment, in which case they're not going to hear anything about it. 

I feel like that's the point for you to go have a drink with your friends, go get laid, go home and be proud of yourself for getting on stage, and then revisit it with a fresh mind so that you have at least an opportunity to absorb what you've done before somebody just shoots a bunch of crap at your face. It's a lot.

Lloydie: No one wants a load of crap shot at their face, not after this year. 

So, to Susan’s duo partner, Rachel Mason. I spoke to Rachel as part of one of my favorite episodes this year. I liked the contributors so much that I made a two-parter. And even, then I couldn't include as much material as I wanted to. 

This was a two-parter on duos; two provs. And I spoke to Rachel about how duos get together and how they work so well.

Rachael Mason: So, let me start by saying that this way. I think the best ensembles put themselves together. And largely ensembles don't get that choice; they're put together the auditions that somebody else is running or they're just your class.

So, ensembles that put themselves together tend to like they have the same sense of humor or the same reference level or the same love of a style. 

So, when we pair away like twelve people down to two, we have like… We have that on a micro level; like it's very in tune and you get to see like a comfortability where people – like Susan and I can finish each other's sentences. Like when she does something, I almost know where she's going to go. 

The hard part about a two-person as opposed to like group improv; like in group improv, while you and your friend are playing pilots, the rest of your buddies can make the plane. And that is incredible. And when it's just me and Suzanne, like we have to bring the plane with us? I don't know if that makes any sense.

Some people were like, “No, my 12-person team has 15 minutes. We're so nervous.” And I'm like, “Why? {indistinct 4:23}. I'm like, “Me and Susan do two-provs for forty five minutes to an hour.” Like I couldn't imagine being on a 13-person team and only having 15 minutes. That's crazy to me.

So, I guess that's another benefit. Like there's breath in a too-prov and the audience can feel more voyeuristic in a two-prov; like really like a fly on a wall.

Lloydie: One of the duos or two-provs that I'd love to have been in at Fly on The Wall of when they got together is T.J. and Dave. They're a world-renowned partnership. And when I spoke to David Pasquesi about how they set out to create that show originally, it turns out the show evolved from doing, rather than seeing. 

David Pasquesi: Well, we didn't set out to do that or anything. We just set out to do anything. And we just found out. And I'd not seen – 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. You know, 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. 

Lloydie: I didn't see as many improv shows as I usually do this year; funny that. But when I did get to see, not once but twice, was Kornfeld and Andrews' at the Magnet Theater in New York. They're one of my favorite pairings to watch for so many reasons. 

Louis Kornfield: A couple of years. 

Rick Andrews: Okay. Cool. 

Louis: Four or five years. 

Rick: More than a couple. 

Louis: Maybe six years. 

Rick: Okay. 

Louis: Might be about six years. 

Rick: That’s a while. That’s dry spell. 

Louis: It's a dry spell. 

Rick: It's a drought. Your libido is a desert now. It's been deprived of water for quite a while. 

Louis: Yeah, it's a moistureless libido. 

Rick: Yeah. 

Louis: The days are hot and the nights are very, very cold. 

Rick: Very cold. Few plants and animals can survive. 

Louis: Yeah. And the ones that can… 

Rick: Yeah, they’re special. 

Louis: Real serious. 

Rick: Yeah. 

Louis: Real serious survivors. 

Rick: Couple of snakes and cacti. There's little frogs that bury themselves. 

Lloydie: In much of this year, just as the pandemic hit the US, this show was featured in an article in The New York Times. And their process and the moves they made in their show was analyzed. 

One question I asked, which I didn't fully get to explore in the podcast episode edited, was how conscious that on stage choices are.

Rick: Oh, none, I think. Or very, very little. I think in that article, and I think when we talk about what we do or we talk about shows afterwards or when the guy interviewed us, I think it was interesting because he was trying to put some logic and explanation towards the things that you're doing in the show that are a little more instinctual. 

Because I think it's really hard to inhabit the character fully and also be kind of cerebrally trying to plot our plan or think about how you want to come across. 

You pretty much just have to be those people, because I think the stuff that makes it feel lived in and real is your level of kind of commitment and listening and focus. 

So, I think we think about how we want to approach characters and treat them in the show, but when we're doing it, I'm just trying to be there and react to the last thing that just happened. And I think those more cerebral things are more, yeah, how are we approaching the show in general or how are we conceptualizing what we do if someone has to ask us about it? But it's not necessarily something that – I don't want to speak for Louis – but in the moment I'm not. 

You know, in that article, I thought he did a really great job of kind of asking us to peel up in the surface and be like, “Well, why did you say this?” or “Why did you do that?” And then I, in watching the video, I can kind of reverse engineer and remember, “Oh, well, he said this. And I guess that made me feel blank” or “That reminded me of X.” 

But I'm not analyzing those thoughts in the moment because I think analyzation almost inherently includes some kind of judgment with it. So, you're just kind of accepting and letting that stuff pass. It's a little more, yeah, I think just being there, Louie, does that sound right there?

Louis: Yeah, that sounds right to me. In a show with a larger cast where you're not in every scene, I find myself kind of objectifying the show a little bit. When I'm not in a scene, I'm watching and I'm thinking a lot about these characters and I'm kind of thinking a little bit more with the director's mind and a little bit more of the writer's mind and kind of mapping possible places to take ideas that are probably going to be rich in content.

And then in the two-person show, you just can't. You never have a space to be able to take a bird's eye view of it. You're just always in it.

So, like for me, I try to spend as much of the show as possible. The more I just try to believe what's really happening and try to treat the show as if it was me, if I happen to be living this person's life, the easier it is to just kind of stay in the show and not stress out too much. 

So, for me, the show, for the first like 30 minutes, it's a lot of very active paying attention to little details and looking for like the right small details that will help me feel most like I'm really there. 

And for every show I like, those details are different things. I remember one show, it was we were in a bar and the detail was just there was a – what should I call it? – like one of those like photo… we call those photo machines. 

Rick: In a photo booth?

Louis: A photo booth. It was like a little photo booth in the corner. And just kind of knowing that that was in the corner, for whatever reason, kind of put me in a good place. And it made it feel very easy to be in the show. 

So, I'm constantly looking for stuff like that, but not really trying to, like, analyze what the right choice is or what the right next thing to say is. 

I mean, Rick, I want to be stepping on your toes with this. I do think that we've talked a lot when shows don't go great. 

Rick: Yes.

Louis: Kind of, we picked apart choices that we made that maybe led it to not go great. And I will sometimes if we come up against, like a fork in the road in a show, I will rely on certain discoveries we've made together over time to guide me to what is probably the right choice. 

Louis: Yeah.

And I think a lot of the times, too, and Lloydie, just stop me if this is more detail than you wanted with that simple question. 

Lloydie: Oh, it's fine. It's fine. 

Louis: But I think a lot of times, too, a lot of those lessons, for me, at least, end up coming back to, “Don't get ahead.” You know what I mean? 

Rick: Yeah. 

Louis: Like I think about shows where in the middle of a show, I think there's two kinds of kind of “mid-show realizations.” There's things personal to the character; like Louis might say something or I might do something that might make me discover something that's true about my character in my mind, but that I didn't know before, but that has been true for this character the whole time. And I might not say it right away. It might just be something inconsequential, it might be something like a big deal; like I have a crush on this person or whatever. And I think that kind of realization is really easy to carry and hold. 

Then there's a version of it that's kind of like, “Oh, this should happen later” or “I want X to happen.” And that kind of thing is that. 

Or it's not necessarily, if it's going to happen naturally, you should just let it happen naturally, because I think when I get ahead of myself, that's what I end up making a choice that in hindsight, after the show, feels kind of limp or it kind of came off the bat wrong or just felt like, “Oh, I had this vision of what it would be and it wasn't that.”

Lloydie: So, from duos to ensemble work, one of the so-called must-learn or must-do group performance pieces in improv is the Harold. This form certainly has serious upsides. But I wondered, as our art form evolves, just how relevant is the Harold? 

Michelle Gilliam of Improv Milwaukee summed it up incredibly.

Michelle Gilliam: I think that there was a time when it was obviously more relevant. I think that now that our landscape is expanding and it's expanding even more with online, which is pretty neat. And I don't think we're beholden to this standard that we used to be beholden to. 

As improv nerds, I think that a lot of different styles are being respected. And yeah, you don't have to know what that is or do it in order to love improv, be passionate about it and want to perform it. 

And yeah, I kind of like that it's going away from that because I definitely don't come from a traditional background of improv. You know, I started in Milwaukee with just short form and then went to college in Chicago and then moved to Boston a little bit later on. And just all different types and focuses. Yeah, I don't think we're as beholden into it as we once were.

Lloydie: I got to do an online show where Michelle and I were in a scene together in July and I had an absolute ball. What a performer. I cannot wait to see her performing in real life. 

In March, I told the story about the pandemic closing down the New York Musical Improv Festival, just two hours before it was due to begin. I was out there due to perform with my team from Nottingham in England, and to have come all the way from the UK was a blow, to say the least, but there was nothing that could be done. 

We were barely beginning to understand what this pandemic would bring to the world. And as a result, with the bar's still open, weirdly, in New York, improvisors got together and did the second-best thing they know how to do. They drown their sorrows. 

And I came across a group from Vancouver in Canada who traveled a similar distance to my group. Here's what it's like to come a long way to do a show and then have it cancelled thanks to a virus.

Isabella Halliday: My name is Isabella. I'm an improvisor with Off Key Improv. That one over there. That's not helpful because this is audio, but that one over there is R. D. Chanders of Off Key Improv. And we have Mitch – What’s your last name? 

Mitch: {indistinct 15:11}

Isabella: {indistinct 15:12}. There we go. And yeah, Isabel Halliday from Off Key from Vancouver.

Lloydie: And you had a fundraiser to get you guys here. So, how are you feeling? 

Isabella: Well it's been a chaotic day. You know, you'll wake up, you think you're doing a festival and said there's a minor plague happening and then you're not doing a festival anymore. 

It's okay. It's been a lot of talk about like sorrow, of missing things, of like enthusiasm, of trying to pitch in and of like gentle law talk being like, “Okay, how do we do this? Because we had a fundraiser and how do we let people know that we're kind of performing in the festival, but kind of not and we're kind of here, but kind of not. And what is the implications of that? Do we let people… We have to let people know and give them the chance to take their donations back, because we're not technically performing in the festival? And then how does that affect us?” And yeah, yeah. 

But then also like being like, “Okay, the folks who are donating to us to get here, we love and trust and they love and trust us obviously, because they're really participating and helping us out. And so, like will they want to?” That question; like where is the connection between trust and giving and what does it mean to give? Yeah, and now we're stranded in New York, maybe. We'll find out. It's fun.

Lloydie: How's everyone else feeling? 

Mitch: So, tonight, it really made up for the fact that, like the second half of our whole day was like kind of a meltdown in finding out that things were canceled, because at first, we were just we're just getting news things are shutting down. Because like while we're here, we wanted to experience New York, because we're from Canada and this is not like a thing we get to do all the time. 

So, like we wanted to go to and see more Broadway shows; oh, Broadway is canceled. Oh, we want to go and see, like these museums, oh, the museums are closing off. It's like, well, at least we have the festival we are all like we're dying in the last six months to go to; oh, that's now canceled. And so, it was like such heartbreak. 

And we were at least going to all like meet up with some of the other groups and like just drink our sorrows together. And then hearing that the group in Chicago, I think First Beat is their name, the fact that they were like pushing to like get something happening. 

Because to me, I've done this festival once before and it kind of proves that I think improvisers are, to me, my favorite form of artists, because there's such a certain level of positive to be a good improviser that can't be faked, that every time we meet other groups, they're always just such incredible warm, lovely people. And that's what I was most looking forward to. 

And this proved it tonight, that, “Oh, my God, everybody just wants this to happen. We don't care about money. We don't care about a big stage and a big audience. We just want to, like, meet each other, have a good time and show each other what we do because we're such a niche, niche, niche thing within our own communities.” 

And it was just so fantastic to get to come together and just kind of triumph over the adversity of, like every obstacle that's been put in our way. And again, proving to me and everyone else that, like improvisers are just like some of those fun, positive and caring people you'll meet in in the arts or anywhere.

Isabella: Yeah, I think having everything canceled, soft of, was an interesting thing for me, because I realized that I came to New York for two things; which number one, is like the arts and just like how vastly rich the city is in art and like how much that matters to me and like… Yeah. Anyway, so that was like the first day. 

And then the second thing was like being able to meet people who do similar things. If I'm correct on this, and you might need to fact check me; I don't know. But I think Off Key is like one of the few, if not only musically improv groups in Vancouver. So, it was really exciting to get to like see other people. And because of this sort of alternative festival that was thrown together last minute, we were able to meet like really exciting groups. And I don't know, I guess that's kind of what I was about for me. So, you know, you'll get through it, right?

Lloydie: And so to the improv that has become the most prevalent this year – Online improv. Mara Joy is an incredible improviser from Edinburgh, Scotland, and she sums up her move online and the impact that it's had on improvisors perfectly.

Mara Joy: I'm like, I totally understand the thing of like, oh, it's – You know, I've seen a lot of people who've said, “It's not the same, but it gives me enough” and then I've seen some people who are like, “Actually, I'm preferring it. I'm really thriving.” And I'm like, “That's fantastic.” 

And I love that there are people who are thriving in this new sort of – I say new – That seems like online improv has existed for a while, as no properly like – because before, it was just people sort of, “Hey, this would be a fun thing.” No, it's like, “Well, this is the only thing.” 

And I have since that first couple of weeks, I have been able to watch more shows like {indistinct 20:15} and I've been better with that. I think part of that is just, I think, one of the things that is very easy to forget about the fact that we’re living in a global pandemic as this. It's a traumatic event, right?

Like, I think, there's a lot of talk about how people are always like, “oh, we'll, we will get used to it will. We’ll adapt or we’ll overcome”, and that's great, but it’s a traumatic thing. 

And some people get through trauma in different ways and get over trauma in different ways. And for some people, that’s throwing themselves into projects or finding a specific schedule or adapting their life to fit into this ‘new normal’.

But for some people, it's just I just want to – some people just want to take a pause. And I think that I'm definitely one of the people who just wants to take a pause. 

Next year… on the Improv Chronicle Podcast.

As we ring in a new year, what do you want covered by the Chronicle? It could be a specific aspect of on-stage improv or it could be more to do with the backstage workings, admin or production of shows. 

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