Improv Articles by Rick Hilton

	Rick Hilton has been an improviser for over 25 years and has toured his craft accross Canada, the US and worldwide. He was taught by the esteemed Keith Johnstone and worked with many of Improv's great performers.
As an exclusive to improvguild.com, Rick has agreed to publish a series of articles on the art of improvisation. Please read, enjoy and learn from the experiences of a senior improviser who has seen it all!

  Article #002: Storytelling

OFFER AND ACCEPTANCE TURNS TO STORYTELLING

  Now that you are an expert in giving and accepting offers, and you are surviving on stage for a few moments, what’s next?  How can you hold the attention of an audience without a script, any rehearsal time, and with very simple production values?  It’s not an easy task.

Ask yourself why you go to the movies.  What are you looking for when you sit down on those cushy seats and eat overpriced popcorn?  When I go to a movie I am desperately hoping for two things: a compelling story and time away from my daily worries.  Improv, as a form of entertainment, should satisfy those same desires.  If you are telling a nice story, time becomes irrelevant to those who are watching, as they are involved in the story.

So telling stories is what it’s all about.  How do you do that without any script?

You have already accomplished step one which is to give and accept offers.  It’s important that these offers are ones that your audience can relate to. Keep your offers in the ‘everyday’.   By keeping them ordinary and by making the acceptance extraordinary you will hold your audience a little longer.

However, experienced improvisers will often notice that as a scene is progressing there are moments where it just doesn’t ‘feel’ right, or worse it actually feels boring.  I use the word ‘feel’ because only by being in those moments time and time again can an actor recognize this boring moment.  It has a feel to it like wearing a shirt too small or pants too tight. Something is off and you feel a bit like a jerk.

Being able to recognize this moment quickly is a skill that comes from practice and allowing yourself to fail in scenes time and again. You need to advance your skills to the point where can you see this moment coming before it happens and in that way stay ahead of your audience.

An untrained spectator only notices boredom moments after boredom has been created.  Create boredom?  You bet you can. So you, as a skilled improviser, need to see or ‘feel’ this boredom before the audience does. Once the audience feels the boredom, the scene is lost and it’s too late to save it.  You’re already boring them and your only hope is a merciful ending.  So how can you prevent boring the audience? By understanding the concept of advancing.

Ahh, advancing. This is a term coined by the great Keith Johnstone and is the perfect word because you, the skilled improviser, need to take the offers you are giving and accepting and simply move them forward. Advance the idea or action, advance the scene.  First, make entering your scene as interesting as possible; make putting on your jacket as interesting as possible; make driving your stupid mime bus as interesting as possible. Once you’ve exhausted all opportunities to make your current action more interesting, then you must advance the scene.

This is the next step in telling your stories. When you are in a scene and you get that ‘shirt’s too tight’ feeling, it’s time to advance.  At this point ask yourself, “Who am I?  What am I doing?”  If you can’t answer those two questions, get the hell off the stage and take my Monday night class.  When you know who you are and what you are doing on stage, then the answer to  the question, “How do I advance this scene?” is right before your eyes.

You are driving your stupid mime bus and now the ‘feeling’ is upon you so in a heartbeat you must allow your imagination to create the next progression of your moment. Things that have happened to me whilst driving my stupid mime bus:

1. the steering wheel has come off
2. I have been overcome with an emotion ( any emotion)
3. I have run over many things: people, animals, cars etc.
4. I have robbed myself, and one time I hijacked my own bus.

Those were all advances I did during the bus scene.  As advancements like these are made, a story begins to evolve.  Opportunities for storytelling present themselves in the form of questions:  How does he drive without a steering wheel? Why is the driver crying? He is robbing himself?! What the hell is up with that? These are the questions the audience asked while they watched the stupid mime bus scene and it is your job as an improviser to answer those questions and advance the scene. Instead of feeling bored, the audience now wants to know more and a simple story is taking shape.

An advance can come from your acting partners as well: A passenger enters the bus with a hidden agenda (he too is crying, he is carrying a wheel from another bus, he is actually the hijacker etc etc.).  You can advance the story yourself or your playing partners can advance the story with you. Another way of looking at this concept is the idea of introducing ‘trouble’ to the scene.  Note that ‘trouble’ in this context is not necessarily a bad thing like: “My pen just exploded on my boss!”.  It could also be something positive such as: “I’ve just won the lottery!”  As long as the trouble moves the scene forward and keeps things interesting, it’s a good contribution. Trouble will lead to more trouble and finally (hopefully) a resolution. 

Ta Da! You are now telling simple stories without a script. The goal is to make them intelligent and relevant stories, and the only way to accomplish this is to practice, experiment, fail and learn.  New players must take regular workshops to go through this process in a safe, non-threatening environment.  I cannot stress enough the importance of failure in the creative process. You have to allow yourself to fail over and over again because embracing failure is the most effective way of learning.  Even if you are failing in front of an audience, if you fail with charm and grace the audience still enjoys themselves and thinks highly of you for at least trying.  Johnny Carson always made fun of his bad jokes. You can always make fun of your bad scenes, but as an improviser your job is to learn from them and make different mistakes next time.

-Rick Hilton