A man is sitting reading a magazine slowly turning the pages. The sound of each one is all you can hear until the rustle of his pants as he crosses his legs. A woman enters the room and sits right next to him, uncomfortably close. He looks up and back at his magazine trying to ease away from her slightly without being obvious. She exhales with a snort of indignation and stares at him, her face getting closer and closer to his and she says in a low voice….

This summer working with Keith Johnstone we did scenes starting with 20 seconds of silence followed by one character saying something to change the other. Those first 20 seconds were riveting to watch “nothing” happen. However, there was so much that was in that “nothing”. Watching as an audience member I created stories about each character and small traits and gestures took on great meaning – it was engrossing.

The audience is not passive, they are searching for the “reason”

- Keith Johnstone Aug 2009

For the players, these scenes with silence gave time to relax and have “nothing” happen. It was 20 seconds just listen for the offers that were there – a shift in position, crossing legs, a slight glance of eye contact. Then a small bit of dialog (5 seconds) and another 20 seconds of silence.

Nothing, nothing, nothing, something!

- Keith Johnstone Aug 2009

This was a shift for me to think about breaking scenes down to smaller slices of very present, in-the-moment focus. For those short periods, listening, connecting, acting, and focusing on what was already there was easier because it wasn’t for a whole scene – just this short part of one.

It’s so easy to rely on being wordy, but so rewarding to let go, slow down, and enjoy the silence.

© 2009, Improv Notebook. All rights reserved. info@improvnotebook.comi

©2010 Improv Notebook. All Rights Reserved.

I wanted to learn the unicycle, so I went out and bought one. After 15 minutes I gave up and put it away until a friend of mine told me it takes 6 hours to learn. So I tried again and learned to ride in 5 hours. (paraphrased from Keith’s lecture)

He went on to tell us that in the first 15 minutes he was looking for improvements and that there are no improvements in 15 minutes work on a unicycle. The knowledge that it takes 6 hours means that no improvements in 15 minutes is no big deal, that things will pick up later. As it turned out this was the truth and it took  5 hours in reality in this case.

The same was true of drawing faces. Instead of setting out to draw 200 faces, he decided on 5000 faces. It took one year, one month, and three days to finish and therefore there was no frustration after the first 200 becuase there were 4800 left to do, so the expectations were low.

The trick is to let the audience see you fail and be happy about it.

Improv is creation in the moment in collaboration with other players, there is no risk of failure – there is certainty of it. Failure won’t plague every scene but it is going to happen. Many of the games depend on failure because the audience wants to see you take risks and fail.

If you practice the question game until you have it down and can go for several minutes without making a mistake, there is no risk, and therefore no more game. It becomes a vehicle to show off your intelligence or how superior you are to the audience.

In learning improv, or anything, you need to fail. Most teachers and coaches prevent their students from having failures by trying to help them “get it right”. They are robbing them of opportunities to reflect on their mistakes and gain experience.

As teachers, coaches, performers, or any other pursuit, we must accept the fact that we will also make mistakes, fail, and have opportunities to learn. It is still important to fail with good humor. As coaches we have an opportunity to model the very thing we are teaching.

You can’t win every class as a teacher and you can’t win every audience as a performer.

-Keith Johnstone, Aug 8, 2009

Failure Practice Exercise

Take any comic strip from a newspaper or website and remove the last panel. Now write 5 alternatives of your own. Keep trying with different strips and different days, there’s plenty of practice. If you keep doing this for a month you will have generated lots of ideas. Who knows – one of them might succeed?

© 2009, Improv Notebook. All rights reserved. info@improvnotebook.comi

©2010 Improv Notebook. All Rights Reserved.