Really? No mistakes?
I agree that with the right amount of support from your teammates you can change a mistake and make it part of the show. For example, if two players are on a date and they’ve established their names are George and Amanda, a third player walks in, honestly hasn’t heard the names, and refers to the two as George and Katerina. “Katerina” can make a support move by incorporating the mistake in the reality of the scene, “George, it’s actually me your mother, I’ve been pretending to be a woman named Amanda so I can see what you get up to on weekends. We should talk more.” This is a nice support move, but I would personally still bring up the fact that the third character should have been listening from the start. It’s obvious the two original players had an idea, and because of the mistake, it had to change. After all, a key rule in improv is listening. This wouldn’t be too much of a problem in a class environment or a free Jam Night, I think mistakes are encouraged when learning. You can learn a lot through your own mistakes. When it comes to performing in front of an audience however, that’s when this idea of “there are no mistakes” ironically fails. I get it, we want to support each other as teammates, that should be encouraged 100%, but when someone makes a mistake, we shouldn’t brush it off to one side, we should talk about it. If you’re charging audiences to come see your improv show, you should be expected to put effort into your performance. I don’t respect teams who don’t rehearse, or think that just turning up and “winging it” on the night will amount to a good show. Hell no, if you are charging audiences, or guesting in a paid night, your duty is to entertain the audience. I love the Harold team I’m in, Jazz Police. The best part about being in that team is the amount of detail and hours we put into our post and pre show briefings. It might look like we’re dicking about on stage, but we put more thought into what we’re doing than you might think. And we go HARD; there have been times where I know I’ve made a bad move, or I wasn’t listening, and we all talk about it as a group and offer things we could improve on, and how we could have supported, and I never feel embarrassed or stressed about it because I’m surrounded by altruistic players who want to improve as much as I do. Everyone supports, everyone contributes, everyone listens, and we all share each others enthusiasm to put on a good show. I would say there are no mistakes in improv if you’re learning, or encouraging support in your training. In improv led jams, there are no mistakes as we are all here to support the fact we’re improvising together on stage. If you want to take it seriously however, charging audiences as an improv team, know that mistakes can happen; the trick is to not ignore it, take ownership of it, and learn from it. - John
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Written by- John Gallagher Portero Archives
June 2020
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