Twenty seven – London Acting and Improvisation

I re-read the description: an improvisation course for actors. I’m not an actor. I have never dreamt of becoming an actor. I have never done any improvisation. The idea of ‘treading the boards’ whilst wearing a silly costume fills me with dread. To me, actors are a weird alien species who emote in unexpectedly gregarious ways. There was another worry: this was a seven week course, with each class lasting two hours.

I needed a new rule; I needed a ‘what to do if a Meetup goes on for a considerable length of time’ rule. I thought for a moment. I looked again at the event description. If I didn’t go to this event, I felt I would be abandoning the whole premise of this ridiculous project.

My new rule emerged: ‘if an event is advertised to take place over an extended period of time, you must still attend; the only exception is if attendance puts the whole randomness enterprise at risk, the Meetup costs an extraordinary amount of money, or there is a clear risk of getting fired from your day job’.

I looked at the price of the course. It wasn’t extraordinary. Rules are rules. I reached for my wallet, fished out my credit card, and paid the deposit. I was going on an improvisation course.

The studio where the course took place was a modern building made of glass and steel, situated close to Euston railway station. I saw a group of people sitting in a spatious reception area. I found a seat and quickly discovered that I was sitting amongst fellow students.

Minutes later, we were ushered into a windowless room that was painted white. Students sat down on chairs that were arranged in a circle, and started to take their shoes and socks off. I looked around. There were about fourteen people who were predominately in their twenties, four of whom were men.

Our teacher was called Ray. He was in his fifties. He wore scruffy clothes, odd socks and was in desperate need of a haircut. There were no introductions. Instead, we were asked to put the chairs away, stand in a circle, close our eyes, and reach out to take the hand of the person on our left.  We were then told to release the hand of the person and then take the hand of the person on our left or right; it was up to us.

I reached for the hand of a middle aged woman who was on my left. My new friend was told to close her eyes. My role was to guide her around the room, not bumping into any of the other couples who were also doing the same. We then switched roles: the person with their eyes closed had to do the guiding, and the sighted person had to prevent bumping. There were no explanations as to why we were doing this: we were just told to go ahead and do it.

I asked myself that fundamental question of, ‘why am I here? Why am I not wearing any shoes, guiding a middle aged woman by the hand through a group of strangers who I don’t know?’ Surprisingly, it was great fun. My companion thought the same. I felt I had been vaguely competent.

At the end of the exercise we were encouraged to chat to each other about what we had experienced; to feedback to the entire group about our feelings. These group chats allowed Ray to do some teaching, and to tell us his philosophy of improvisation. During one of these chats we were taught how to stand in a relaxed and open way (which he called the 'Jesus posture'), and we were told that ‘improv is like Christianity, but it’s better’.

‘Hold up your dominant arm, take your elbow of your other arm. Lower it. This is the cheapest puppet there is. It’s free’. Our hands became a mouth piece of an ‘arm puppet’.

Our activity was to talk to another hand puppet using only vowels; we were to talk 'gibberish' to each other. I sat on a chair, faced my new partner, Lisa, and we had a discussion about nothing using our hand-puppet-arms.

‘Okay everyone! We’re now going to introduce consonants’. We were told to change partners. I was paired up with Ray. He encouraged me to sit on the floor next to him. I then realised I was going to be a part of a demonstration.

‘Don’t look at me, look at the puppet. The puppet is the focus’.

I looked at Ray’s hand. It began to talk gibberish, starting with a vowel, but then adding in a consonant. It then struck me that Ray’s gibberish-talking-hand had a Scandinavian accent. My hand, on the other hand, was talking gibberish with an English accent. Ray’s hand was starting to copy what gibberish I was saying, so I started to copy whatever his gibberish speaking hand was saying. My hand was getting a bit annoyed with this, so I then started to gibberishly-mock the nonsense that he was copying from me. We were having an argument.

Ray stopped the exercise. Everyone clapped our performance.

Everyone gave the exercise a go, and then fed back to the group. Ray asked everyone what they were doing or feeling whilst they were talking in gibberish with consonants, and one guy said, ‘I was trying to order something in a shop’.

‘What were you trying to order?’ someone asked.

‘The content isn’t relevant. What is relevant is the connection with the other performer. You could be saying anything, but it doesn’t really matter; you need to have that link with those around you. There’s a rule of improv, which is to make your partner look good.’ Ray paused, letting this important point sink in.

‘When you do improv, you’re going to fail; you’re going to fail constantly, but nobody is going to die. The only thing that is going to hurt is your ego, and you need to fail, and this is a safe space to fail in. Even people who have been doing improv for years constantly fail, because you go to places which you’ve not been to before. You are your own material’.

The final activity was based around a group of three people. We had to ‘throw body shapes’ and a nonsense phrase to someone, which in turn had to be countered with another body shape and another nonsense phrase. The actor who was standing in the middle had to repeat the shapes and the sounds. Ray reminded us to breathe (our breath releases our tension), and to slow down the ‘shape throwing’. Everyone had fun.

At the end of the class, I walked with Jay and Lisa to Warren Street underground station. Jay turned out to be a banker who used to be a part time stand-up comedian, and Lisa taught psychology at a college. Jay said that he wanted to do some comedy writing for other people. His motivation was to try to discover new ways of being creative.

We said goodbye to Lisa at the tube station, since she was catching another line, and I chatted with Jay all the way to Charing Cross station, which was my stop. I was already looking forward to seeing both of them the following week.