Aw, Miracle Cat ...

Back in November, Stradivarius and the Other Kinds* recorded a Bat as a Christmas present for our friend Duke, whom we miss. The only advertising we did was through a Facebook event, which told us to expect 12 people including the performers. By the time the show started, we had 70 or 80 people in the audience. Maybe more. Such a fun surprise.

The recording arrived in Laos via Thailand last week. Now that Duke's had first dibs, I can post the show online. Download it here: Daylight Savings Bat (aka "Miracle Cat") -- 11/6/2010

I listened to a piece of it for the first time the other day. It's always awkward to watch or listen to shows you performed. Besides the "does my voice really sound like that?" feeling, my main reaction is to be overwhelmed that people seem to enjoy when my friends and I sit around for half an hour and say strange things into the dark.

My favorite element of the show is how many of the later scenes grew out of a mistake in the beginning. In the third scene of the first beat, Marty asks Meredith why he would even bring up the cat --- now that I hear it, he clearly intended to convey that the cat had died. However, Kevin and I didn't pick up on that nuance at the moment, and we mewed as though the cat were on the porch.

At this point, Marty and Meredith had several options for dealing with our mistake:

1. Ignore us and move on like they never heard the mewing.
2. Call us out as a new cat or a stray.
3. Acknowledge us as the same cat and
    a) ignore/deny Marty's earlier implication about the cat being dead.
    b) kill the evil zombie cat.
    c) treat cat resurrection as a normal occurance.
    d) get excited about a miracle.

I am so pleased they chose to be excited rather than force everything into making real-world sense or killing off what didn't fit into their preconception. Miracle Cat mistakes are my favorite kind of mistakes.




*Stradivarius and the Other Kinds is**: Josh Blaney, Skizz Cheney, Meredith Malony, Kevin McLenithan, Marty Jones, and me, with generous assistance from Brendon Culhane and Blade Barringer.

**Or at least, it was for that show. We may grow and rearrange soon.

Harold with Your Eyes Closed

When I teach improv workshops or coach troupes, my first order of business is to get them comfortable with Harold. Harold is the simplest long form, but it is not necessarily easy. To an audience, it looks like an improvised play. To an improviser, the breakdown looks something like this:

Infographic by Dyna Moe, via Story Robot

Harold gets a lot of flack. Some workshops and troupes have told me Harold is too basic for them and they want to move on to something more sophisticated. (Ironically, those are usually the groups who don't do well with risk, and their Harolds are dull as a result.) Others have told me they didn't want to do Harold because it was impossible. (Maybe it is impossible, but I've seen it done so many times, and I've done it myself.)

Harold is an excellent barometer for how a troupe is really doing, especially when it comes to spotting games and patterns, heightening, and reincorporation. No one moves past Harold. Your Harolds get weirder or more elegant as you grow as a player and as a troupe, but a good Harold is never boring. If you can do Harold, you can do anything.

---

Some friends and I have been getting together for the past several weeks to work on our improv. There are six or seven of us, depending on the night, and we are called Stradivarius and the Other Kinds. We were each in wheatonIMPROV, but we had never all played together. We were in different eras of the club and on different troupes. Given the range of experience, I foresaw our practices being a little rocky as we fought to reconcile our various approaches to improv and life.

So I was wonderfully surprised when, twenty minutes into our first practice, the group mind clicked. I think it was because of the following two things: (1) We respect one another, despite not have much shared stage time under our belts, and (2) we all have a thorough grasp of Harold. We could do a Harold with our eyes closed. In fact, that is exactly what we did. ...  More on that later.