Accessibility

I talk a lot about accessibility.​

I am currently in Singapore​​ and finding myself talking about accessibility with my good friend Yu Hsien. He does some (amazing) set design here. But he struggles with the perception of theater here. What is popular is not good and what is good is not popular. 

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​Irony City and Hustlebot 11.15.07

The improv scene in the states is not all that bad, but I find that argument at the heart of why a lot of people dislike short form or narrative improv or any number of other forms. When Irony City first started performing, we did a lot of shows with a group in town called Hustlebot who did solely Harold. I would watch their sets and marvel at the simplicity and beauty of their games, the technical brilliance of their second and third beats. Then I'd hear people say, "Yeah those guys were ok but I enjoyed your games much more."

We were not better improvisers. But I think we did work that was more accessible to someone who's never seen improv. They could look at it and say, "Yeah, I know what's going on here." And that person is still a large percentage of the Pittsburgh audience.

​When performing to non-improvisers, we have two options:

1. Educate them to appreciate technically beautiful improvisation
2. Be cognizant of the accessibility of our work

​They are not mutually exclusive, especially since option 1 is a long-term option. Shows like Totally Free Mondays at the SCIT are in the option 1 camp. This is a free show where Harold has been performed every week for years. That gets students, friends, family, and the general public to learn the conventions of improvisation (edits, tags, pacing, etc.). FWIW Hustlebot was doing this too. My friends coming to see us did not  go regularly.

And while I love short form, ​you do not have to do short form to make something accessible. Give the audience some ground to stand on, something that they recognize from non-improvised work. Some shows follow a familiar format: LuPones improvises a musical or Midseason Replacement makes up a sitcom; others stick to a well-known genre: Crime Scene Improvisation. Even just telling a story with a beginning, middle and end, where the protagonist grows and changes will make the show more accessible to an audience used to written work.

​Not that any of that is easy, but I think it's important for a community working in Pittsburgh where the average audience member has seen little to no improv. 

Forming a new team

I remember Irony City's last round of (formal) auditions. We had forty+ people show up and cast two. That's a lot of talent we turned away!

And I mean it when I say talent. There were a ton of good people that just don't fit in our team. We wanted people who both complimented and accentuated the personality of our group, players who would make us better by being in the group.

Now that the Pittsburgh community is exploding it is much easier to form a team. You can just ask a few people whose name you know to play with you at cage match. But is that the best way?

I don't think so. There are many successful models for teams, but as I've been chatting with folks here, it seems often times they are formed haphazardly.

Here's how I would go about forming an indie team:

• Who do you absolutely love to play with? You get excited to do scenes with them. Here's your chance to do a lot more!
• Who do you admire most as a player? You love their style and want to know more about how they tick. Remember, you'll watch a lot of each other's work, get notes together, and hang out.
• Who plays the way you like to play? If you're a patient player, it might be good to have another patient player or two on your team. Especially early in your career.
• Who balances the group out? Who does a really good job at what you're weak at. Maybe you need a good straight man, or someone with a solid emotional core, a player who aggressively edits, etc.

Now look at your list. If, in your opinion, you are the weakest player on that team, it's probably the best team for you to be on!

How I think about short form

I really enjoyed performing short form for many years, and I still love watching it when it is compelling. I would say the same about long form -- anything can be done well or poorly and anything can be performed for entertainment, art, comedy or theater.

So how do I think about short form? Not much differently than long form actually. Many people do look at it differently. Because the games change every 5 minutes, they think, "We better have scenes that get there faster and get more laughs per minute." In truth, many long forms (aka Harold) typically have scenes shorter than 5 minutes. And in long form we encourage players to know their want / what their scene is about within the first few lines. So how much faster could you get to the point? Further, the audience typically does not know or care to know the difference. So why should we treat them so differently? As long as our scenework is compelling, they won’t care how we get from point A to B.

What practical affect does that have on my approach? I look at short form games/constraints as an opportunity to push my in a way I wouldn’t normally play. I mean that both in a larger sense (my work during some period) and a narrow one (this specific scene).

Let’s say I’m working with a group that tends to be very talky. We might think of some games or workshop some games to address this. For example, we might play Film Dub/Dub Scene*. Often when I see this game, there are a lot of jokes at the expense of the mechanism: a long line of gibberish turned into a short line of dialog or vice-versa, someone going against the intention of the player, etc. For this team, I would focus it differently. I’d think of it as an opportunity to focus on one thing at a time. If I’m acting in the scene I would think entirely on that: acting. How can I use blocking to help tell a story. Use my movement to create physical space where there is emotional distance. Listen to the dialog and punctuate beats with changes in movement. Initiate movement or space work as gifts to my dubber. And the same goes for dialog. I can just focus on dialog -- on creating natural lines that are begged for by what it happening on stage.

This to me is a fun way to play. And I kind of fun I don’t get to have a lot on stage in long form.

*a game in which 2-3 players do a scene in gibberish and 2-3 players stand off stage “dubbing” the dialog.