Improv and Gardening, or The Joy of Planting Seeds
A guest blog from Liam Webber
Picture this: your brain is a little, unique tin – maybe its one of those cigarette card tins from the olden days, maybe it’s a brand-new, purpose-built wooden box – whatever it is, it’s completely your own. As you go through your life, you fill your tin with seeds that are borne out of your experiences. Maybe you got some of those seeds from reading your favourite book, or that holiday you went on to Peru, or just hanging out age 14 on a park with your friends and a bunch of cheap, plastic bottles of cider… Who knows! You can pick up seeds anywhere (and we do!) and they get stored all jumbled up together in our little brain-tin.
When we get on stage to do improv, we say we get on stage with nothing… But that’s not strictly true. We each bring with us our own cute, little tin of experience-seeds. The audience then give us a suggestion. This is our soil – our dirt – the nutrient-rich foundation in which we’re going to grow our garden. The moment we step onto stage with a suggestion and our tin of seeds, the fun begins: We start planting! Every offer we throw out into the scene is a seed, pulled from our human experiences, carefully poked into a hole in the ground, and covered back up ready to grow.
The most exciting thing is, we have no idea what the seeds we’re planting will grow into.
The audience say “Submarine”. I open my tin and randomly pull out a tiny tear-drop shaped seed:
“Gee, looks like rain today, Jenny!” I say to my to my scene partner, wistfully looking out of an imagined window.
I don’t know which life experience meant that when I heard “Submarine”, this line leapt out my mouth. I have no idea where this line will lead or what flower will bloom from this seed. All I know is that right now, this is the seed I’ve plucked from my tin and I’m planting in the dirt!
The danger with this is that planting seeds is super fun, exciting and very addictive.
The audience bring you a patch of beautiful, bare, loamy soil ready for planting, and “WOOHOO” off we go! It’s easy to get carried away… Everyone is scattering seeds everywhere they can, not paying attention to what others have planted around them. As the show goes on, and these seeds try to grow, it looks like a jumbled mess. The plants don’t have space to breathe, are fighting for nutrients, water, and sunlight, and while you get some pretty things poking out here and there, it’s not the garden your team had in mind when the audience shouted “Spatula”.
So, at the beginning of an improv show we want to avoid over-planting. We want to nurture each seed that gets planted into being the biggest, strongest, most beautiful specimen of a plant it can be – whatever plant it is. This is where we, as improvisers and gardeners, have to look at the whole picture. What is the best thing to do for the garden (the show) in the long run?
Rather than plant a seed of our own, are you best off nurturing someone else’s?
Does your friend’s sapling need some water?
Does that idea need a bit more fertiliser than the others around it?
Has someone on the team not planted anything of their own yet?
Sometimes we just need to step out of the way, so our shadows stop blocking the sun.
As gardening messiah Montagu Dontagu says -
We’re growing this garden – AKA creating this show – together, so it’s all about balance.
We want to plant our own experiences and support others’ in equal measure. If we want a varied and beautiful garden, we want a range of plants growing together healthily! If our seeds come from our experiences, then the wider range of different experiences you have on a team, the more varieties of beautiful, colourful plants you can grow as a group.
It’s also important to remember not all plants grow at the same rate or bloom at the same time. Two plants planted at the same time may flower six months apart – the same is true for ideas in an improv show. Two ideas from the same scene may blossom in totally different parts of the show. Some ideas flower consistently throughout the show, while others bide their time only to burst into dazzling colour in the final moments. All these ideas are needed through an improv show to keep an audience engaged throughout!
Finally, if high-end, scripted theatre is like the Chelsea Flower Show – all pristine and perfect – an improv show is like the audience’s own garden. The joy for them isn’t in looking at something perfectly put together, it’s in watching the seeds grow and the ideas blossom and bloom together.
Messy? Maybe.
Imperfect? For sure.
But, as gardening messiah and dungaree enthusiast Monty Don says, “When we plant something, we invest in a beautiful future amidst a chaotic world”.
As the audience shout that suggestion and we leap into action, we’re all investing together in something beautiful growing out of it. We watch it grow, live, and breathe until the lights go out and it dies back for that winter-time betwixt shows. But as with a garden, we’ll be ready when Spring comes - ready for the next show to bring a whole new garden in brand new soil… And if I remember rightly, they absolutely love it. I mean, you can’t ever beat the taste of a homegrown tomato.
Liam is an improviser and avid gardener from Nottingham, UK who splits his time between 3 very different gardens and 4 very different improv teams. You can follow his adventures in gardening on Instagram (@liamjwebber) or TikTok (@liamsplants).