Life Skills Becoming Improv Skills
Many people advise that to be a good improviser, you need to have an interesting life… so what are the things have people done, what hobbies have they taken up or professions have they worked in or life habits they’ve taken on - that have helped them in their improv.
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This episode features:
Jodi Pfleghar - find out more about the groups Jodi is part of -
https://www.facebook.com/MunichBakeThis
https://www.facebook.com/impromunichorn
And the festival she runs which is online this weekend:
https://improvember.de/
Jade Fearnley from Murder Inc - The Improvised Murder Mystery
www.murderincimprov.com
Andy Johnston from The Mop and Bucket Company:
https://www.mopco.org/
Pat Robinson from Squares in the Round in Nottingham
Elise Rodriguez from Florida Studio Theatre in Sarasota - check out her new podcast with John Gebretatose here: https://anchor.fm/eliseandjohnshow?fbclid=IwAR1uYP80xwwlYf7V12__A50cwHO5MTRUNMQhxCiwvDtC2x7TOF_DG4m4EPI
The Improv Chronicle Podcast is produced and hosted by Nottingham improviser Lloydie James Lloyd
Theme music - Sam Plummer
Logo design - Hélène Dollie
Episode transcript:
This… is the Improv Chronicle podcast, I'm Lloydie.
Lloydie Lloyd: It's Tuesday, 3rd November, 2020. Many people advise you that to be a good improviser, you need to have an interesting life. So, what are the things that people have done? What are the hobbies they've taken up or the professions that they've worked in that have helped them in their improv?
We start in Munich with Jodi Pflegehar, originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the US. Jodie has been in Munich for around 24 years. She's artistic director of Bake This, is a teacher and co-founder of ImproMunicorn and runs Improvember, Munich's annual Improv Festival, which this year is online. You can find a link to it in the show notes.
Jodi feels her improv has been hugely impacted by being a parent and a teacher.
Jodi Pflegehar: Well, I must say I started doing improv back in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And I wasn't doing it professionally. I was going to an audience participation improv show that was happening every week.
And nothing was taught. It was simply, let's play, have some fun. It was a professional troupe that was leading it. But I didn't know what I was doing. I knew nothing about what improv really meant. I just was having fun and hanging out with the people afterwards. So, I had a little bit of experience.
Then I came to Germany and did my thing as an English teacher. I'm a trained teacher for elementary school, primary school. And I wasn't teaching proper school; I was teaching English. And that was a big push in the direction of helping me to get back into acting and find my way back to improv.
Then I had children. And it started with my first baby, of course; mine came one at a time. And after my first daughter was born, I found an improv group that was advertising online, looking for some people to come and have fun and play a little bit.
And I hesitated. I didn't jump in right away. But what I did do in the meantime was I found improv courses that were being held in English. And I said, “ You know, let me go check that out and see what that's all about.”
And I took two courses and had an amazing time. And it was great to get away from motherhood for a brief stint and just be an adult, but play like a child.
Then I contacted this group and it happened to be Bake This, but they had not ever performed before. And I went to one of the rehearsals and found myself crawling on the floor and telling crazy stories. And I fell in love; completely fell in love.
And I realized how much my teaching, my parenting pushed me back into this place where I had already been but never really embraced, I guess I could say. Because of the idea of play, because of truly having to constantly be on your toes as a parent, because you'd never know what's going to come at you. As a teacher, same thing. And you have to be ready for any teachable moment; anything that should happen in the classroom that should give you that aha moment to say, “Yeah. Let's go off on a tangent here for a moment. This is important.”
And I realized how much those skills were important to me and brought them to my improv. And I have to say vice versa as well.
Lloydie: In Salford, in the UK, Jade Fearnley is part of Murder Inc. the improvised murder mystery, and it's the act of puppet making that she's found to be a huge influence on the way she improvises. Although it was a more real-life character on my Instagram that caught her eye when we were talking this week.
Jade Fearnley: How cute your cat is that I've just seen on Instagram; that gorgeous little Yoda tabby cat. Beautiful. Like all the mischiefs that that cat could get up to and still be forgiven for afterwards.
I mean, it's very much the same with the puppeteer. And so, of all the things that you can make a puppet do that if it was a real person, they'd never in a million years get away with. And just how much you can make an audience sympathise with a puppet on a string or on an arm for anything. If you put it down or you slightly hit it with a mallet, that's it; you have become the cruellest, most nastiest thing to the most innocent piece of fabric that anyone's ever seen.
Lloydie: Hey, Jade, fabric is innocent. Okay?
Jade: Not all fabric. {indistinct 5:01} has got a lot to answer for; I'll be honest with you.
Lloydie: Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's true.
Jade: But yeah, it's very bad. And I've found it's been really handy to see how puppets inspire reactions out of the audience to inform the characters that I can create that have a little element of that in them. Because if you can make it like a really lovable monster, oh, I just love that. I love playing lovable monsters on the stage.
Just like beasts or things that you're not quite sure what they are. Because obviously, I'm trying to almost project to the audience exactly what sort of monster I am, but they don't know that. They just sort of see me. They see characteristics that look a bit like that, but they don't quite understand how I'm supposed to look. So, I get to play with that and sort of adding bits to the imagination and do a lot of {indistinct 5:52} that go that give them an idea of what sort of monster I am.
And when I be that monster, I really like to sort of play on the idea that I'm naive or otherworldly. I'm from somewhere else; I don't quite understand the world around me. And that can make for some really poignant, moving, sad, loving scenes where I just get to be something that everyone's already in love with because they're so cute.
Lloydie: So, your improv is genuinely been influenced by cute pieces of fabric?
Jade: Yes, absolutely. And it's not something that I could have ever foreseen. When I've done a lot of puppetry in the past, it's always been with the idea of entertaining kids. And that's fantastic; I absolutely love entertaining kids.
And what I love about them is they will look directly at the puppet. They're not interested in what I'm doing. And I've done a lot of stuff on stage where I'm there with the puppet on my arm and I'm speaking. It's very, very clear, where the voice is actually coming from. But the children aren't interested. I'm not the fun bit, I'm not the excitement. The excitement is the piece of foam that seems to be animating itself. And I think that's magical.
And again, I tend to use a lot of what I've learnt about how puppets express themselves and how much they can get away with how much cheek and impishness that they can do. I’ve sort of used that in my improv to help me have more fun and be cheeky on stage. And that's been a lot of fun.
Lloydie: So, have you kind of almost visualised yourself as one of your puppets when you're performing?
Jade: Yeah, in a fashion, but not so much in the sense that I would move like a puppet would when in the arms or how I'd speak. It's more so to do with expressions and looking at the world through eyes that don't quite belong there.
And I think that's one of the main things, because a puppet is not a person. So, if you put a sort of puppet in a scene with a person, they're going to naturally look a bit of otherworldly; they don't belong.
And that's often something that's so much fun to play with when someone sort of making all of these new discoveries as they go as a character. It can make a naivete and a vulnerability that audiences love to latch on to. And I find that really interesting.
Lloydie: Hearing Jade talk about creating characters and monsters was fascinating and makes a huge amount of sense to me. I can see how that would influence your improv.
But when I was making this episode, one person I spoke to online said something that frankly didn't make immediate sense to me.
Andy Johnston is an improviser in upstate New York, USA with the Mop and bucket company. His day job, however, is in sales and he thinks sales has made him a better improviser. I was itching to know how.
Andy Johnston: The thing about sales, a lot of people think that they can just teach you how to sell by giving you ‘here's your sales pitch that you talk to people about’. And I guess anybody can repeat a sales line. But if you if you want to be really good at sales, you have to connect with your customer.
One of my main roles is to make a friend first and then make a customer. So, the only way you can do that is by really paying attention to the customer. And that means you have to listen to what they have to say, you have to watch them and watch their body language and you have to adjust what you're saying to what they care about.
And when you bring those things into improv, that's pretty much all the main points of improv is. Just because you have a great idea, that doesn't mean anything. If your partner says something that is different, if you just bull through what they said because you want to get your point out, then your partner knows that you don't care about what they have to say and the audience knows that you don't care about what your partner just said.
So, really paying attention to what your partner says in each scene makes a huge difference in how well it goes over.
Lloydie: Was this something that was obvious to you from the start when you started improvising or did something suddenly click and you went, “Oh, hang on”?
Andy: When I first started improv is as a lot of folks do. I thought, “Hey, I'm funny. I'll be good at improv.” The first class I got into, they started playing these various games and you had to be really connected with people. And it was more about being real and being connected than it was about being funny. And that kind of hit me right between the eyes of, “Oh, crap, I'm not going to be good at this just because I can hit a great punch line.”
And then I started tying it in with what I was doing with sales and I said, “Oh, this is the exact same thing.” My sales background has helped me to connect well in improv, but also the improv has taught me a lot about how to do better at work.
A big thing in sales is you have to listen to your customer. So, many people go in and they want to get their point across and just, “You got to hear what I have to say. Here's my sales pitch.”
But oftentimes, if you just sit back and listen and watch your customer, they'll tell you exactly what they need. Like, for instance, I work for an engineering company and we do energy efficiency programs. And I was at a school and talking to the head of maintenance. He just started {indistinct 11:38} telling me all about the LED lights that we were proposing to put into his property. And he knew everything there was to know about this.
And I was kind of just sitting back and talking about my stuff. And then I watched him and I realized he wants me to understand how competent he is in this subject.
And so, all I did was I just sat up, leaned forward, looked him right in the eye and just listened very carefully to what he had to say. Within five minutes, he was selling me on why he needed my program.
And that applies so much in improv. There's so many scenes where we've got an idea in our head and we'll just want to let it out there and just keep going for it. But if we're really paying attention and like every word and every action out of our partner is the most important thing that that character has ever heard, then we get the goal.
Lloydie: Having an interesting life and drawing from it really helps. Of that, I've little doubt. One person I know describes herself as the oldest improviser in my city of Nottingham, UK.
Pat Robinson: Oh, a good time to {indistinct 12:58}.
Lloydie: Oh, look at this; both of us on time.
Pat: Well, I did arrive and I just went for a walk round.
Lloydie: Pat Robinson is in her 70s. She improvises with a group called Squares in the Round, and she believes that her love of running has helped her as an improviser in numerous ways.
Pat: I know that nothing in life comes quickly. And when I started running at 54, I got pretty good, but I could hardly run for a couple of minutes before. So, I stuck at it.
And it's the same with anything. You know, most probably, when I first did improvisation, I wasn't very good, but I thought, “No, I'm going to stick at it.” So, don't give up; just try. And that's all I can say.
Lloydie: So, it was your running that kind of gave you, once you kind of, I suppose, got through the wall, then…
Pat: I thought you said, “Gone through the war.”
Lloydie: I want to know; I wasn’t going to talk about the war.
Pat: Through the war.
Lloydie: All right. You remember the war. Oh, God. So, is it something about perseverance and just like kind of pushing through when you have those difficult moments?
Pat: Yes, absolutely. I mean, now I get so annoyed when people say, “Oh, I can't do that.” Nothing in life is easy. You've just got to stick it, stuck in and give it a go.
And people say, “Oh, improv is just playing and everything.” No, there are rules to improv, which sounds a bit of an oxymoron. But yeah, you probably feel, “Oh, God, this is not very good. I'm not very good”, but just keep at it and have – I mean the most important thing is to have fun. And I've had so many laughs to improve, which I didn't do when I was a runner.
Lloydie: Will it help my improv if I become a part time runner?
Pat: I'm not sure it would. I've got to take up running to be an improviser.
Lloydie: I think you haven’t got to.
Pat: Just having – Yeah, being fit because that makes you, as you said, healthy body, healthy mind. That makes you feel good. And if you feel good, you'll want to try new things and have a go at things. You're not going to sit.
I mean, I see a lot of people at my age. I mean, I don't go to bingo every week. I mean, I enjoy it. But you see a lot sort of give up and they just sit and watching television. God, you don't know what you can do in your old age or any age. Have a go. Don't give up.
Lloydie: Pat's message of pushing through the difficult moments is something that came up when I was talking to Elise Rodriguez, who's an improviser from Florida Studio Theatre in Sarasota in the U.S.
Elise is also part of an awesome new podcast called The Elise & John Show that she does with improviser, John Gebretatose. Their first episode just dropped and it's a real must-listen.
Elise’s past time that has helped her improv is yoga.
Elise Rodriguez: Well, yoga is all about being president in your physical body. And I feel like the challenge in improv is not is to not get stuck in your head. So, if the challenge in improv is to not get stuck in your head, yoga comes in handy in that you train to remain aware of your physical body, which pulls your focus away from your mental body.
Lloydie: Yeah.
Elise: So, when I'm in my physical body, I'm much more in tune with my intuition and with my scene partner, perhaps. I'm much more able to react authentically to my scene partner's choices and words because it's a visceral physical reaction versus me being in my head and trying to process and decide what I'm going to say next or what I'm going to do next.
Lloydie: Right. Okay.
Elise: So, it's very much being present in your physical body instead of your mental body. So, I mean, there's so many parts in yoga where you stop to process what is happening.
Lloydie: Okay.
Elise: So, part of part of practicing yoga is stopping at different points throughout the practice to pay attention to how your body has changed, based on your last several poses, to check in on how your body might feel different.
And that's so important in teamwork and character work, especially, allowing for a still moment to occur for the last beat of the scene to land – to feel that last moment – then to see how your scene partner has been affected or to discover how perhaps the scene dynamics have changed or has shifted in the last few moves.
Lloydie: That makes so much sense.
Elise: Yeah.
Lloydie: And that reminds me of Rebecca Sohn from the Annoyance Theatre, who I've heard say more than once, “Get out of your head and into your body.”
Elise: Right. Yes. I've heard her say this, too. Yes. And it's exactly that. And it's hard to just… because then we're now thinking. When we hear that quote of hers, we're now thinking, “How do I get into my body?” But again, we're thinking.
Lloydie: Yeah.
Elise: Whereas in yoga, your body's the one that's doing the thinking and the reacting. If I am in a scene and my brain is screaming, “Oh my gosh, what is happening? I'm uncomfortable. The scene is not going anywhere. What am I going to say next?” I will utilize what I have learned in yoga, which is to take a breath and breathe through the difficult moment.
So, in yoga, you have all kinds of twists and turns and poses that can be extremely uncomfortable, if you're not used to it, but you're taught in yoga to literally take a huge deep breath and smile through that.
So, it's almost like acting; like I'm going to act like this is very comfortable right now and I'm going to do it with my body, so that my body is almost convinced that this is perfectly fine; that I just have to wait and hold this pose and take this breath. And when this breath is over, my body will tell me what to do now.”
And then there's me. What I really wanted to do was end this episode on a really neat note by saying on the day of the US election, just how much me being active in politics, it influenced my improv. It seemed like a little neat bow to place in the episode.
And I have worked for a political party in the UK and I've worked for one of their parliamentarians. But in all honesty, that's not been such a big influence on my improv as this.
{Music}
I've sung in church choirs for well over 30 years. I'm a man of agnosticism and a relative lack of religious commitments most of my life, but I come back to Anglican choral singing again and again. And it's through that singing and through music more generally that I've gained so much that I've been able to put into my improv.
And it's not just the obvious things that I put into musical improv shows, but when it comes to things like game of the scene, I've been influenced by recurring musical motifs in pieces. When it comes to timing and moving things along, I’ve gained that from music. And when it comes to working with others to create something bigger than ourselves, well, music gave me that too, even if it didn't give me a neat little bow to put on the end of this episode.
In some ways, it's hard for our improv not to be influenced by all the other things we do. But I think there's a real benefit in knowing that.
Next time… on the Improv Chronicle Podcast.
Taking care of your scene partner: Now, I've heard the phrase; take care of your scene partner, so many times in improv. But what do we really mean by that? What is it we need to do to make sure our scene partner is taken care of? And how does that impact the scene?
The Improv Chronicle Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Lloydie James Lloyd. You can help a podcast by subscribing and writing us on your favourite podcast app.
Check out the show notes for this episode to find out about current projects the contributors are involved in. And if you have an idea for a possible episode, get to improvchronicle.com