Making your improv house a home
Relax your crack about improv formats and bring your audience into a cosy embrace
Two huge timeholes are scouring Zoopla & Rightmove for houses I’ll never be able to afford and lengthy discussions with improv teams on what format they want to perform. In both cases, I’m engaging academically in where I want to be, but neither is getting me any closer to being there.
The things property listings are based on tell you everything and nothing about a house*. Floorplans, square footage, length of lease, shared access to a garden, on-off street parking, pretty photos from the most flattering and space-enhancing angles are also useful to know. But they don’t say anything really about what it’s like to live in: how warm it feels, how the light comes through the windows in the morning, how loud your neighbours are, how happy you’ll be day-to-day living there, and how it’ll feel with all your stuff in it.
Improv formats are similar. In this one, there’s 3 first beats, a group game, then at the end you might connect things together. Another format down the street has a core scene that you come back to, but you can do tag runs to explore something shiny. The next one is a single scene for 25 minutes. This one does all of the above, except it’s a musical. This format is a one-hour narrative, but backwards. All useful to know, but incomplete and of little concern to anyone other than improvers themselves.
A team still needs a common understanding of how they’re going to play. What impulses are you following in scenes, how do you use tag moves, what kinds of edit point do you tend towards, how it will feel with all your stuff in it etc. A team which initiates with strong premises and sweeps a scene on the first laugh feels very different to one that starts with a physical initiation and aims for three solid scenes in their half-hour. A team that plays very verbal and intellectual games in two-person scenes will feel very different to one that favours fun in physicality and big groups. Most important is the chemistry between team members, that’s hard to define but you know good and bad when you see it.
The best homes are perfectly customised for the people they house and how they want to live. The best improv teams perfectly customise any format for the players they have and how they want to perform.
The same applies to your visitors too: A happy audience will remember how they felt watching a team, but they’re very unlikely to remember that the show was a textbook Harold. They’ll remember certain little moves and their favourite performers. They’ll remember how much the team love each other and invite them into a fun time. They’ll marvel at your ingenuity but won’t notice that you perfectly executed 3 game moves in every tag run. They’ll love visiting your home because you make it so welcoming and guarantee warm company.
As improvisers we should be cognisant of this if we want an audience beyond our students. The format itself is secondary to the content of the show. Audiences will return for teams that they love, not the formats they perform.
Shows like SORRY, Uncle Glen’s Menagerie, Austentatious and Baby Wants Candy do such a great job of establishing how much fun you’re about to have, from the moment you enter the venue through to the blackout. In Winner - an improvised sports biopic I direct at The Free Association - load-in house music draws from the best scores of titanic sports movies and we introduce each of the players like the heroes they’re about to play. All our headline shows have some basic set that sets the vibe of the show without getting in the way of the improv.
In St Doctor’s Hospital, we have an opening voice-over from fictional resident doctor ‘Alex Banacek’ as a nod to Meredith Grey’s moralising during Grey’s Anatomy that also does the heavy lifting of outlining how the show will work. Our audience get is delivered in character as Dr Banacek addressing a busy waiting room.
In the Do Not Adjust Your Stage show, The Wunderkammer, we invested in an opening animation video that expresses the variety of source material and pace the show will move at. You can see it here.
They’re little things, but giving that extra thought to the environment you’re welcoming your audience into can make all the difference to elevate your improv show into an event.
The square footage of the house is secondary to how homely it feels. Make your improv house a home.
*For creatives in any major city, a house is like a flat, but has extra rooms and even another level. Some even have private outdoor space.
St Doctor’s Hospital by The Free Association is performing at Assembly at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2023 (2-28 August, 3.15pm, except 14th). Tickets here