postcard from Lake Ivan

[lakeivan]

david@lakeivan.org
www.lakeivan.org

A POSTCARD FROM LAKE IVAN

I have been developing a form of fully improvised, nonnarrative theater with my company, Lake Ivan Performance Group, since 1992. Over the years, the form and technique of this work has changed greatly, as I have worked with and learned from a great many talented improvisers. In recent years, the work has typically featured two speaking actors and one silent actor, plus a musician. We use the technique to make video pieces as well as live performances.

The technique we use focuses on how to improvise with language outside of a narrative structure, but it derives from my experience with improvised music and dance. The following email, which I sent to a member of the Group after a weekly rehearsal a few years ago, provides a 'snapshot' glimpse of some aspects of the technique, as we were practicing it at the time.


Hi Cassandra!

I had a few more thoughts on last Sunday's rehearsal which I wanted to share with you. These thoughts are based on my experiences while playing the piano for dance classes, where, as you know, I develop a lot of my ideas on improvisation technique. I think dance class makes a good microcosm of what we do in our theater pieces, because it is a simpler, clearer, more straightforward form of improvisation, yet the technical issues are all exactly the same, as are the challenges.

One of the things I've discovered after 18 years of playing for class is that there is ONE SINGLE approach to the task of improvising music for movement which ALWAYS works best, under every circumstance. In class, a teacher will first demonstrate a short dance phrase or exercise, which I then have to play for while the students perform it. While the teacher is demonstrating the movement, I try to pick up the mood, energy, and feeling of the dance, as well as the rhythmic structure. While doing so, I often get ideas of what to play (a lyrical waltz, or 'something in D minor...') Sometimes I get several contradictory ideas ('It should sound like Beethoven.' 'No, it should sound like the Eurhythmics.') Sometimes I get absolutely no ideas at all. The approach which I've found always works best is this: I stay aware of all of my ideas (if I have any), but I don't make any decisions about what to play. Then, when I start to play, I use my fingers on the keyboard to FEEL the rhythm, dynamics, mood, etc. of the movement. With each new phrase of music I try to trust the feeling and go deeper into it.

What happens to my original ideas, if I had any? If I had no ideas to begin with, the music I play is consistently excellent when I follow this approach. Occasionally, one of my ideas was very strong and what I end up playing comes out sounding close to the original idea. Sometimes I discover that my ideas were way off the mark, based on a misunderstanding of the teacher's intentions, and so what I end up playing has no relation to the original ideas at all, but also comes out working strongly with the movement. Most often, what I play contains elements of my original ideas, but is about 10 times better than what I had originally thought of, PROVIDED I USE THIS APPROACH. It always amazes me how polished, refined, elegant and powerful music, well-suited to the teacher's pedagogical intentions and to the student's needs, just POPS into existence every time I use this technique.

It sounds simple. One approach which always works best in every situation. The problem is that my conscious mind, the part of me that thinks up all those ideas ahead of time, is so convinced of how wonderful the ideas are that it has a million arguments as to why I should really try to play music based on one of my clever ideas, instead of trusting my feelings. (Understand the difference: my preferred method doesn't involve discarding or ignoring my ideas. On the contrary, I try to be as aware of them as possible. What I actually end up playing often incorporates many of the ideas. I simply don't DECIDE WHAT TO PLAY based on my ideas. You could say I decide what to play 'by feel.' It's like when you're climbing up a big, half-rotting tree, trying to prune it. You 'decide' which limbs are capable of supporting your weight BY FEEL. This is how we make all our decisions in our improv work. Yes, it requires us to 'go out on a limb.')

There is a character in all world mythologies of 'the trickster.' 'Coyote' in Native American traditions. "Anansi the spider" in African traditions. I believe this figure in part represents the conscious mind with its endless seductive rationales for trying to distract us from what we know we should do.The only way I've found to overcome the temptation to follow ideas rather than feelings is to consciously remind myself of what the right approach is, before I start to play, every time. I still do that 20 or 30 times a class, 3 or 4 classes a day, after 18 years.

There are several ways I feel this applies to the issues of recent rehearsals. One is, obviously, the role of 'having ideas' while improvising. Its a common mistake to think that being intuitive means 'not thinking' or 'turning off your brain and just doing it.' What I'm suggesting is that being intuitive doesn't involve turning off ANY part of your brain. You don't suppress ideas, in fact, your whole work is made up out of your ideas to begin with. Instead, it simply means you don't DECIDE WHAT TO DO (or say) based on your ideas. Ideas are a part of your input, what you're aware of, they feed you. You actually decide what to do by FEELING where the flow of energy of the whole piece is going, and by constantly letting yourself feel more and more.

I understand very well your temptation to give yourself agendas, technical problems to work on, extra things to try to 'do.' "Perform in the proper scale.""Use the space fully." "Relax." Even "try not to DO too much" becomes something you try to DO. It is very hard to accept the fact that the work will always come out best, no matter what, if you focus ONLY on doing ONE THING: (in the technical language we've been using recently) immersing your spongelike vocal line into the energy flow of each moment in the performance, and opening yourself up so you can become more saturated with it. I know that takes a lot of words to say, but as you know, when you're actually doing it, it feels like one simple action. What it all boils down to is: use your voice (and your silences) to feel everything going on. If I could somehow convince you not to try to DO all of those other things, and, each time you improvise, to dedicate the full force of your will power ONLY to trying to get more and more saturation, you would achieve mastery of this technique so quickly it would make all of our heads spin.

Actually, there is a useful way of incorporating all of those agendas, other than telling yourself to DO them. They are all things you can work on trying to FEEL. In other words, your only task is to feel more and more, but some of the things we are trying to feel are subtle and elusive, and we need training and practice in order to feel them easily. 'Scale of performance' is something you feel, not something you do. When you're immersing your performance into the small intimate space between you and a video camera 4 feet away, it feels different from immersing your voice into the space reaching from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House to the back of the highest balcony. Your place on stage, inside the visual composition of each moment, is something you can train yourself to feel, not something to 'do'. Even relaxing, or 'not doing too much' is something to feel. If, with each phrase, you could fully feel the exact size, texture, emotion, etc. of the energy of that moment, you would automatically be 'doing' exactly the right amount, with nothing extra. Hope that gives you some helpful ideas. See you Sunday.

Love,
David

[lakeivan]

SURVIVAL INSTINCTS

Good improv technique means acting, insofar as possible, by instinct and intuition, rather than by calculation. Our deepest instincts are our survival instincts. So, if you could imagine that using good improv technique was a matter of survival, you could tap into a powerful part of your intuitive self, and greatly improve your work. Here's how we do it at Lake Ivan:

The improvs we do at Lake Ivan don't have a narrative structure, so we use a "musical" structure. But the same principles of technique could be applied to a narrative scene and to comedy improv.

In the current version of our technique, we prepare by imagining that the piece we are about to perform already exists in it's perfect form. We imagine that it is like a piece of music, by which we mean a flow of energy, rhythms, and emotions. Our job, as performers, is to physically feel, in our bodies and with our voices and our words and our silences, every moment of this piece of music. Note that our job is not to perform, recreate, show, or explain the music, but just to experience it physically. We proceed as if the actual words or actions we perform could be anything at all, as long as they help us connect to the feeling of the underlying piece of music.

Note that you can use the same concept in a narrative or comedy improv: the difference between our nonnarrative form and a narrative form is that in a narrative structure each person is supposed to remain inside the point of view of an individual 'character.' The narrative version of our technique would be to imagine that the scene you are about to perform already exists in it's perfect form, and that your job is to remain inside the point of view of your character, and feel every moment of the scene (by using your voice and words, your silences, and your physical movements.) Note that the actual words you say and actions you perform are incidental, the "real" scene is the underlying flow of energy and feelings with lie underneath the surface.

This underlying layer of energy-feelings-and-musicality is the lifeblood of the scene. It is the source from which everything in the scene springs. To the extent that you are able to fully immerse yourself in that energy flow, and feel it with every cell in your body, your work and the scene itself will flourish and thrive. To the extent that part of you moves outside of that energy flow (to worry about something, self-criticize, etc.) your work and the scene itself will be weakened.

When we are preparing for the scene, we imagine that the flow of energy-and-feelings which is the scene is like oxygen. If we remain fully inside of it, we will experience great pleasure, and our performance will flourish. If we move outside of that flow, even a little bit, our work will start to flounder, wither, and die, and so will the scene itself. This makes us work in a very instinctual, low-on-the-brainstem sort of way: INSIDE THE FLOW: GOOD FEELING!! OUTSIDE THE FLOW: BAD FEELING!! Just as if we were trying to stay inside of a place that had delicious, nourishing air, and not go into the surrounding area which had poisonous air.

The preparation could be phrased this way: The scene I am about to perform already exists in it's perfect form, as a flow of energy-feelings-and-musicality. To the extent that I keep myself completely immersed in that flow, my performance will flourish, so I will do WHATEVER IT TAKES to keep 100% inside of the flow.

The formulation "whatever it takes" is very useful, since it allows your intuitive self to solve the problem of getting back inside of the flow in the fastest, most efficient way, without needing to remember a complicated set of instructions.

[lakeivan]

THE INNER CRITIC

One of the most vexing problems facing the beginning improviser is how to deal with the Voice of the Inner Critic. While you're in the middle of trying to perform a scene, this pesky voice has a seemingly limitless supply of criticisms to launch:

What I'm saying sounds stupid. (Variations: I look stupid. The scene is stupid. My fellow performers are stupid...)
This is slow. Repetitious. Boring. Cliched. Not believable.
I'm afraid that this scene is like that awful performance I gave last night.
I don't like the lighting. The music. I made a mistake. I knocked over a piece of the set.

Etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum

It is actually EQUALLY detrimental to have an Inner Praiser:

This scene is going great! I love that last idea I came up with! This is really funny/moving/well-done...

The Inner Praiser, like the Inner Critic, takes you OUTSIDE of the scene and into a critical view of the scene, which weakens the scene.

Actually, ANY stray thoughts which comment ON the performance or WORRY about the progress of the scene are detrimental:

Aren't we supposed to be ending soon?
I wonder if my boyfriend is enjoying this?
Is my voice loud enough?

The problem of the Voice of the Inner Critic is that it makes you doubt your own impulses and your intuition, and good improv technique consists of absolutely trusting your impulses and your intuition.

The technique of overcoming the Voice of the Inner Critic does not consist of suppressing the voice, but of knowing how to interpret it. It is a waste of energy to try to pretend that the critical voice isn't really there, when that voice is a natural part of you. Good technique consists in knowing what that voice is really saying to you.

The point I'm trying to make is: there are a million different forms in which that voice makes its criticisms, but it's always really saying the same thing: Feel More. There's Not Enough Feeling. What you're doing is Half Felt. So the solution becomes: go deeper into the feeling of whatever you're doing.

Anything that seems bad or unconvincing in a scene seems that way because it is only half-felt. When something seems like a cliche, if you feel it fully it becomes an Archtype. When something seems slow and draggy, when you feel it fully it becomes Majestic and Grand. When something feels overly intellectual, when you get into the feeling behind it it seems richer and fuller.

For a beginner, the first instinctive reaction to the Voice of the Inner Critic is to run away from the material you are playing and look for another, better idea. "Oh, this storyline isn't working AT ALL," we think, "I'd better try something totally different." Or "I hate being stuck inside this whiney character, I'll change her to make her more vivacious and exciting." Etc. etc.

Actually, such a reaction is always counterproductive, because it takes you directly OUT of the emotional logic of the scene, destroys the throughline and the continuity, and plunges you into the weakened position of trying to "think of ideas," which means you've lost the power of your intuition and your instincts.

It is always a better tactic, whenever you hear the Voice of the Inner Critic, to interpret that voice as having said to you "Go Deeper Inside of whatever you're doing." (Regardless of what the voice SEEMED to be saying.) Thus, if the material you're working on seems silly, go DEEPER into the silliness. If it seems slow and draggy, go DEEPER into the slowness and experience it with your whole being.

Whatever the material you're working on happens to be, when you go deeper inside of it, it will become fuller, richer, and more genuine, and thereby become much better theater. It may also naturally transform itself and change into something else, except that the change will not be desperate or arbitrary, it won't be the result of RUNNING AWAY FROM THE SCENE, it will be the next logically organic step of going deeper INTO the scene, and thus it will assure the audience that the scene you're playing does indeed make sense, has it's own integrity and logic, and is taking them on a journey into an interesting place.

The journey into the Next Place in the scene is always by going deeper Inside of what you're doing.

[lakeivan]

TAKE THE AUDIENCE ON A JOURNEY

In our work at Lake Ivan, we don't use a narrative structure, so, early on in our work, we discovered that it was necessary to find a replacement for the narrative structure. After all, in an abstract performance, if the piece simply meanders from texture to texture to texture, the audience will begin to stop trusting the actors after about 5 or 6 minutes, regardless of how fascinating, surprising, or well-performed the various textures are. The audience eventually develops the feeling that the piece is "wandering around, not going anywhere" and is wasting their time. They have an intrinsic need to feel that the performers are deliberately taking them on a journey, leading them step by step deeper into the heart of SOMETHING. In fact the scene works best if the audience feels that every moment in it is focused more or less directly on furthering this exploration.

This is actually equally true in a narrative or comedy scene. Narrative scenes appear to have the form of What Happens Next: that is, they continually answer the question "what happens next." But if all you are doing is creating a long list of sequential events, then the same thing happens that happens in an abstract piece: it begins to seem like the scene is meandering all over the place for no reason. A narrative improv also needs to feel like it is taking you on a journey deeper and deeper into the heart of something.

This is why we developed the concept of Saturation. The idea is that if you, the performer, are like a sponge, your goal is to constantly open up your pores and fill yourself more and more fully with the feeling-state of the piece you're performing. Note that this concept of getting more and more saturated does not mean that you get more and more "emotional" and it also does not mean that your performance gets louder and louder or faster and faster. After all, if the feeling-state of the piece is one of calm quietness, if you keep opening yourself up to that energy, you will get quieter and quieter, calmer and calmer, not louder and louder. It simply means that with every breath, every phrase, every beat of the scene, you open yourself up to feeling the energy of the piece more fully, regardless of whether that energy is small, medium, or large, emotional or unemotional.

And what is that "feeling-state" which you are opening yourself up to? You don't have to define it ahead of time, or even understand what it is. It is simply defined as "the feeling-state which the piece has NOW, in the present." You stay connected to that feeling-state, and continually open yourself up to feeling it more and more fully, regardless of whether or not it changes. If the feeling-state in a given part of a scene is one of "snooty indifference" and you keep opening yourself up to become more and more saturated with that feeling, it may well be, for a while, that you feel more and more snooty and indifferent. Or, as you open yourself up to the feeling, the snooty indifference may transform itself into rage, or boredom, or it may drop away and leave a calm contentedness. The point is: you never move AWAY from the energy, and you never disconnect from the energy, and you NEVER EVER just "sit" in the same level of saturation for more than one phrase or sentence. You always continue to open yourself up, so that you can feel MORE and saturate MORE with the next sentence. This is what creates the "narrative feeling," the feeling that every moment in the scene is taking the audience a step further on a focused journey.

You might use this concept to build a preparation for yourself along these lines:

"The scene I am about to perform is a flow of energy and feelings which already exists in it's perfect form. My job is to feel each and every moment of the scene. With every phrase, I will open myself up, so that I become ever more saturated with the feeling-state of the scene."

[lakeivan]

RELATIONSHIP TO THE AUDIENCE

New York audiences are tough. I remember the first time that I came out on stage (at Here) for an audience that was in an ungenerous mood: they (figuratively) had their arms folded across their chests, and I could hear them thinking "OK, you'd better do something fantastic in the next minute and a half or," (figuratively looking at their watches) "I'm out of here." That's a scary thing to face when you're working without a script. I've also performed improvs in front of audiences who clearly hated what I was doing. I knew that if I tried to work off of the audience's energy in a situation like that, I'd be in a lot of trouble. But that left me uncertain as to how exactly to think of my relationship to the audience.

On the other hand, I've also performed improvs for audiences that seemed to worship my every movement and laughed at or appreciated everything that came out of my mouth. The times that I tried to work off of the audience's energy in cases like this, it had an equally ruinous effect of the piece. I craved the audience's approval and laughter so much that I began to pull out all my old gems and chestnuts, my schtick, and I was continually rewarded for doing so. But the piece itself became shallow and almost incoherent, because I had left behind the inner emotional logic of what I was doing. Afterwards, I learned from friends in the audience that despite all of the laughter and responsiveness, they were left with a feeling that the piece "didn't add up" and "really didn't work."

Experiences such as these drove me to the conclusion that, despite the fact that comic performers often claim that they need to work off the energy which they feel coming from the audience, that this was an extremely unwise way in which to approach performing improvisation, regardless of whether the audience was friendly or hostile or simply neutral. I began to search for another way to conceptualize what I was doing.

What I came up with is this: (like most of the entries in this journal, I use this idea to perform the abstract, nonnarrative improvs which my group specializes in, but the same concept can be applied to comedy improv.) The audience relates to the performance in a way which is similar to how they might admire a landscape. If I'm an actor playing a tree in the landscape, then the more I connect to the tree's energy, and fill myself with "treeness," the more the audience will be able to see, feel and appreciate that part of the landscape. If I'm playing the river, I need to fill myself as much as possible with the "river energy" in order for the audience to see the picture clearly.

In other words, this is what my relationship to the audience is NOT:

I am NOT trying to "perform" the piece for them
I am NOT trying to "explain" or "describe" what it going on in my imagination to them
I am NOT trying to "show" them what is going on in the piece
I am NOT trying to "act out" the piece

This is what my relationship to the audience IS:

I am trying to feel, with every cell in my body, every moment of the piece. The more I feel the piece as a physical sensation in my body, the more the energy of the piece will be clearly EMBODIED by me, and therefore the clearer the piece will be to the audience. The more fully I feel the piece physically with my voice (and the words I'm saying) the more the audience will be able to hear the sound of the piece.

What's more, in my mind, I don't have this relationship to the ACTUAL audience which is sitting in front of me in the theater, but to a kind of idealized audience which I call the Virtual Audience. (Grotowski called it the "partner in security," I believe.) This is an imaginary person or persons who are just as fascinated as I am by the amazing, mysterious worlds which take shape through the magic of improv. I imagine that this person, like myself, is watching, fascinated, moment by moment, as the piece reveals itself. The more clearly I connect (physically) to the energy of the piece, the more this person and I will both be able to enjoy the act of discovery.

I came to really understand performing for this 'virtual audience' when I began to have more experiences acting for camera. It's also the same thing that one does in a rehearsal; imagining an ideal audience. Now, when performing in a theater, I use my relationship to this same imagined audience more than to the real audience.

Note that my primary motivation for performing the piece becomes my own curiosity and delight at discovering what the piece turns into, not trying to please the audience or "show" them anything. If the entire audience walked out in the middle, I would be able to continue, purely for my own pleasure. (It actually came close to happening that way, one late night at the Fringe Festival.) The quality of my performance is no longer dependent on having the "right" energy coming from a "good" audience.

I have used this approach now for years, in many different kinds of performing situations, and found that it is always helpful. It allows the piece to be as strong as possible, regardless of the kind of audience I have, and it also goes a long way towards eliminating performance anxiety.

[lakeivan]

WORDS AS A TOOL TO HELP YOU FEEL

Here at Lake Ivan, we believe very strongly that when you perform an improvised theater scene, the real scene does not consist of the words you say. It is the underlying structure, a continuous flow of feelings and energy, which constitutes the real scene. Making this distinction has important consequences for how you approach your work.

When I am working with beginning students, I always have them perform scenes by vocalizing with gibberish and pure vocal sounds, before I allow them to do a scene with real words. The idea is that when they perform the scene, they perceive that the throughline of the scene is a connected flow of energy, emotions and musicality which lies UNDERNEATH the level where words are. Since, in my own group, we work in an abstract form, we usually conceptualize this flow as having a musical structure to it, but the exact same idea can be used in a narrative scene with characters.

The image we use is that the scene itself IS this flow of energy and feelings. It is as if the scene is something which exists already in its perfect form, and the job of the performer is discover what this form is by FEELING it. The actor's VOCAL LINE becomes the tool which she uses to feel each moment of the flow of the scene.

The Vocal Line is a continuous line of sounds and silences, which lasts throughout the scene. Think of the silences and the sounds as being two parts of a continuous Vocal Line, in the exact same way that "rests" (silences) as well as notes are a part of a musical line in a musical score. This enables you to think of the Vocal Line as a TOOL for experiencing each moment of the flow of the scene. In other words: the voice is not a way of expressing the scene, it is not a way of communicating the scene, it is not a way of explaining the scene to the audience. It is primarily a way for you, the actor, to FEEL the flow of the scene. Since your goal is to feel the scene as fully as you possibly can at each moment, you will use the "voiced" part of your Vocal Line whenever that is what enables you to feel the most, and you will use the "silent" part of your Vocal Line whenever the silence is what helps you to feel the most. But at every moment, you're still performing the same task: using your Vocal Line in order to feel the flow of the scene as fully as you can possibly feel it.

In practice, when performing a scene using nonverbal sounds, the actor often knows, inside her mind, exactly what words she would be saying if I was allowing her to use real words. This is no problem. I ask the student, in this case, to simply be sloppy in how she pronounces the words, to not fully enunciate them and to not turn them into fully articulated words, but allow them to be slurred, unclear vocal sounds. The idea of the exercise is that student is CHECKING to make sure she is connected at each moment to an emotional/musical flow which is UNDERNEATH the words, rather than just being inside the logic of "what she is talking about" or inside of her ideas about the scene or even inside the visual images she is bringing up.

The next stage in the training is to allow the student to use real words during certain parts of the scene, and to go back to nonverbal sounds the rest of the time. When using words, the student will still think of the words as a TOOL for feeling the flow of emotions/musicality which lies underneath. In the context of this exercise, it doesn't matter whether the words make sense or not, whether they are interesting or boring, whether the actor thinks what she is saying is "stupid" or "wonderful," whether it is repetitive or not, whether the actor is speaking in full coherent sentences or unintelligible fragments, whether the words actually describe something going on in the actor's mind or if they do not, whether the words relate to something another actor in the scene has said, or if they do not. The goal of the actor is still to "feel the flow of the scene as fully as possible in each moment," and she simply uses ANY words which allow her to feel the flow as fully as she can. As before, if being silent allows her to feel more at a certain moment, she should use her silence as a way of feeling the flow.

Doing this exercise, the student is practicing the idea that the throughline of the scene is the flow of energy-and-feelings underneath, NOT the narrative or intellectual line of what the actor is talking about.

There are two ways I use of having the student switch back and forth between verbal and nonverbal sections. In the first method, I watch the scene, and whenever I feel that the student is constructing her scene but following the line of the verbal subject matter (what she is talking about) and that she has lost her connection to the underlying flow of energy-and-feelings, I will say "Go Nonverbal," and she will switch to nonverbal vocalizing. If it is indeed true that she has lost her connection to the underlying flow, there will be an audible glitch as she has to switch gears mentally and reconnect with the flow of feelings. This glitch will be an important clue, both to her and to me. When I feel satisfied that she has re-established a strong connection to the flow, I will say "Go Verbal," and she will switch back to vocalizing with real words.

In the second method, the student herself decides when to switch back and forth. Whenever she is uncertain that she still has a strong connection to the underlying flow, she will switch to nonverbal vocalizing, in order to check the connection. When she is certain that the connection is strong, she can switch back to using real words.

After a while, this will train the student to always construct a scene by following the line of the underlying feelings-and-energy, instead of a line based on what she is talking about. Just the THREAT that the director might say "Go Nonverbal" at any moment is enough to ensure that she performs in such a way that she COULD switch to the nonverbal, without the telltale glitch, at any moment, because she is placing herself INSIDE the flow of feelings rather than INSIDE of the verbal subject matter.

The final stage of training, of course, is to do an entire scene, remaining fully verbal the whole time. When the student has learned how to construct a scene by following the throughline of the underlying feelings-and-energy, and to USE WORDS as a TOOL to help her to feel this flow as fully as possible at each moment, she will be ready to remain fully verbal throughout a scene. At this point, she will probably discover that it is much EASIER to perform this way using words, than it is to use nonverbal sounds. This is because, as a tool for entering into feeling-states, words are much more powerful than nonverbal sounds, because they evoke feeling-states with much greater specificity. This is why we are interested in watching scenes with words in the first place!

[lakeivan]

THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING

Is it wrong or right to "know" ahead of time what's coming up in a scene? If you're supposed to proceed through an improv by feeling and discovering everything about the scene in each moment, is it OK if you have a strong feeling about what's coming next?

Real beginners at improvisation tend to navigate their way through a scene by trying to think up and implement a set of "ideas." While they are in the middle of performing a scene, they use up half of their brain power by trying to "think up stuff to talk about" or to make decisions about what the scene is like. If it is a narrative or dramatic scene, they also use up a lot of brain power trying to think of all the ways that their ideas fit in with the ideas of their scene partners. What all of this amounts to is that, because half of their brains are busy inventing ideas and manipulating data, they are only partially inside of their character and inside of the feelings of the scene, producing a scene which is shallow, not credible, cluttered, incoherent, inorganic, and overly intellectual.

As an actor begin to acquire technique, she begins to learn that the proper way to navigate through a scene is by FEELING the scene, that is, by opening herself up more and more, each moment, to feeling the flow of energy-and-emotions which make up the scene, and thus discovering along the way what the "content" of the scene is. If she doesn't understand this process clearly, she can become confused about if it is OK or not to "know things before they happen."

One actor in my group used to occasionally ask me about this problem. "When the scene began," he would say, "even before I said a word, I could feel that the mood of the scene was quiet and sad, like an elegy. I even knew that I would begin to speak mournfully about the death of a childhood pet. If I'm supposed to be discovering everything about the scene by feeling it in each moment instead of by thinking up ideas, isn't it wrong if I know ahead of time what the scene will be like?"

Well, NO, actually, it isn't. This actor was suffering from the following misunderstanding:

If you don't proceed through a scene by "thinking up ideas," that means you're supposed to remain throughout the scene in a state of completely suspended "unknowing." Each element of the scene enters into you as a total surprise.

That's not what is meant by "discovering the scene by feeling it."

The point of "discovering the scene by feeling it" is NOT to put you into a state of blank "unknowingness." The point is for you to place yourself, as you work through the scene, as directly and fully as possible into the richly pleasurable flow of feelings-and-energy which is the actual source of the scene, rather than placing yourself inside of your intellectual manipulation of ideas about the scene, which you then have to try to artificially transform into actual feelings, slowing down your responses and taking away the authentic, organic quality of your work. Once you are fully INSIDE the flow of feelings-and-energy, you will generally find yourself in a state of rather full "knowingness," rather than in a state of "unknowingness." That is to say: You will "know" what the scene FEELS like, and you may very well "know" what's coming up next in the scene as well.

Does this mean that, besides knowing what each moment in the scene feels like, you also "know" what's going on in the scene in the intellectual sense? (This question is basically equivalent to asking if you would be capable of describing the feeling in words.) It depends. Some of the time, you might also "know" what you are doing in a conscious, intellectual sense. If, for example, the feeling-state you are in at a certain moment happens to be a very familiar feeling-state, for which there are very well-known terms, such as a state of "overwhelming jealousy," and if the director happened to stop the scene at that exact moment and ask you to verbally describe what your feeling-state was, you'd be able to describe it easily. If, on the other hand, your feeling-state was an odd, hard-to-describe state, and the director stopped you and asked you to describe it, you might not be able to. If you happen to have a sense of poetry and you worked hard at it, you might still be able to come up with a description of it after a while: "I was feeling a kind of light, suspended, round floating quality, almost as if I were a glowing pink soapdish which was floating through a blue sky." In either case, if the scene WASN'T interrupted by the director, and you just continued to move through it, you wouldn't NEED to describe it to yourself, to your scene partner, or to the audience. You would just need to be INSIDE of the feeling as fully as you could be, and allow that feeling to affect your language and your behavior.

The same thing is true about those times in which you "know" ahead of time what you're about to say. If you are building your scene by staying inside of the flow of feelings, you may, at certain times, have a very clear notion of how those feelings are about to translate into language. You just "know" that you're about to talk about being in a parking garage, or whatever. At other times you may have no idea how the feeling-state you're in will translate into language, you only know what it feels like, and you will be genuinely surprised at the words which pop out of your mouth.

The point is that you CONSTRUCT YOUR SCENE by remaining fully inside the flow of feelings, rather than by partially pulling out of the feelings in order to "think up ideas for the scene." This means that your goal is NOT to place yourself in an ignorant state of "unknowing." You DO want to "know" what is going on at every moment, in the sense of "knowing what it feels like." This kind of "knowledge," knowledge in the sense of being completely filled up with feeling, is the knowledge which becomes the very basis of the scene. So, while you do want to keep yourself in an "open, receptive" state, a state where you can constantly pick up more and more information (feelings) from everything which is going on around you, that doesn't mean you're trying to remain in a state of "blankness" or "emptiness." On the contrary, you're trying to feel as fully saturated, as filled with feeling, as you can possibly be at each moment.

[lakeivan]

COUNTERPOINT FORM

Seemingly, this is the first topic covered in this blog which applies mainly to the abstract, music-and-language improvs which we do at Lake Ivan, and doesn't seem to have a direct application to comedy or dramatic, narrative improvs.

And yet...

The concept of Counterpoint Form, if you tweak it just slightly, DOES have an important function in comedy and narrative scenes. It helps to accomplish the crucial goal of giving the scene overall focus and shape, preventing it from splintering up into unrelated parts, and, just as crucial, makes clear to the audience that the actors are listening to each other on a deep level. It even provides a simpler, more elegant version of the "Yes, and..." technique. Read on, if you wish to see this mystery revealed...(at the end of the entry I describe what on earth this has to do with comedy and narrative work.)

In a scripted piece, the writer and the director are able to keep the scene focused, to direct the audience's attention to the center of the action, and keep the various elements onstage in balance. In an improvisation, the actors have to accomplish this goal collectively. They cannot lose their awareness of the total stage picture, or of the totality of the sound of music-and-voices, at any time. They cannot simply settle into experiencing their own inner throughline, their own inner logic, while losing touch with what's going on around them. This necessity is what led me to working in Counterpoint Form.

Here's how I currently do it in our Lake Ivan pieces:

We like to use the image that the "piece" we are about to form is something that Already Exists, in all of its details, in its Perfect Form. Note that "the piece" is not thought of as the particular words we will say, or the actions we will take, but, rather, the "piece" consists of the Feelings and the Energy which lie underneath these words and actions. Our job, as improvisers, is merely to experience (feel) each and every moment of this piece. Since we are FEELING the piece by using our voices (and our words) as well as our bodies, it will end up being translated into a form which is visible and audible to the audience. (See previous entry on Words as a Tool to help you Feel.)

There are many complicated reasons I could go into which explain why this image, that the piece we are about to perform already exists in its perfect form, and we are merely there to experience it by feeling it, is so helpful for performing improvisation. But the bottom line is: it works. It works wonders.

If I am performing a two person scene, I prepare myself by saying to myself that my job is to feel and experience The Whole Piece, that is, a complex whole which consists of my energy, my Vocal Line, as well as my partner's energy and her Vocal Line. These two Vocal Lines combine to form a musical whole, just as two or more musical lines combine in the counterpoint form of Baroque music. In fact, if we are performing our duet along with a musician, then the music that she is playing is also a part of the complex whole. The light and the colors of the set are part of the whole. EVERYTHING that I feel or am aware of within the stage space is part of the whole.

My job is NOT to just experience my own throughline, my own Vocal Line, my own story. My job is to use my Vocal Line (my words and my silences) to feel this complex, contrapuntal flow of energy-and-feelings, which contains the energy of two people. (More, for a scene with more than two people.)

In the case of a two person scene, if I am thinking of the piece as being like a piece of music, then it is one of those compositions that prominently features two melodic instruments, such as the Duo Concertante of Mozart. Or a section of a jazz piece in which two soloists are playing at the same time.

The use of this image has all sorts of beneficial results. Because my partner and I are both focusing on feeling the whole rather than just our own parts (in other words, we are focusing on feeling the same thing as the audience feels), we collaborate at every moment on shaping the flow and development of the scene. The audience can feel that we are not ignoring each other and getting lost in our own worlds, but are collaborating. The piece has a clear, coherent shape at each moment, as well as a clear overall shape. The scene has a natural balance between the two voices. If we speak at the same time as each other, because we are both focussing on feeling the "two-voiced music" of the piece, our voices naturally blend in such a way that the audience can understand what both of us are saying. It doesn't mean that my energy has to be THE SAME as my partner's, it just means that I am aware of the way that our two energies blend together. In other words, during a certain section of the scene my energy might be belligerent, and my partner's energy might be soothing, and we would both be concentrating on feeling the way that the belligerent energy and the soothing energy blended together to create that part of the scene.

Here's what this has to do with comedy and narrative improv:

In a narrative improv, the piece has a "dramatic" shape, with "dramatic" rhythms, rather than a musical shape. If the actor goes into the scene thinking "I will concentrate on feeling what my character feels, thinking what my character thinks," then she will probably lose track of the overall shape of the stage image and of the scene, creating an impression that she is in her own world, ignoring the other actors. But she can solve the problem of keeping the whole scene coherent and focussed, by simply going into the scene thinking "This scene already exists in its Perfect Form. My job is to experience every moment of the scene, to feel the flow of the Complex Whole which is the scene, which includes the energy and presence of ALL of the performers. I will experience this Complex Whole from inside the point of view of my character."

If she is in a part of the scene where her character is arguing with someone else, they both need to feel the Rhythm of this argument, so that they (as actors) can collaborate to make the scene work properly. (Even if their characters are doing the opposite of collaborating.) Likewise, if her character is pointedly ignoring or snubbing another character, both of them have to feel the Rhythm of this snubbing, so they can cooperatively create the effect.

If you apply this technique in a larger group scene, you will never again have the problem of certain couples or individuals breaking away and losing their relation to the whole scene.

Note that if you use this technique in a narrative scene, you can elegantly get rid of using the "Yes and..." and other (to me) rather cumbersome techniques which force you to keep track of your ideas in relation to the other actor's ideas. If all of the actors enter the scene thinking that the Scene Already Exists in its Perfect Form, and that they are all going to discover and feel that Scene together, they will naturally collaborate and support each other's ideas, since they are each concentrating on feeling what the collective Scene is about, rather than on "thinking up ideas" and "fitting those ideas in with what the other actors are doing."

Here's an example: elsewhere on this site, I read a discussion about what to do if your scene partner begins a scene by saying "Isn't it lovely here in Paris?" There was a discussion of the different consequences of responding by acting as if you really ARE in Paris, or, responding by acting as if your partner is lying or is crazy, and you are really in New York or somewhere else.

Using the counterpoint technique, I would enter the scene by thinking that my job was to discover what the scene was about, and what the form of the scene was, by feeling it at each moment. When my partner begins the scene by saying "Isn't it lovely here in Paris?," I will (mostly likely), because I am focussing on learning what the scene is about by FEELING the scene along with her, also feel the reality that we are in Paris. I won't have to remind myself to support her choices or to "think up" a choice which fits in with hers, because I will already be focussing on discovering what the scene is about collaboratively with her. It is also possible that I will "feel" that she is a crazy person, and that we are not really in Paris, but I will probably only feel this if there is genuinely something deluded in her character's energy, and so I will probably only end up responding that we are "really in New York" if that is also the direction for the scene that she was sensing.

[lakeivan]

CLARIFICATION OF TERMS

A reader of this blog recently called me up to chat, and made me realize that it was time to clarify some of these terms which I bandy about so freely. For example: I'm constantly referring to improvs as being based on a flow of "feelings" or "feelings-and-energy." I also refer to good technique as being based on "using the words to feel the piece" and "opening yourself up to the feeling more and more." So what are these "feelings" that I keep referring to?

I certainly do NOT mean "feelings" in the sense of "being very emotional all of the time on stage." I'm not the super-emo guy.

I use the terms "feelings" or "feeling-state" in a broader sense, to refer to everything which you feel during the scene. ANYTHING you feel is a "feeling-state." Blank neutralness is a feeling. Machinelikeness is a feeling. Deadness is a feeling. These are all feeling-states which one can explore and go deeper and deeper inside of. It is not necessary for a scene to contain rage or joy in order to use a technique of building the scene based on the "feelings."

Note that these feelings include all physical feelings, and in fact even the "emotional" feelings are experienced primarily as PHYSICAL. I tell the actors in my group that they should try to experience everything as physically as they possibly can. (This doesn't mean they have to jump around vigorously all of the time. It just means that they experience the energy, emotion, and other feelings as something inside of their bones, muscles, nerves, and cells.) If you experience the scene physically, it will become visible to the audience.

THOUGHTS OF THE WEEK

One way to think of a scene is that your challenge is to see how far you can go into a state where you are completely involved in the scene, with every cell in your body and every fiber of your being.

For those of us who have some training and experience in acting in scripted plays, we know that the normal acting technique is to be about 90% "inside" of the play and inside of your character, and to leave a little part of yourself on the outside, watching all the technical things, like making sure that you don't knock over the set pieces, forget your cues, etc. This technique works perfectly well in a scripted play, because the playwright and the director have already worked out the structural integrity of the performance beforehand, so you can easily give up this 10% of internal involvement with your character without it damaging the continuity or integrity of the play itself.

However, in an improv situation, this technical habit NO LONGER WORKS. In an improv, the actors are writing and directing the play collaboratively, at the same time that they are acting. The scene derives all of its strength and integrity from the ability of the actors to be as completely INSIDE of the flow of feelings that make up the scene as they can possibly be. The actors can no longer afford to leave 10% of themselves on the "outside" watching over the technical aspects of the scene. They can't leave even 1%. Not even half a percent. I tell actors to be inside of the scene "110%," by which I mean, when you think you are inside of the scene 100%, you can always go even further inside. Always.

In a narrative or comedy scene, one way to think about it is it is OK to make choices or decisions during a scene, but only FROM INSIDE OF YOUR CHARACTER. In other words, you, the actor, shouldn't step outside of the scene to make up "choices" about how the scene should go, but you should stay completely inside of your character, and allow him or her to make choices as necessary.

I once began a series of performances (at Nada on Ludlow Street) with a technical aspect I hadn't used before: there was a videographer onstage shooting us from various angles in closeup, and there was a video monitor on the stage with a feed from the camera. The audience had the choice of seeing us in close-up on the monitor, or just looking at us on the stage. The actors could also see the monitor.

In the first performance, I was confused as to how much or how often I should look at the monitor, and thus know what the audience was looking at. I found that I kept pulling out of the flow of the scene to "worry" about whether or not I should be looking at the monitor. Every time I did so, I would weaken or destroy the continuity of the scene, because I hadn't remained fully "inside" of it. It was like having to start the scene from the beginning over and over, and the effect was not good.

In subsequent performances, I began to learn that I could actually take care of all technical questions, like "should I be looking at the monitor?" "are the mike cords getting tangled?" etc. etc. from INSIDE of the flow of the scene. I can remain entirely inside of the scene, and also remain aware of all of the technical issues, and take care of them FROM THE INSIDE. If it's the right moment to look at the monitor, I'll look at the monitor. If the image I see on the monitor affects or changes what I'm talking about, then it does.

The point is to NOT EXIT THE FLOW OF THE SCENE just to "worry" about ANY aspect of what might be going wrong with the scene. You can stay inside of the flow of the scene, maintain an awareness of all the technical concerns, and allow your intuitive self to solve all the problems, without having to stop and "think" of a solution.

[lakeivan]

CONNECTEDNESS

Every successful improvisation needs to have a feeling of connectedness from its first moment to the last; that is, it needs to have the feeling that, in an organic, lived-through, directly-felt sense, each moment of the scene BECOMES the next which BECOMES the next, etc.

It is this quality which makes the piece feel real, because it is nonarbitrary. Things don't happen haphazardly, they are inevitable (but also surprising.) Everything in the scene feels like it belongs in that scene and doesn't belong in some other play. For an audience member, when you come to the end of a scene which has had a feeling of connectedness, it feels like you have lived through a whole, meaningful experience, not like the actors have been forcing you to wander around in a random pattern.

On the other hand, any disconnectedness in a scene, even of the slightest, tiniest kind, has disastrous consequences. You lose the audience's trust in the scene on the spot, and you will have to work like mad to ever get it back. Since the performer, having disconnected herself from the scene, then has to reconnect to it, she creates the tiresome feeling that "the scene is beginning all over again from the start," which is frustrating for the audience as well as the performers. And you lose that magical sense that the improv is all about discovering connections in an organic, lived-through experience.

In fact, the consequences of a single moment of disconnectedness are so bad that an actor should be quite stern with herself about forbidding them. In her preparation before the scene, she should say to herself something along these lines:

"I am absolutely forbidden to 'exit out of the flow of the scene,' even for a microsecond for ANY REASON." (Meaning: I am not allowed to go outside of the flow of the scene to worry or think about ANYTHING.)

The above negative approach is an essential tool for the actor to practice, but there is also a more positive approach. You can train yourself to actually FEEL THE CONNECTEDNESS of the scene.

To accomplish this, simply use your own version of the following preparation:

"In the scene I am about to perform, while I am feeling the flow of the scene, I will be especially aware of the CONNECTEDNESS of the scene. I will feel how each texture, quality, and feeling-state BECOMES the next one, whether it changes slowly, in a middle speed, or suddenly. I will not space out even for a moment, because I do not want to miss a single moment of the connectedness, and thus miss some of the story of the scene."

Experiment with adopting this preparation to the particular form you're working in, whether comedy, dramatic, abstract, musical etc.

[lakeivan]

A GREAT WARM-UP EXERCISE

This is a great warm-up exercise, which works on many levels at once to prepare an actor for improvisation .

Choose a song which you enjoy singing, and know well. It doesn't matter what style of song it is.

Sing it in three versions:

VERSION 1:

The first time through, sing it just to check that you know all of the words and the pitches.

You are doing this to get rid of any anxiety you have about knowing the song. If you find that there are a few spots where you're not sure of the words or the tune, make something up.

VERSION 2:

Face an imaginary audience, preferably a large, appreciative one in a terrific venue. Sing the song directly to the audience, with the intention of conveying everything about the song to the audience: the words, the story, the emotion, the notes and rhythms, etc.

The traditional paradigm for performance which most of us are trained in is that the Goal of Performance is to Communicate the Material to the Audience. The purpose of Version Two is as much to exorcise as to exercise: it is a way of using the traditional paradigm for performance mainly so we can get it out of our system and move on to Version 3.

VERSION 3:

Do not think of an audience. Imagine that your only purpose in singing is to experience and feel everything about the song, as fully as possible. Your aim is, within yourself, to feel the emotion, the words, the story, the notes and rhythms and the physicality of singing. You sing the song in order to personally experience all of this as fully as possible.

Version Three can be done either with eyes closed or open. It is often helpful to do it with eyes closed, because that reinforces the feeling that your purpose in singing is to create an experience for yourself. However, certain songs are addressed all the way through to another person, and so it may be that the best way to experience these songs as fully as possible is to have your eyes open, so that you can feel that you are addressing the song to another person.

The purpose of Version 3 is to practice the actual performance mode which you will need in an improvisation. The song is no longer thought of as an idea or as material, but it is explicitly thought of as An Experience, something for you to feel. The act of singing now becomes a way to maximize your experience. The relationship to the audience is no longer that you are trying to "tell" or "show" them the material. Instead, it is assumed that if you use your singing to experience the song in a fully physical way, the audience will be able to hear and see the song in a fully realized way as well.

It is interesting to note that it is almost always the case that a person's Version 3 is by far their best rendition of the song, and it is also the clearest version, even though the supposed focus of Version 2 is to "try to present the song clearly to the audience."

Sometimes, because the goal of Version 3 is to maximize feeling, it comes out in a way which would seem way too emotional for a traditional cabaret or song performance, but this usually doesn't mean that Version 3 was fakey or badly done, it just means that it is outside the conventions of cabaret performance. By the same token, certain songs, in Version 3, will make the actor so emotional that she can't really sing very clearly. All of this is perfectly OK because the purpose of the exercise, as a warm-up, is to open up the connection to the actor's feeling center as much as possible, not to practice conventional song performance.

[lakeivan]

SAFETY DEVICE

Performing improvisations can feel vulnerable and scary. It's hard to get up in front of an audience, particularly a New York audience with attitude, without a script as a safety net. What you need, in the absence of a script, is some kind of alternative safety device. When you are in the middle of a complicated scene, and you can feel that something is going wrong, you need the simplest possible thought or reminder you can give yourself that will fix it. You don't have time or mental space to think of a very complicated set of technical requirements. You need a way of instantly bringing your work back to the Basic Professional Level. (The Basic Professional Level is the level in which the audience thinks the work is "amazing" and "wonderful." In reality, you can probably soar much higher to more transcendent levels, but the Basic Professional Level is good enough so that the audience will feel like very satisfied customers.)

Here's the Safety Device I use:

I've been working on improvisation long enough that I'm very familiar with the sensation that I am "inside" the flow of the scene.

In the abstract, nonnarrative work I do with Lake Ivan, "inside" the flow of the scene simply means I'm inside the flow of feelings-and-musicality which makes up the scene.

In a narrative form such as comedy, "inside" the scene also means inside the reality of the situation and my identity (character).

The safety device:

Whenever I sense that something about the scene is not right, I remind myself "just be inside of the scene, and ANYTHING you say or do (or don't do) will be good." This is true. As long as you place yourself inside the flow of the scene, you can't make a bad choice. Everything will be at least at the Basic Professional Level.

Once you are securely back "inside" the scene, you can work on opening yourself up and being ever more fully "inside" the scene, which may lift up the scene above the Basic Professional Level to an even higher level.

The usefullness of the Safety Device is that it is simple, it's fast, and it always works.

[lakeivan]

Most improvisors have a sense that "having confidence" is necessary for a scene to go well, and that they can be thrown off by lacking confidence. But what exactly is this confidence? A misunderstanding of the idea of confidence can lead to subtle difficulties in your work.

Because I make my living as a musician, a lot of my knowledge about improvisation is drawn from my experience playing the piano. When you are playing a particularly fast of complex passage of music, it becomes very obvious that you need confidence. Your hands are flying all over the keyboard, trying to accurately hit keys at a rate much faster than your conscious mind can comprehend. If you are confident about your ability to hit the right keys, this feeling of confidence itself, manifested physically, will increase your accuracy. If you feel unsure and hesitant, the physical manifestation of your insecurity will likewise ensure that you will miss many more notes.

A common error is to think of confidence as a kind of "blind faith," which is actually a manifestation of an enormous LACK of confidence. In other words, you think to yourself "I have no belief that I can consciously make myself hit the right notes, so I'm going to fling my hand somewhere in the vicinity of the notes, and just believe ON FAITH that it will hit the right ones." What you're actually doing in this case is deliberately SHUTTING DOWN the channel of information which your hand is receiving from your eye and your brain. As might be expected, it makes your accuracy worse rather than better.

Real confidence is simply the intellectual understanding that IF YOU KEEP THE CHANNELS WIDE OPEN between your eye, your brain, and your hand, you will play the notes with perfect accuracy, even at tremendous speeds. Your hand will be accurate because it will be AS WELL-INFORMED as possible. This makes your job as a musician much easier: all you have to do is keep your attention "inside" of every note of the music, and keep the channels (all of your senses) wide open. Accomplish these two things, and you will play the piece perfectly.

The same thing applies to improvised theater. You must bring yourself to understand intellectually that if you simply "live" inside each moment of the scene, and KEEP ALL OF THE CHANNELS (that is, all of your physical awareness and your senses) OPEN, you will "nail" each line and each beat of the scene perfectly.

Note that this knowledge is not particularly something to use directly in the scene, or in creating a mental "preparation" to use before starting the scene. If you prepare by saying to yourself "I will be confident in the scene" or even "I will keep the channels open" it won't be of much help to you.

Rather, say to yourself "I will fully experience every moment of the scene." Then, in order to do so, you will have to KEEP THE CHANNELS OPEN as much as possible at all times, and thus you will be making yourself feel confident.

In other words, confidence is a RESULT of good technique more than the cause of it.

[lakeivan]

Why do some improv performances seem overwrought to a degree that is fake? When is exaggerated, over-the-top behavior a liberating, thrilling, hysterically funny and enjoyable experience for the audience, and when does it feel, somehow, not justified by what's going on in the scene?

Some performances are also too UNDERplayed. Certain moments can come off as vague, underarticulated, and simply hard to read.

The trick, naturally, is to play each moment at exactly the right size, the right energy level. But how do you do this?

The basic model for improvisation which I use in my technique, as outlined in this blog, is that you approach each scene AS IF IT ALREADY EXISTED IN ITS IDEAL FORM. That is, you view the scene as a continuous flow of feelings, energy, rhythm which already exists, and your job is to experience as fully as possible each moment of that flow, by using your words, your silences, and your actions. One aspect of that flow of energy is its SIZE.

Each moment of the scene will have its own energy level, on a continuum from very low and quiet to vast and overwhelming. (Of course, most moments are somewhere in the middle.)

As you go through the scene, feeling the flow of the scene, one aspect of what you are feeling is the SIZE of the energy at each moment. Your goal should be, at each moment, to feel the EXACT size of the energy flow, not a hair bigger, and not a hair smaller. (Remember, at different moments, you may be "using" words, silence, actions, or stillness as a tool to feel the size of the flow, but this shouldn't make any difference. You will be able to feel ANY size of energy, regardless of whether you are silent or talking, still or in motion.) Try to get the size of the flow with pinpoint accuracy.

You can practice feeling this aspect of the flow by doing an improv making nonverbal sounds, and making yourself especially aware of the size of the energy flow at each moment. (See the section on working "holistically" for a discussion of why you should work on feeling SIZE as an ASPECT of the whole flow, rather than trying to concentrate on "just feeling the size by itself.")

There are different challenges for you to practice when doing such an exercise. If you come to a moment where you genuinely feel a tremendously huge flow of energy, it may be difficult to find enough "largeness" in your physical instrument to accommodate all of this energy. In a moment of very tiny, nuanced energy, the flow may feel almost imperceptible. In all the moments of middle-sized energy, it takes practice to feel the exact shade of "middle" which you are doing.

Make sure you have no biased beliefs that "bigger" moments are "better" in any way: funnier, more exciting, more dramatic. They're not. You could have a scene that consists exclusively of quiet, subtle actions and words, and, if the performance is perfectly "true" to the underlying energy, it will be a great scene. In general, it's a good idea to have an attitude that you are almost RESISTING having any huge, dramatic climaxes. That way, if a huge climax DOES occur, it will occur because the internal needs of the scene are so strong that the scene overcomes your resistance. The result is that the huge outburst will seem completely justified. (Just like in real life, where most people do not enjoy having huge dramatic displays in public, and only do so when an inner necessity compels them.)

In other words: what makes any moment in the theater moving and believable is when it is played organically, that is, it is exactly true to the flow of energy which underlies the scene. The enormously big moments, if there are any, will seem believable because the huge amount of energy has built up organically. The quiet moments will also seem justified, if they fit with the underlying dynamic. In fact, the jarring experience (for the audience) of feeling like a moment is "overplayed" or "underplayed" refers precisely to the feeling that the size of the performance is not organically related to the feelings underneath.

Therefore, go into the scene with absolutely no preconceptions about climaxes, high points, low points. Every scene will have its own organic shape. Some scenes will have no extreme high energy moments. Some will be almost all high energy. Your goal is to discover, by feeling it, exactly what the shape and contour of this particular scene turns out to be. The truer you are to the size of what you are feeling, the more believable and organic the scene will be.

[lakeivan]

KEEP THE SCENE ALIVE

A common mistake is to enter into an improvised scene with the idea that the problem of improvisation is the problem of performing without a script, and that, therefore, when you have "come up with an idea" which "works" that you have somehow solved the problem.

The reason that this is a mistake is that once you decide, with tremendous relief, that you "know what the scene is," and that it's just a matter of "playing it out," you cut yourself off from listening to the intuitive flow of feelings which is the true source of the scene, and the scene goes dead.

I'll give a musical example, drawn from my own experiences playing improvised music for dance classes.

It might seem as if, in dance class, when a teacher shows an exercise or a combination of steps to the students, that the musician's job is to "come up with something to play which will work with those dance steps." Even if I avoid the grossly obvious pitfall of trying to force myself to think of a musical idea before I begin to play, I may still be overly influenced by my anxiety about "the need to find an idea." Thus, when it becomes clear, as it always does, within the first few moments of playing, that I actually DO have an idea, and that it's a very good idea which goes with the dance steps quite well, my anxiety is relieved. I feel tempted to relax, to say to myself "Ah, I have solved the problem. Now I have a good idea to work with, and all I have to do is continue to play this music until the exercise is over."

The result, inevitably, is that the music congeals into a frozen IDEA of music, and loses its ability to grow, develop, respond to changes from the dancers. It goes dead. All of this happens because I have dropped my sense that I must actively listen, actively open myself to the intuitive sources of the music.

Similarly, if two actors are asked to improvise a narrative scene, without a preset scenario, they may mistakenly believe that the challenge of the scene is to come up with a good idea. Once they begin the scene, and they both realize that they have collectively come up with the idea that the scene is about Sally and her husband Jeff, who are arguing about whether or not to go out to dinner, they may both relax, greatly relieved that they have accomplished the task of finding a good idea. They tell themselves that the only thing they have to do now is to play out the rest of the scene. From that point on, the scene is STUCK in Sally-and-Jeff-argue-about-the-restaurant, and all chances that it might grow and deepen into something beyond this scenario are lost. Furthermore, the scene loses the feeling of real-life-being-discovered-each-moment, and instead settles into a clichéd set of secondhand notions about married people having an argument.

One can avoid this mistake by having a clearer idea of what an improvisation really is, and what the task of the improviser actually entails.

Instead of thinking, as you enter the scene, that the problem is to come up with a good idea, try imagining (as described elsewhere in this blog) that the scene you're about to perform is one that ALREADY EXISTS IN ITS PERFECT FORM, and that your task is actually to open yourself up and experience this scene.

Furthermore, the scene itself is not an "idea" for a scene at all, but an organically felt flow of feelings and energy, which lies underneath the surface of the scene. So your actual challenge is not to come up with an idea, but to continually open yourself and allow yourself to feel this flow of energy which is the actual source of the scene. It is a task which you must keep performing from the first moment of the scene to the last.

In my musical example, this means that I recognize that the real "music" does not consist of the notes, the chord structure, or the melodic structure. The real music is the emotional and kinetic, rhythmic feeling which will underlie both the sounds from the piano and the dancers' movements. My task is not to think of a musical idea, but, by using my fingers on the keyboard, to continually open myself up, allowing myself to connect with this musical energy in a fuller and fuller way. The result? It will still be true that a clear, appropriate musical "idea" will quickly become apparent in what I am playing. But this idea, instead of remaining frozen because I have settled into it, will continue to grow, develop, and become stronger. When it organically needs to change into a different idea, it will do so. It will be alive.

In the case of the narrative scene, the two actors can also keep the scene alive by imagining that the scene they are about to play already exists in its ideal form. Furthermore, the scene itself is not an "idea" for a scene, and it does not consist of what the actors will actually do or say. Rather, the scene is an organically felt flow of feelings which lie underneath the words and the actions. The job of the two actors is to open themselves up to this flow of feelings, more and more fully, throughout the scene.

This means that, like the audience, all new information they discover about the scene is provisional, and is constantly being deepened and broadened. They may well discover, by opening themselves to the flow-of-feelings-which-is-the-scene, that the scene indeed turns out to be about a husband and wife named Sally and Jeff, and that the two of them are indeed arguing about going out. But the actors' task is not over. The task of continually opening themselves up, and, by intuitive feeling, learning more and more about the scene, goes on throughout the scene. As the scene continues, they (and the audience) will learn more and more about who Sally and Jeff are, if they are indeed REALLY having an argument, and, if so, what it's all about. Everything is provisional and subject to revision. The scene continually grows, gets deeper, and takes the audience further on a journey into the world of Sally and Jeff. The details of the scene are filled with precise, intuitive knowledge, rather than clichéd notions. The scene is alive.

[lakeivan]

THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE

When you're performing a scene from a script, or even just a scene with an outline, a traditional way of structuring your work is to play your character's motivation. But this won't work in a completely open improvisation, because you don't know anything in advance about who your character is. It also won't work in more abstract forms of improvisation which don't use characters at all.

A workable substitute is to work from your own personal motivation as an artist. In your preparation, clarify to yourself exactly what you hope to get out of the scene.

One of the strongest motivations you can use to propel yourself through any scene is the pleasure principle: the idea that filling yourself with the flow of feelings-and-energy which are the understructure of the scene is an intense, physical pleasure, and that your goal in the scene is to feel more and more of that pleasure.

We're all familiar, on one level, with the idea that being "inside" of a theatrical scene is pleasurable. This is the actual reason why people go to the theater, and it is also the reason that people become actors. It explains why even performances which are about the deepest despair become pleasurable experiences in the theater. In real life, if your children are killed, or your husband cheats on you, or some such thing, it totally sucks. It hurts, with a horribly debilitating pain. But actors know that if you sing a torch song about a great unhappiness, or play a tragic scene, that it is a wonderful and healing experience. Audiences for these performances feel elation, at the same time that they feel despair. I believe this is mainly because in the theater, unlike in life, when you play a tragic scene you are deliberately and consciously choosing to enter into feelings of despair and unhappiness and you are choosing to experience them as deeply as possible. When a tragic event happens to you in real life, the assault is so great that you try to hold back and avoid the full sensation. This holding back makes the pain itself much worse.

In the theater, when you play a tragic scene, or watch one from the audience, the difference is that because you are consciously choosing to fully enter into the feeling, you allow all of it to "flow through you," and therefore it heals you, rather than hurts you. It helps you release all the left-over pain from the tragedies in your real life, by giving you a safe place to finally fully experience the pain. This wholeness and fullness, by the way, is what makes tragedy seem sublimely beautiful, more than the elevated language.

All of this is just to point out the obvious-but-easy-to-forget fact that the mere act of immersing yourself into the stream of feeling which makes up the scene is inherently pleasurable.

You can use this idea in your preparation for an improv this way: "The scene I am about to perform is a flow of feelings-and-energy. Being inside of that flow is an intensely pleasurable experience, and my goal is to constantly immerse myself in it more and more, and feel more and more of that pleasure."

This has two beneficial effects on the scene: the first is that it is a good test of how "inside" the scene you are. In other words, in order to be sufficiently involved in the scene for it to be convincing and make sense, you need AT A MINIMUM to be "inside" of it enough to experience pleasure.

The other benefit is, that by making clear to yourself before you begin that your goal is to experience more and more of the pleasure of being immersed in the scene, you are insuring that you will remember to become more and more "saturated" with the energy which is the very lifeblood of the scene, and the source of all the best choices you can make for the scene. It is too easy to become distracted, and to think that your job is to fulfill a million other agendas ("be funny" "explain the story" "think of an interesting idea" "make something unexpected happen") and this preparation is a way of reminding yourself of the one thing which is your only true goal for the scene.

An interesting side observation: people often think (incorrectly) that when a performer is performing "for her own enjoyment," she is creating one of those self-indulgent performances which are so tiresome and boring to watch. Not true! The more an actor REALLY tries to experience pleasure from acting, the more pleasure the audience will be able to feel along with her. The real cause of those horrible self-indulgent performances is when an actor DOESN'T get any pleasure from what she's doing. When an actor drones on and on, keeping you a prisoner in your seat, and she doesn't even have the decency to enjoy what she's doing, this is what cause you to feel that she is wasting your time, along with her own, and creates the kind of performance commonly referred to as "self-indulgent."

[lakeivan]

USE THE BODY

Here's a bit of improv theory:

As outlined in the "Relationship to the Audience" entry, if your job as performer is not to SHOW the scene to the audience, and not to ENACT or PERFORM the scene for the audience, but only to FEEL the energy-and-emotions which are the underlying structure of the scene, then what IS your relationship to the audience? How do they make a connection to the scene?

As I wrote in that previous entry, your job as performer is to FEEL the energy of the scene as a PHYSICAL SENSATION. You feel it in your body. You use words to feel it physically with your voice. The more you feel it as a physical sensation, the more visible it will be to the audience. The more you feel it physically with your voice, the more audible it will be to the audience.

Therefore, a goal of good technique would be to feel the energy of the scene in as physical a way as possible, using your whole body. A good sentence to say to yourself as part of your preparation for the scene would be "My goal is to experience the flow of feelings-and-energy which constitute the scene as physically as possible, with every cell in my body."

But what does it mean to "feel the energy of the scene as physically as possible?" Suppose the mood, the energy you feel underlying a certain moment of the scene, is a mood of anxiety, of expectant dread, as if something awful were about to happen. If you tell yourself to "feel the energy more and more physically," does that mean that you will hunch your shoulders, squint your eyes, dart your glance rapidly at all the corners of the room, and in general act like an extreme caricature of paranoia, straight out of the Yiddish Theater?

Only if you misunderstand the instruction. "Feel it more and more physically" does NOT mean "DO all sorts of physical movements and gestures which REPRESENT THE CONCEPT which you associate with your IDEA of that energy." Note that, like all of the improv instructions which I use in my technique, this instruction is not an instruction to DO anything at all: not make gestures, not make movements, not anything. It is a "feel this" instruction, not a "do this" instruction. All you need to do is be present inside of your body, and feel the dread and anxiety which are the underlying mood of that particular moment, and concentrate on feeling that this anxiety and dread is a PHYSICAL sensation, flowing through your arms, legs, torso, your entire body. The slight, involuntary movements that you perform in order to maximize how much you "feel" are more than enough to convey your character's state of mind, and in a suitably underplayed style.

And speaking of style: suppose you were in a similar situation in a scene, but you could feel that the entire energy of the scene was grossly farcical, exaggeratedly ridiculous and comic? In telling yourself to "feel the energy" of the underlying dread "as physically as possible," you would, in this case, be led naturally into allowing your body to take on all of the ridiculous, farcical and comic exaggerations of posture and gesture which you wouldn't have done in a more naturalistic, dramatic scene. The reason for this is that the difference between two scenes, which have essentially the same characters and plot, where one is a naturalistic drama and one is an exaggerated and farcical comedy, is precisely this difference in the physical energy. In the farcical version, the emotions are allowed to overflow into the most grotesquely exaggerated physical form possible. (The words and the character's reactions to the situation are likewise permitted to overflow into a larger-than-life style.) Intuitively, if you feel that you and your scene partner are both feeling the scene in this comic, farcical style, you will naturally allow your body to take on a more and more exaggerated version of the mood of the scene. Style, too, therefore, is something you and your partner feel as a physical sensation.

[lakeivan]

HOW TO NOT LISTEN

Here is an example of a technique I developed SPECIFICALLY to do the kind of abstract, poetic and nonnarrative improvisation which interests me. I don't think this technique is particularly useful in comedy or dramatic improvisations. (Of course, very few people besides me are actually working on abstract, language-based improvisations, so there may not be that many people who find this technique useful. Still, it should be good for something! If you find it helpful to you in your work, I'd love to hear from you.)

Most actors who have basic training in acting technique understand what to do when they are not speaking during an improvised scene. Just as in a scripted scene, the goal is to stay "inside of" the circumstances of the scene, and "inside of" the flow of your character's reactions to everything that happens. This goal remains constant, whether you are speaking or not. You naturally allow yourself to be aware of the literal meaning of what the other characters are saying, as well as the underlying emotional tone, just as you would in real life, because the style of narrative theater demands that everything you do, even if comically absurd or exaggerated, lies "within" the storyline.

But what are you to do if your goal is to create a more abstract, poetic form of theater in which the actors are creating an evocative collage of poetic texts rather than telling a story? If the scene has no story, what exactly are you doing when you aren't speaking? If you're not responding to the other actors by reacting to the literal meaning of what they just said, how are you responding? One senses that an abstract scene must have a "structure" which the actor remains "inside of" throughout the scene, analogous to the "storyline" structure of traditional theater, but what exactly is this structure?

The answer I came up with for my own work, after many years of experimentation, is that the structure I preferred to work with is a musical structure. The scene, a collage of improvised texts, is really an organically whole composition which, like music, has the logic of a connected series of feeling states. Each feeling state naturally evolves into the next one, which creates the "meaning" of the scene, exactly as it does in a piece of music. (At least certain styles of music, for example Romantic music.)

This means that, by analogy to the actor in a narrative scene, the job of the actor in the abstract scene is to simply be "inside" of the flow-of-feeling-states which IS the scene's structure. Her goal is to be "inside" of the scene at all times, whether she is silent or speaking. Her silences are just as full of feeling, and have just as much of a rhythmic, musical form to them as her speeches do. She simply speaks when speech helps her feel more connected to the flow of the scene, and is silent when silence helps her feel more connected. Her task ("be as connected to the flow of the scene as possible") remains constant. (Much of this is covered in my previous entry "words as a tool to help you feel.")

However, she will soon discover that if she tries to "listen" to what the other actors are saying, that is, to really focus on and understand the literal meaning of what they are saying, as we're used to doing when performing a traditional scene, it will throw everything in the scene off. After all, it is precisely this characteristic, of "responding to the literal meaning of words" which distinguishes the narrative-based from the nonnarrative styles of theater. Since the goal in narrative theater is to stay "inside of the storyline," as an actor, you naturally WANT to take in the literal meaning of what others are saying. (You, the actor, want to take in the meaning, even if it happens to be a moment in the scene when your "character", self-centerdly, is NOT listening to what the others are saying.)

By contrast, my goal is to create a form of theater in which the texts are all related to each other primarily through the underlying feelings and musical qualities, and only secondarily or accidentally through the literal meaning of the words. (I think of this style as being a way to encourage audiences to be comfortable inside of their feelings and intuition, without having to rely on following a story.) In theater of this style, if you listen too closely to the literal meaning of what the other actors are saying, it destroys the scene. It draws you completely out of the flow-of-feeling-states, what I like to call the "understructure," which the scene is based on. It tempts you to entertain yourself and the audience by creating a kind of "surface unity" to the scene, where, by making clever connections between your own subject matter and the subject matter of the other actors, you trap the scene at the level of intellectual cleverness, and prevent yourself from discovering any deeper, really interesting connections.

The solution I developed is, when I am not speaking during a scene, to focus on connecting to the voices of the other actors primarily on the level of emotional and musical tone rather than on the level of the literal meaning of the words. I listen in the same way you listen to someone speaking in a language which you don't understand. I don't go so far as to try to "block out" the literal meaning; it would be a wasted effort to try and PREVENT myself from taking in the meaning of the words. It is perfectly fine that on some level I "know" that my partner is talking about a supermarket, or about flying to the moon. But I don't focus on taking in the literal meaning; I put actual effort into connecting to the emotional and musical qualities of her voice.

To be more precise: my effort at ALL moments in the scene is to feel the emotional-and-musical flow of the scene AS A WHOLE. If I'm the only one speaking, that means that I'll feel most of this flow within my own voice. If my partner and I are both speaking simultaneously, I'll feel this flow in the combination of our two voices. If I am silent and my partner is speaking, I'll primarily feel this flow as being "inside of" my partner's voice. And, of course, if everyone is being silent, I'll feel this flow as being "inside of" the silence.

The fascinating result is, when the actors make NO CONSCIOUS ATTEMPT to connect the literal meaning of what they are saying to what the other actors are saying (but also make no attempt to block out the literal meaning) and instead focus all of their efforts on connecting to the other actors' voices on the emotional and musical level, the texts which the actors come out with are automatically deeply connected, on the literal level, on the metaphoric and poetic level, as well as on the emotional level. In fact, typically, the scene which emerges is so coherent that it feels as if every single line in it is addressing a single topic. And this happens without any conscious effort on the part of the actors. What I am calling "not listening" to your partner, apparently leads to what improvising composer Pauline Oliveros refers to as "deep listening."

[lakeivan]

Ok. I know there are some of you out there who have been reading this blog over the past year and some of you are filled with curiosity about the improvised video projects and performances I have been doing since 1992.

For those of you who are intrigued and would like to try your hand at the "Lake Ivan" style of abstract, poetic improvised video and performance art, I am currently looking for a few excellent actors.

Actors who work with me are guaranteed an artistic adventure, hard work, the opportunity to hone a formidible technique which will help you for the rest of your artistic life, occasional fame and glory, and very occasional symbolic amounts of money which are my way of saying "thank you for your artistry." (This last condition will certainly change if I ever begin making more money from showing my work.)

Let me know if you're interested, and we'll take it from there.

If you're not familiar with my work, take a look at the blog and at my web site.

http://www.lakeivan.org

(212) 774-7760

David Finkelstein

[lakeivan]

SEDUCED BY SPACE

This entry should please some people, and not be of interest to others. It's a real BLOG entry, that is, I'm writing notes about a recently videotaped project I've been working on, and trying to figure out how to make it work. So I won't be simply lecturing about my version of improvisation technique, as I have done in most of my other entries. On the other hand, what I'm writing about is very specific to my own work and my own style, and it may not apply much to "ordinary comedy improv" which other people practice. Then again it may! It's always interesting to see how work which is substantially different from your own can still inform what you are working on.

I've been working for a while on what I call "landscape" pieces: very textural, abstract pieces, collages of fairly abstract language, music, and movement, which are intended to be used to make video installations to be shown in art galleries, or else as "installation" style performances, where the audience is free to come and go and watch for however long they like.

Naturally, these pieces need to have a somewhat different style and structure from a video or a live performance which the audience is expected to sit and watch from the beginning straight through to the end.

Because these "landscape" pieces naturally refer to space, and to the environment in which they take place, it seemed a natural idea to videotape one in an evocative, interesting site. I assumed that, this way, the site itself would become the "subject" of the piece, even if only in a very abstract, textural way. (That is, the language of the piece might not refer overtly to anything in the landscape, but the textures and feelings in the voice would be inspired by the environment.)

Previously, I had always practiced this form of improvisation in my main rehearsal space, which is (all too common for underfunded artists) my apartment. I had always assumed that I could practice the form in my apartment in a way which would be quite similar to doing it outdoors on location. After all, like an outdoor location, my apartment is a specific kind of environment, with it's own associations and feelings, and so the piece could be influenced by the environment of my apartment, just as it would be by an outdoor site.

Two weeks ago, I had my first opportunity to try videotaping this landscape form of improv in a very interesting site, a new arts center in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, which has an outdoor area which combines the look of a ruined industrial site with the backdrop of the Gowanus canal. There was a crew of just three, myself and an actress I've been working with, plus a videographer.

We taped the piece in one long continuous 60 minute take. The idea was that a very long take would enable me to create a kind of looped video piece to present in art galleries. I liked the idea of doing a continuous 60 minute improv, because it created an opportunity to sink deeper and deeper and deeper into the altered state of improv, in a way that you can't achieve if you keep stopping and starting over again.

While in the middle of the improv, I was vaguely aware that it didn't feel as good as any of the rehearsals in my apartment had. I felt that I was nowhere nearly as "saturated" with the energy and feelings of the piece as I had been in rehearsal. I was vaguely aware that it had something to do with the difficulties of the transitions, whenever we moved around in the site. Partly, it was a technical difficulty: I was using a wired lavaliere mike, and the long cable, which connected me to the videographer, became unwieldy when we moved over large distances.

However, when I watched the tape, it quickly became apparent what the real cause of the difficulty was, and it only became clearer on successive viewings.

Videotaping in a large, evocative, interesting, outdoor site was NOT the same as practicing in my apartment. The environment of my apartment is self-contained, and actually is not particularly poetic or evocative. It's also very familiar to me. Because of this, when we rehearsed in the apartment, the result was that the apartment itself influenced our improv comparatively little. Most of what came out in the improv came from the internal energy and feelings of the two actors, unleashed into the space. And the result was that the improv was extremely rich, full of feeling, compelling, and even quite funny at times, although we weren't aiming specifically for comedy.

We entered our outdoor videotaping with a vague notion that the piece "was supposed to be ABOUT the space in some way." We were supposed to let the feeling of being in the space shape our improv. But the space itself was new to us and was extremely compelling, evocative, and much more varied than my apartment.

The result was that we were seduced by the space. We kept looking at the space, in different directions, or up at the sky, and asking ourselves "what does being here make me feel like at this moment?" There was an unspoken idea that the task of the improv was somehow to "explore the space." What this tended to mean, in practice, was that whenever we felt a little bored, or uncomfortable, or like something had been going on too long, we succumbed to the temptation to simply move on to another location in the site, or look off in another direction, and thereby find a new texture or feeling to explore. In other words, the space provided a constant temptation to run away from whatever feelings we were exploring, and look for something "new" or "better." The unfortunate result was that almost the whole piece was very, very superficial in tone. It was filled with our "first impressions" of different parts of the space, and almost never got inside of any of the feeling-states in anywhere near the depth we had achieved while rehearsing in my apartment. The idea, never fully acknowledged, that we were "exploring the space," became the ultimate trick we could use for escaping from the material, and creating a kind of false, superficial "variety." (I probably should have thought of this ahead of time, since I have always HATED performances in which the director tries to "explore different ways of using the space.")

I now realize how I should try approaching landscape improvs in an outdoor site next time:

I would instruct myself and the other actors that the goal of the piece is to explore the ENERGY and FEELINGS, NOT to "explore the space." It's not that I'm asking them to actually BLOCK OUT or pretend they don't see the space. There is nothing to be gained in an improvisation by blocking ANYTHING out, since improv technique consists, in essence, of being aware of absolutely everything in the present moment.

Rather, I would instruct the actors to not think of focusing on the space, to not think of working primarily by drawing their performance from their reactions to the space, but think of their primary focus as the ENERGY and FEELINGS in the space. The GOAL should be to get deeper and deeper and deeper inside of this energy. Always moving in one direction only: deeper inside of the energy. If they end up physically travelling through the site during the piece, it would ONLY be because they felt that they could get even deeper inside of the energy and feelings by moving to a new spot, not because they are "exploring parts of the space." (This would probably result in less frequent moves.)

Of course, the feelings and energy which the actors will have at a particular site will, in reality, largely come from their response to that site, particularly if it is a varied and unusual site. Ask someone to "enter inside of the feelings and energy" they experience in an abandoned amusement park, and they will feel something totally different than they would if they were on a tropical beach at midnight. And I'm not trying to minimize that. The goal of the work would still be to create a piece which is largely "about" the site.

But if the actors think too directly that their goal is to explore the space itself, they will end up being seduced onto the level of surfaces and first impressions. On the other hand, if they stick to the goal of focussing only on the energy and feelings which they find at the site, the work will take them into a much deeper, more resonant level, and they will end up creating a truer portrait of the inner soul of the landscape.