The House That Del Built

The Intellectual Musings of an Improv Wonk.

The Rehearsal Process

Lately I’ve gotten a lot of questions about running rehearsals—practical questions rather than philosophical. And they’re important questions, because we can have all the theory we want in our heads, but if we don’t know how to put that theory into action in rehearsal, we’ll never be able to transform and refine our play. 

I’ll say right off the bat that I take rehearsal very seriously. As a teacher and a former athlete (Division III softball—no big deal, guys), the importance of planning a lesson/practice has been drilled into me for most of my life. And, since improv is sorta something between an academic discipline and a contact sport, the lessons I’ve learned in the classroom and on the field tend to be good lessons for improv as well.

When a teacher plans a lesson, he thinks of the skill he wants to teach that day (the Pythagorean Theorem; interpreting a political cartoon; analyzing symbolism in poetry) and creates a lesson plan that will take the students from where they are to where he wants them to be. The same process occurs when planning improv rehearsals. A good coach considers what skills need to be worked on and thinks about how to address those skills most effectively in the two hours the team will have together. 

What to work on, of course, is very different depending on whether you’re teaching a class for beginners, or coaching a Harold team, be they newbies or veterans. People new to long form and the Harold need to build skills step by step: one week scene work; the next week openings; the week after that taking first beat scenes into second beats, etc. Veteran teams, however, need responsive coaching. The players, presumably, know the basics, so you have to watch the shows, notice the holes in the play, and address those holes in rehearsal.  

For how to rehearse, I turn to my sports analogy, because although the planning stage might be like teaching an academic subject, the actual rehearsal is much more active than most academic classrooms, and requires that staple of the sports practice: the drill.

The point of drills is three-fold: isolation, repetition, and experimentation. Isolate the skills, repeat them in well-thought out drills (or “exercises,” as we usually say in improv), and encourage the team to experiment so that you can both push the parameters of your skills and note where the edges start to fray.

And here’s a little secret: sports teams never actually run a full game in practice. Or almost never. They run those drills. Which is to say, they set up a particular, isolated aspect of the game (throwing, sliding, cut-offs), and practice them over and over and over. And, then, even if they do run a game occasionally, it’s called a “scrimmage”, and it usually has some parameters that are decidedly different from a game, such as “one-out innings”, or “flies are outs”, etc., because they, too, are set up to work on specific skill sets, to isolate those sets from general game play, to repeat them until they become part of the muscle memory, and to experiment with them until each player knows both the range of his skills and the team’s.

Yet so often as improv teams we get caught up just practicing our form, straight through, at rehearsal, instead of working on the component parts that make up a great show? Do a Harold, get notes, do another one. Besides for the fact that you’re not isolating those skills that need the most work, the show-specific notes given on a rehearsal Harold are often so difficult to generalize to repeatable behavior that they’re nearly useless. Not always. For new teams, simply feeling the motions of the Harold in action can be a necessary “drill” in and of itself. But once a team knows the ropes, simply putting up Harold after Harold isn’t going to aid growth nearly as much as skill-specific drills.

So, back to the three benefits of the drill:

Isolation. In order to really work a skill, it needs to be separated out as much as possible from other skills in the exercises you do in rehearsal. Obviously, it needs some context, but the existence of the team itself provides that context, because you know that, in the end, this skill needs to be incorporated into the larger work of your shows. The point of isolation is that you can’t tell what’s going on with a skill if you’re being distracted by all of the surrounding skills and moves; you need to find the issue and clear it away from the “noise.” 

Repetition. Run it. Run it again. Talk about what you saw. Run it again. Maybe you add restrictions, or increase the range of the drill (but let’s save that for “experimentation”). But first and foremost, you run it. Because a skill that might come up for each person once or twice in the whole night if you just run Harolds will get worked a dozen times if you isolate and drill. Everyone gets a chance to do it, to feel it in her body, to ask questions and reflect on the skill, and, just as importantly, to see everyone else do it a dozen times and see what that looks like. And when you practice this move over and over and over, when you find yourself inside the complex set of variables that make up a Harold, you’ll intuitively recognize this particular piece that you isolated in rehearsal, your mind and body will know how to react, and everything else will fall into place.

Experimentation. Because, again, if you only get one chance to do something during a rehearsal, you’re sure as hell not gonna want to screw it up. And screwing up is how we learn. It’s how we find our boundaries and push our limits. And if we know we’re working something in isolation, we can bomb it big, shake it off, and try it a new way on the next pass. (And also, as I said above, there’s the experimentation of changing up the drill to add restrictions or parameters. )

One of my favorite rehearsal drills is forcing a team to do ten different “organic” openings (which really just means that they don’t get to plan out the format of the opening beforehand, but they can do whatever kind of opening they want) on the same suggestion. And once they do one opening format, they can’t do it again. “You did ‘real life’ monologues. Fine. Next opening you can’t do those. Same suggestion. Go.” It’s a great drill because it embodies the three important aspects of what a drill needs to be so well. You isolate the skill of openings; you repeat that skill ten times; you set up a restriction that forces the team to find a new way to do something they’ve done a million times before.

At a recent Maxitor rehearsal, someone did a really cool tag out where she came in while the person was in the middle of a line and just kept the flow of the dialogue going but made a new scene around it. It was like a tag out, but smoother. We all thought it was cool, but we’d never really done that before. So I decided to devote an entire rehearsal to that and other “non-traditional” in-scene moves—tag outs, split screens, etc. Isolation.

We drilled them over and over. We discussed how and when each one worked best. We drilled them again. We worked it in scene after scene until it felt clear and executable. Repetition.

And because rehearsal is the safe space to experiment with these things—to screw up and make discoveries and see what this kind of technique can do for us as a team, we tried it a bunch of different ways. We saw what worked and what didn’t. We did it well and we bombed it, and we saw the difference between them. Experimentation.

Then, this past Saturday, we had a show, and an opportunity arose to do this kind of tag out. And we executed it perfectly. It had been two weeks since our teammate had introduced this move into our repertoire, and one week since we’d drilled it into our heads and bodies. Of course, because it was fresh on our minds, we may have been looking for an opportunity to execute it, and it may come up less frequently in future shows, but when it does, we’ll be able to do it comfortably, and it will add that much more depth and interest to our show.

You play like you practice. That’s what my coaches always taught me. And I understood that that doesn’t mean that you need to practice in game conditions. It means that the skills you drill in practice get into your body, they plant themselves in your brain and in your muscle memory, and they’re ready for you when the spontaneous need for them arises. And where do spontaneous needs arise more than on stage at an improv show?

  1. montrealimprov reblogged this from thehousethatdelbuilt and added:
    Exactly… -vinny
  2. thehousethatdelbuilt posted this