Brown Blog Films

As mentioned in a previous post, John Canemaker came to visit recently. After his wonderful presentation on the Art and Flair of Mary Blair he talked about his life and the several different jobs he’s had throughout his career. He explained how it is so important to do other types of acting when you’re in the field of animation. Be it stage or film, an animator should step out from behind their monitor and desk and act in front of an audience at least once in their life.

This made a lot of sense to me as I had been toying with the idea for a while. I decided to take action and immediately searched for a improvisation course in Dublin and luckily enough I found a masterclass that would be starting the following week. I couldn’t wait!

The class was over two fun filled days where the participants rediscover their natural ability to ‘play’ while exploring collaborative games, exercises and techniques developed and used by North America’s Second City Theatre (the forerunner of ‘Saturday Night Live’) and ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway?’.

The class was coordinated by the multi talented John Dawson. John studied and acted with numerous comedy troupes including Second City Theatre Co. He teaches master-classes and workshops in improvisation, characterization, scene study, audition technique and on-camera acting with institutions in Ireland and abroad, including The Actors Centre in London, Dublin’s Gaiety School of Acting, The Galway Film Centre, Toronto’s Equity Showcase Theatre and Trinity College’s Samuel Beckett Centre.

Improvisation develops confidence, spontaneity and creativity in all of us. In addition to being a mode of live performance, improv can be used to create characters, develop original stories and as part of a rehearsal process to explore written text.

I used to watch ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway?’ religiously growing up and was in constant amazement by geniuses like Colin Mockery and Ryan Stiles.  I remember always loving to have a go at it and pit my mind against them, though I know now I would have failed miserably at the time against such brilliance!

Having done the course I really appreciate just how difficult improvisation is. It is all about collaborating and listening to the partner you’re working with. You can never think ahead of them as they have the potential to say anything at all to you.  You have to take each correspondence at a time rather then pre-empting their response, as they will usually never say what you expected and you will just get a brain freeze! It’s about thinking on your feet, it’s a game of mind tennis but in this game the ball should never be dropped.

One golden rule in improv is not to try and be clever, just keep it simple and the comedy will come out of the situation naturally.

Oh and did I mention throughout this verbal communication see-saw you also need to convincingly mime your actions!

This all takes lots of practice and can’t all be taught over one weekend. However I still learned a lot of valuable lessons during the weekend. It is such a useful tool to have at your disposal because it make you really think about the characters and it emphasises so much how important character relationships are in stories.

I could not recommend this highly enough and can’t wait until our next session in February where at the end we will be doing a live improv performance in front of a paying audience! GULP!!!