little a To BIG E

This is it kids: the final frontier; the last leg.  The end, as they say, is nigh.

It’s last level time in Improv.  Level E, baby.  LEVEL E.

Everything we’ve learned or tried to learn or haven’t yet learned is coming together in Level E.  Character, location, physicality – all at once and all the time.  There is no free ride, no phoning it in.  We are on all the time.  Our new Teach is a master note giver.  This is scary.  You finish your 4 to 6 minute sketch and he gives you 5 minutes of notes.  “What were you thinking when you said …”.  “Uh, dude, this is Improv, I thought we weren’t supposed to be thinking”.  Well, yes and no Grasshopper.  Our skills need to be so well honed that even when we are not thinking in a particular scene, we can anticipate and direct a narrative and have things make sense within a 4-5 minute sketch, while also  fleshing out a character, defining our location and doing something so as not to be a simple talking head.  Think that’s hard?  Try it for a 45 minute free form sketch.  The cliff?  It’s right there.  Jump off it and go.

The only way to get really good at this is to keep doing it.  And, yes, of course your whole life is improv as I haven’t yet woken up in the morning to find the day’s script by my bed, but performance Improv is different.  You need to do it in front of an audience who may laugh or stare at you in perplexed silence.  You need to fail and flounder and sometimes maybe succeed.  So now, every Monday night after class it’s Wheel of Improv in the John Candy Box Theatre where we’re forced onstage for a skit or two so we can see what we’re made of.  Last night, I was made of a fraidy cat, literally pushed onstage for my first Wheel skit.  We spun the wheel and got ‘Number’, which means each person in the scene is given a number and this number represents the number of words each sentence you can speak in contains.  My number was four.  Sounds weird to you?  I bet it does!  You must make sense.  Without being a caveman.  See, hard isn’t it?  Who speaks like that?  No one I know.  It was super fun.  And really quite hard.  Stop writing like that!  Sheesh, how totally annoying!  It all worked out okay, and yes, I will be back next week.  When you’re in, you’re in you know? It’s addictive and exhausting and challenging and fucking scary.  This is my kind of fear.  Bring. It. On. 

I don’t know what comes next.  That’s always the thing, right?  What’s after this thing?  Level E is it.  I’m done.  Hopefully to graduate with a certificate suitable for framing and then what?  I can start from the beginning.  I can audition for Conservatory, but they want a resume that likely wouldn’t be my real life resume and headshots and an actual audition – do you think I can do that?  I don’t think I can do that.  Should I do that?  I’m hoping by the time Es done my non-thinking kind of thinking will have taken over and I’ll just know what to do, but let’s bank all that for now as there’s much work to be done – a big hour show on the Mainstage, many more Wheels and the crazy class itself.  I’m so scared and excited I can hardly stand it.