My gentle encouragement to be 'obvious' is falling on deaf ears. A story about a lost puppy suddenly has purple cheese all over the place. A scene with a marriage counselor incorporates random monkeys, and explosions... or explosions of monkeys... or exploding monkeys. A scene with people on an airplane is likely to incorporate a sudden outbursts of bunnies - or pie - raining from the sky.
Recently I had some success with a student. He is a very smart, fast young person that I love to work with. I'll call him Ivan. Ivan was GREAT at inventing sudden random elements. In one story we were co-creating - he turned the 'old woman' into a witch. That was fine with me... we followed that path. She was making a potion - the story called for a potion that would help the hero of the story - a little boy - find his way home. But Ivan was very creative and random - and made the potion good for turning people blue with polka dots. When I stopped the story - and asked him if making our lost little boy blue with polka dots was helpful to the story - he admitted that his first impulse was to do the obvious and have the potion help the boy find his way home... but, "That seemed to obvious and boring". Okay... I can see that... then I asked Ivan "Does a potion for making people blue with polka dots help the story?" and he GOT it! It was like a light turned on in his head. We backtracked and concluded our story with the little boy finding his way home. And from then on, the little boy always keeping a vial of the potion on hand.
Later we talked about the impulse to be random. Random elements can make us laugh - it is true. When Improv is working - it is full of random elements. The process of co-creation leads spontaneous 'Random'. I love random when it happens accidentally... but when random elements are pushed into scene after scene after scene - we end up with lots of improv that all seems the same; a mess of ideas.
I also have noticed how much originality and randomness are valued in recent decades. In America we’re raised to believe that thinking “outside the box” is better that staying “inside the box.”
ReplyDeleteAnd when a story is being written by an individual or a group with clear leadership, I think that a random or original idea can be turned into something unexpectedly relevant (usually because it turns out to be not so random to the individual that offered it).
But in an improv scene where creative control is shared, the opposite may be true. Because in improv, you start “outside the box” – there is no box – and to make a story you create the box with others and at least try to stay inside of it.
So rather than being enemies to creativity, concepts like “genre,” “archetype” and even “cliché” become useful, because they provide a target that several different imaginations can shoot for without blowing the story apart with random elements.
I think it’s shared control that turns this value on its head, in improv anyway.