In your time doing Improv

Gwyn

Gwyn

Old School
#1
#1
(let's see if I can phrase this correctly) what do you think the most amazing innovation was?

Like in science you can say once this happened that spawned all these other things.....

This can be a move, or form, or even just an attitude or outlook.

I'll start and say, tag-outs. When Jazz Freddy brought in tag-outs. I actually saw that go from place to place, from group to group. Amazing.
 
M

MarkH

New Member
#3
#3
The biggest change?

The advent of long-form. When I started, there were as many improv groups in Chicago as there are now... in other words, you couldn't walk down the street without tripping over an improviser. But there was NO ONE doing long-form, except for a very few groups at IO. Improv shows were actually 3/4 scripted and 1/4 games.

The first time I saw a Harold was in a bar that is now Schuba's, and Dave Pasquesi was playing with them, warming the group up with his juggling ( I digress, but he would juggle three apples, one of which he said had a razor blade... he would eat the other two, and keep juggling, eventually biting into the third, after which he would spit out bloody apple chunks). And Man! those first Harolds were like watching train wrecks... the form was very very new, and when it worked, it was fun, but more often it was pretty damn scary, but always fascinating.

I was still studying over at Second City with Michael Gelman, and I brought up the shows I'd seen, and Gelman went off on a half hour rant about Del, and how the Harold was just a warm-up game they'd been doing at Second City for decades, and how Del was a lunatic that had assaulted his students and been thrown out of SC.

Del and I talked about this just a few years ago, and Del's reply was, "Well, Gelman pretty much had me pegged, didn't he?"

Mark Henderson:up:
 
Gwyn

Gwyn

Old School
#4
#4
YES!

Mark you and I came up around the same time.

They (Gelman) were still telling us to do Harolds to get material for our Level 5 shows then. It was before you couldn't call it a Harold. I still have cassette tapes (before they video-taped it) from those beginning shows labelled, by the guy in the booth, "Harold".

There are a bunch of very old school Second Citizens out here who do a show every Wednesday, and they do a "Harold" but it is soooooo old fashioned. It's exactly the way we were taught at Second City in class. You know, the walking around at the beginning, tossing out words or phrases (like a pattern game opening, only not stationary, for you young kids)....Now they might call this a Montage. Unless someone's calling it something else now. I can't keep up.
But THEN, that was a Harold.
 
funnyerik9

funnyerik9

Lunatic, Lover and Poet
#5
#5
In Second City LA...

We do montages to get material. It's not as structured as a Harold, and really is more of a deconstruction without a pattern game at the beginning. We get a word or phrase and do scenes based off of that. A few characters come back, but not many.

For our Level 5, we come up with a basic who-what-where and improv a scene based on that.

-Erik:up:
 
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