When Not to Improvise
One of my go-to statements about improv is:
Improvisation is like car racing. It’s only a good idea if everyone is doing it and you’re all going in the same direction.
We as improvisers should remember that assuming others will adapt to us can greatly complicate our business relationships. As a case in point, I just finished recording a course for lynda.com. I record most of my courses from home, so I’m teamed with a producer assigned to remote authors. I’d deviated from the original table of contents, but hadn’t updated the Excel worksheet for my producer. What I assumed would happen is that he’d see that my recordings didn’t match the original structure, change the file himself, and fill in his notes.
What went wrong? His workflow is to review the files when I’m done recording, which means he’s not adapting as I go. As soon as his notes didn’t match with the original TOC, he had to come to me to find out what had changed. I submitted the accurate TOC based on my actual recordings, but now he has to go back through his work, determine which notes apply to which movie, and update his the spreadsheet for the video editors.
If I’d taken a few seconds to update the TOC worksheet as I moved along, I’d have saved my producer an hour of tedious, detailed work reconfiguring his notes. Sorry, Ian.
Full Review of Significant Objects
I mentioned the book Significant Objects a couple of days ago. If you’re interested in the book, and I hope you are, you can read the full review I just published on Technology and Society Book Reviews. I’ve run that site since 1998, which is eons ago in internet time.
Here’s the first paragraph of my piece:
Every now and then you read a book that causes you to think “Man, that was great! I should do a project just like it!” Then you sit back and realize the project’s creators had a brilliant idea, invested the time and effort to realize it, and that your attempt would be at best an homage and at worst a poorly executed rip-off of someone else’s concept.
You can find the full review at http://www.techsoc.com/sigobj.htm.
Significant Objects and Events
I have one more post to go in my listening series but I had to tell you about the book Significant Objects, just published by Fantagraphics. The idea behind the project was to sell 100 mudane items such as ashtrays and gold-colored rabbit candles on eBay. The twist was that the item description was actually a short-short fiction piece by professional writers such as Meg Cabot, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Scarlett Thomas.
So how much value did the stories, which were clearly labeled as fiction, add to the items? The items cost an average of $1.25 to acquire and sold for a total of nearly $8,000. That’s a profit of about $7,875, or over 6,000 times acquisition cost.
When I was young, I heard a story about an auction where the auctioneer was having a hard time getting anyone to bid on a guitar. One of his assistants picked up the guitar and played a beautiful song, causing the price to go through the roof when the bidders realized the object’s potential. That story is probably apocryphal, but the lesson remains: you make something significant by how you relate to it, whether by making music or writing a story about it.
As improvisers, we use our audience members’ suggestions to create our work. We have a duty to them to make their contributions significant by honoring what they gave us, especially if we’re replaying their day or referring to an important event in their life. Remember also that we can do harm. It’s one thing to show how a person’s day could go wrong, but it’s another to dismiss what they’ve said or done.
Keep your audience’s needs at the forefront of everything you do. After all, they’re the most important group in the theatre.
Language and Acceptance
I’ll take a quick break from my series on listening to point you to a New Yorker blog post by Ryan Bloom. Improv and business are all about language, whether used to share ideas, to include others, or to exclude them from your group. In technical fields, you get jargon. In social circles, you’re often differentiated based on your grammar.
Is this inclusion and exclusion fair? Of course not. Human interaction and grouping at least implies (I’d argue requires) a sense of “member of the group” and “not a member”. To me it’s not surprise that how you communicate identifies you as part of a group. Bloom also points out that individuals are members of multiple groups and adapt to fit the situation. The “correct” usage appropriate for one circumstance would sound dorky in another.
As you might suspect, academics have found a way to differentiate themselves based on their approach to grammar and usage. There are two general schools of thought when it comes to language and “correct” grammar. The purely prescriptive outlook argues that there is a single, correct way to speak and write. The purely descriptive outlook argues that there is no “correct” way to speak or write — all that matters is current usage. Descriptivism is a push-back against the “blackboard grammars” of the prescriptivists. Bloom argues that descriptivists, whatever their motives, don’t adequately describe social realities:
People who say otherwise, who say that in all situations we should speak and write however we’d like, are ignoring the current reality. This group, known as descriptivists, may be fighting for noble ideas, for things like the levelling of élitism and the smoothing of social class, but they are neglecting the real-world costs of those ideas, neglecting the flesh-and-blood humans who are denied a job or education because, as wrong as it is, they are being harshly judged for how they speak and write today….
This is not even to mention the descriptivists’ dirty little secret. When it comes time for them to write their books and articles and give their speeches about the evil, élitist, racist, wrongheadedness of forcing the “rules” on the masses, they always do so in flawless, prescriptive English.
You can find the full article here: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/05/language-wars-descriptivists.html
Improspectives 
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