Below are some general hints for playing improv. These can also be found in your school’s manual.
Failure is an opportunity. Failing is an opportunity to make everyone feel good. If you get eliminated from a game or score low in a scene, smile and get ready for the next game. It’s a great way to win to audience over to your side.
If there was no fear, we wouldn’t need rules. Blocking and wimping and all the other things we tell you not to do, those are things people do when they’re scared. If you can free yourself of fear, you don’t need to worry about following the rules.
The secret of great improv is making the other person look good. Theatre Sports is a team sport. If you are on stage to support your team-mates, yield to offers and serve the function of the scene, you will make everyone look good and make yourself look generous and good-natured. If you are not on stage listen and watch. They could need you at any moment. You must be available. Always come on with an offer to help the scene – not a line to make you look good or get a laugh.
Be obvious. It is not the idea but what you do with it that counts. What is obvious to you may not be obvious to everyone else. If you follow the next logical step the audience (and your fellow players) will be able to follow you much more easily. Planning ahead takes you out of the moment – just think about “what happens next?” Don’t try to be clever or funny – those that try to be clever aren’t; those that don’t try are.
Listening is much more useful than creativity. Knowing how to use the ideas that are already out there is much better than having a great idea yourself. You best help the scene by building on the offers that are already there.
Always bring something on stage with you. Enter the stage with an attitude to your job, the other character(s) on stage or an idea that will help the scene. If a very depressed, low-status man finds a treasure chest in his garden, enter as his very high-status, happy wife.
Be prepared to drop everything. If you enter to be the high-status wife in order to pressure your husband into buying new clothes and the player on stage endows you as a pirate, it doesn’t matter how great your idea was – they are right. Keep the bits you can use (for instance, you can be a high-status, happy pirate and pressure the man into buying pirate clothes and joining your crew). See what this new combination leads to.
Be changed by what happens in the scene. Did you just find a treasure chest in your garden? Has your dog just been lost in a cyclone? Has your mother just told you she hates your new painting? Show us how this affects your character. There is no better offer than an emotional change. It makes it easier for you to think of the next logical step and easier for the other players to make complimentary offers.
What happens next? Train yourself to keep the story moving forward – avoid traps like phoning for help, fighting and arguing over prices that take time without achieving anything. Fights only become interesting when someone loses. Keep them short if you use them at all. Don’t talk about what happened last week or what you’re going to do – do it!
Don’t be prepared. You cannot rehearse an improvisation. You can practise and sharpen your skills. You can walk on stage with a perfect plan for what will happen in the scene and have to give it up ten seconds later (or miss the turn and get totally left behind). Trust your team-mates.
A scene need not be funny. Theatre Sports is theatre, comedy and tragedy alike.
Relax and have fun. If you’re all having a good time, so will the audience.