Basketball Improv

When explain to people I perform improv most people’s reaction is how do you do it, it must be so hard, aren’t you scared when you get on stage.  Improv on the whole is really hard to do, so as I get into the rest of this post I don’t want to downplay that fact, or pretend that I am any good at it.  But to actually do improv, it’s not that hard, it is actually pretty much exactly like a lot of other things that we do every day in our lives.

When I get up on stage before a show, I am usually not nervous.  It can be stressful to make sure everything is together, warm up, get a show list together, and make sure the team set up for success.  But Before I step foot on stage, I always take a moment to remind myself, once we get up there, we are going to make everything up.  On top of that, if we are truly “yes anding” each other, whatever happens will be the right choice, accepted, and heightened into something worthwhile.

Tonight I was watching Arizona play basketball on television, and it really dawned on me how much the game of basketball, or any sport really, is so much like improvisation.  When the players head down the court, the probably have some plays or a game plan in mind, same thing for improv, then stuff happens on the court and the players have to react through their instincts to what is happening to reach their objective.  Conversely, each player is constantly reacting to everything that all of their teammates are doing, if someone goes rogue or starts breaking the overarching rules of the game, the whole structure breaks down.

Every day in our lives we are improvising.  Maybe we wake up with a game plan or a schedule, but we don’t have the script to the actual words we will say or the reactions we will need to make.  Constantly we are working off of and reacting to what the people around us are doing.  If we can see the patterns, building the connections, and make the best decisions, the scenes of our lives will end up going in a positive direction.  Sometimes things do not work out the way we want them, we receive some notes, and we get back out there and do it again.  That is improv, that is life!

MJ Mistake Makes the Scene

On April 5th I posted a blog called Mistakes Make the Scene, and what I wrote on that day was confirmed in a show I was in this weekend!  I was performing in our short form Improv Slam show, and we were playing the game of Say What.  In this game two players leave the room and we get suggestions of different objects, celebereties, historical events, etc, and then the players come back in and we try to get them to guess the suggestions using mime and gibberish.

We were writing down the suggestions and my team forgot to write one of the suggestions so we added it in on the margins.  During the game we emphatically bid to play the scene which was supposed to be based off of the Torjan Horse (written in the margins), when my scene partner started acting out Michael Jackson (the next suggestion).  Obviously we were on different pages, and obviously we had messed up the scene.  Perfectly enough we both one hundred precent committed to what was happening on the stage, and lived it up in our moment of mistake.  Our scene partners who were guessing did an excellent job of exacerbating our mistake with awesomely terrible guesses.

Overall, I think that moment was one of the most hilarious moments of the night, and got the biggest laugh of the evening.  That would not have happened if we just stopped improvising, or got embarassed about what happened.  We lived it up and really enjoyed the moment!  Everyone else on the stage yes anded our terrible moment, including the other team miming the next suggestion which was actually Michael Jackson, and one of their team memebers just pointed to us.  So don’t be upset when you make a mistake, it probably will be the most exciting thing that happened all day.  I am just happy we could honor the King of Pop, as being our biggest mistake of the night!  Embrace the moment, and rememeber mistakes make the scene!