Category Archives: Improv Tip

Start Your Day with a D.A.!

Posted on by
Reply

Imagine that you were not allowed to speak unless you were quoting Socrates, Cicero, Aristotle, Winston Churchill, Lincoln, etc., not even “Please pass the salt” unless you were quoting. Imagine that you were an English major but were not allowed to write any of your own thoughts, no essays, not even an email; you could only copy down quotes from Twain, Dickens, Faulkner, Joyce, Cervantes, Goethe, etc . Imagine that you went to art school but were never trained or encouraged to do anything but reproduce famous paintings, never, never paint or sculpt anything that you thought up, ever. Just copy Picasso, Renoir, Degas, Ingres, Leonardo. Imagine if you went to music school and never played anything but the notes of some distant (and likely deceased) composer, never received encouragement or training to make your own music…

Oh, wait. That is, in fact, how it is in music school. No creating. Just recreating. Nothing wrong with re-creating – unless it’s the only show in town. Any garage band worth its salt composes its own songs. Why is it that your averate terminal-degreed music student can’t write a convincing piece for their own instrument? Isn’t something missing?

Continue reading →

Improv Tip of the Day: Just Duet

Posted on by
Reply

Improvising doesn’t mean being unprepared. On the contrary, the preparation is ongoing and endless: you have to be ready for anything, kind of like life itself. So there is more than plenty to work on in the practice room. But improvisation is fundamentally social, so we need to get out of the practice room – or more to the point, the practice room mentality – as often as possible and play with a partner. Partner play makes everything more fun and fun is, well, fun, i.e. highly motivating. People will do stuff that is difficult or even not very pleasant if they perceive it as fun, witness any sport. Which would you rather do: run back and forth rapidly for an hour or play racketball? And so on. In musical improv we are energized and inspired by our partner. More, more! Stephen Nachmanovitch said it best in his book Free Play (in fact, he says all kinds of things about improv better than anyone has ever said them: run, don’t walk to the nearest bookstore and buy a copy if you don’t own one yet):

One advantage of collaboration is that it’s much easier to learn from someone else than from yourself. And inertia, which is often a major block in solitary work, hardly exists at all here: you release each other’s energy. Learning becomes many-sided, a refreshing and vitalizing force.

Continue reading →