The Shawnee Dispatch - January 16, 2008

The Bonner Springs Chieftain, June 6, 2007

In improv classes, it's all about listening, ‘being real'

By Jesse Truesdale, Reporter

Anyone who has caught an improv theater performance might be surprised to learn that there are methods for teaching and refining the craft. The skills required to make watchable improvised skits are different than those needed for acting from a script.

The most important skill?

"Definitely listening to what your partner says," John Robison said.

Robison is the owner and operator of the Roving Imp Theater, 115 Oak St., where he teaches improv classes on Saturdays.

"Number two is, you have to be willing to be onstage and be real," he said.

That means "If you go up on stage and try to be funny, you're not going to be funny," he said. "Most funny situations arise out of real life. I laugh the most just sitting around and talking with friends. If you can take a little bit of that and convey it to the stage," you'll be successful as an improv actor.

At Saturday's Two-Person Scene class Robison coached three people, one of them his wife, Denise, a regular stage actor, his sister, Julie Robison, and Jessica Robins.

The class began with what John Robison calls "a warm-up for mind and bodies."

The first warm-up is rock-paper-scissors, with a big twist: the players use their whole bodies, as John jumped from person to person, changing his form each time. Each player and John give a warrior yawp as they face off. Then came a game in which the students and Robison lined up, and the first person would pantomime an activity and the next would ask what the first was doing. Instead of answering that question, the first person would name a completely different activity that the questioner must perform, and then the process would be repeated.

The game moves quickly from person to person, so it requires fast thinking and creativity, with some of the named activities including "making chairs," and "eating a squirrel."

Then the class moved on to building basic scenes, in which two students would create characters and situations on the fly. Like sausage-making, this part isn't always fun to watch.

"You always have to burn off the bad scenes first," said Denise Robison, Robison's wife, who is a scripted-theater actor.

Robison regularly interrupts the players to remind them that questions are to be avoided as lines, especially for the first one by a character.

He also gives them general tips on how to improve a scene while they're in the middle of it.

During one, where Denise performed a skit with Julie Robison, John's sister, in which Denise was an eccentric with her own "string theory."

"Time out," Robison called after the scene seemed to be spinning its wheels. "What's your relationship? Where are you now? You have to let us know what the relationship is."

After the players tweaked their scene to incorporate his advice, "it got a heck of a lot more interesting," Robison told them.

In the next scene, Denise and Jessica Robins played two children, one of whom had to constantly wear a helmet.

"Time out," Robison said. "Good luck on this one."

Robison's point was that portraying children in improv scenes was difficult because they're "so scattered" in their attentions.

Robison's next bit of advice was for the players to avoid too otherworldly situations and characters, and to keep scenes in "the land of people. Reality is what will sustain you when building a scene."

For the next exercise Robison had the students walk around the stage while leading with a different body part, such as their left elbows, chests, and foreheads.

After naming several different body parts Robison told the students they had each created unique characters for each different walk and that the technique of leading with a certain body part can help them to create a good character.

If they were to begin a scene leading specifically with the nose, he said, "I guarantee a brilliant scene will follow."

Next, Robison had the players initiate scenes with their funny walks.

In the first, Denise, leading with her chest, looked down at it and beamed, "they're new!"

The next exercise had the performers making loud exclamations or noises as the starting point for a scene.

In one scene, Julie fell on the floor. In the ensuing dialog she told Jessica that she survived a fall from a tall building by dint of the special suit she was wearing. When Jessica made to touch the fabric of her imaginary suit, Julie shooed her away, saying she didn't want her germs.

"Time out," Robison said. "Julie, you have no problem with jumping (off a tall building) but you're afraid of germs?"

Robison's point was that the contradiction shouldn't be ignored, but rather explored as a way to made the character more interesting.

At a break in the class, Robison said he learned the techniques he employs in the class in similar classes in Chicago.

This class has been meeting for five weeks, with next week being the final class.

Robins said she felt that she had come a long way in her improv abilities.

For the next exercise, Robison had the players say a "benign line," -- an obvious, if seemingly pointless, observation.

In one, Denise says "I can see my toes."

It developed from there that her character had lost a great deal of weight.

In the next exercise, Robison had the students initiate a scene using any of the three previous methods: leading with a body part, making a noise or exclamation, or with a benign line. After that was the "six episodes" exercise, in which six different scenes, all with different characters, were related in some way to the ocean.

Denise said the improv training has helped her with her other acting.

"I think the main thing is that it's increased my confidence a lot," she said. "It's such a safe, warm environment -- whatever you do is genius."

Denise said the training has also made her more open to experience through somebody else's eyes.

"When you have to do it in an instant and you don't know what that character is going to be, it makes you a lot stronger," she said.

Improv movies

The Roving Imp Theater, 115 Oak St., is now showing classic movies Monday-Friday afternoons and Thursdays after City Band, at about 9:45 p.m.

Tickets and free popcorn are $3.50 for adults, $2.50 for senior citizens and students, and $12 for a family pass for up to two adults and four children.

Here are the upcoming movies:

Thursday, June 7, 3 p.m. & 9:45 p.m.: "The Devil's Party" (1938): A group of children growing up in Hell's Kitchen form a lifelong bond. Because one refused to inform on the others, he goes to the reformatory. As adults they find their way to conflicting positions in society.

Friday, June 8, 3 p.m.: "The Day the Sky Exploded" (1958): Scientists discover that a group of meteors are hurtling on a collison course with Earth, and if they hit, the planet will be destroyed.

Monday, June 11, 1:30 p.m. and Thursday, June 14, 9:45 p.m.: "Two Women" (1960): The story of a woman trying to protect her teenaged daughter from the horrors of war.

Tuesday, June 12, 1:30 p.m.: "I'm From Arkansas" (1944): A slapstick comedy ensues when a pig gives birth to 10 little piglets and the town of Pitchfork is never the same.

For more information call 441-2309.

The Bonner Springs Chieftain, April 11, 2007

Impish improv debuts downtown

Inaugural show at Bonner theater relies on wit of players, input from audience

By Jesse Truesdale, Reporter

A 17-day-old loaf of pumpernickel that whistles "Dixie" may sound like an Albert Hofmann hallucination, but it was the highlight of the first show at Bonner Springs' first improvisational theater.

The image of musical bread was part of a game/skit in which five of the seven Roving Imp improv players had to figure out what imaginary item, suggested by the audience, they were returning to a store.

It wasn't just the unlikely image, worthy of the father of LSD, that made the skit the favorite among cast and audience members, according to an informal survey by the Chieftain afterwards.

John Park, who played the customer returning the old bread, brought the house down when, after several minutes of way-off guesses and despite the recognizable whistling by the store owner, Tim Jumps, said "a loaf of bread that whistles ‘17.'"

Other game-skits, all of which took as starting points ideas from the audience, such as superheroes they never heard of, unlikely activities for professional competition, a "Jerry Springer"-type panel of youths who stole a school bus, and a game in which a revolving set of two players spoke only questions to each other.

In that skit, the player who couldn't think immediately of a question in response to the other player's last, had his or her place taken by another player, in a setting suggested by the audience (it turned out to be Dairy Queen, just down the street).

That scene was the favorite of player Lauren Jackson, who seemed to last the longest in the friendly competition.

Jackson, a junior at Basehor-Linwood High School, has been doing improv for three years, but even so she was a little nervous for the first show of Bonner's first improv theater.

"I had a few butterflies in my stomach," she said.

Tim Jump, the "Dixie" whistler, has been doing improv for about two years, but like Jackson was also nervous.

"I was sweating a little while," he said. "That's one of the things about improv. You never know what's going to happen."

No matter how much practice improv players put in, Jump said, "When you're onstage, that's the moment you're going to blank out."

Another skit required two audience members to make sound effects onstage appropriate to the actions of two players who pretended they were at a bar mitzvah.

The sound effects got more and more difficult as the skit progressed, from the plucking of a heart to the breaking of glasses and dancing on the shards.

John Robison, owner of the theater and head of the troupe, and several friends built the theater in the space at 115 Oak St., formerly inhabited by a Latin American goods store. That included knocking out two walls, installing 60 refurbished auditorium seats from Tonganoxie High School, and painting it.

Stephanie Theno and Marcia Racki were among the approximately 30 people in the first show's audience.

"We very much enjoyed it," said Theno.

"I think we're coming back," Racki said, though she said she didn't think she'd sign up for improv classes.

"Our brains don't work that fast," she said.

Robison said he was happy with the theater's first show.

"It felt really good," he said, after the 5 p.m. show, especially considering that most of the troupe had only been working with each other for about one month.

Altogether, three shows brought in 77 people, and Robison said the performances only got better after the first show.

At the 9 p.m. show, "people went nuts," Robison said, of the audience's response to the players.

Between skits Robison spoke to the audience and had drawings for prizes, which were tickets to another Roving Imp show, and a set of the game "Hear Me Out."

The Pitch, April 5, 2007