Excerpt from an interview with Rob Reiner at the A.V. Club:
AVC: At the time, did you see yourself more as a performer or a writer?
RR: When you do improv, you’re everything. You’re a performer, writer, and director, because you’re moving the scene in the direction you want it to go, you’re making it up as you go, and you’re acting it. You’re all of those things, so I always viewed myself that way. And with the films I’ve done, I’ve written on them, I’ve acted in some of them. And even ones I haven’t acted in, I’ve acted them out just to be sure another actor can do them.
Read the really terrific interview here.
What a joy it was to make noise purely for the sake of noisemaking. And yet out of all that playful babble, all that nonsense, patterns of language had begun to develop. That night, man aped ape. He copied my animal phonemes to a T and spat them back at me intermingled with playful additions and variations of his own, which I in turn attempted to imitate. We babbled wildly at each other, and what insane fun! We made music: somewhere, a strain of sense, a chorus, harmonies, melodies, rhythms, and motifs emerged out of our howling squall of gobbledygook. We added visual components—we made silly faces at each other, invented meaningless hand gestures. I slapped my chest and slapped my palms on the floor of my cage, and he unclipped the hoop of keys from his belt and rattled it around in front of his face. Our signs and noises and gestures were not discrete or digital but strictly analog, fluid and organic, uncompartmentalized, improvisational, cooperative at times and at times mock-combative. From a raw clay of nonsense we were every moment molding signifiers that had no signifieds, empty signs, decorative and happily meaningless words. Did we communicate anything? No. But language for the sake of communication follows language that is noise for the sake of fun—that is, music—and—this I truly believe—all truly beautiful language is for the sake of both: Communication and music.
“
| — |
This is the best description of organic improv and its goals and intentions I have ever read.
This is an excerpt from The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale. The scene taking place is the first conversation between a high-functioning mentally handicapped janitor and a hyper-intelligent chimpanzee, who serves as the narrator for the story. I am loving this book and definitely encourage you to read it too.
|
Del Close Marathon Weekend
Shows Watched:
Baby Wants Candy (1 hour)
Improvised Shakespeare (1)
Marathon Press Conference (1.5)
The Two-Man Movie (.5)
Omelette Vision (.5)
Bassprov (.5)
Sentimental Lady (.5)
The Stepfathers (.5)
Revolver (.5)
Last Day of School:The TXT Message Show (.5)
Mother (.5)
BASH: The One-Man Improvised Musical (.5)
The Reckoning (.5)
Shitty Jobs (.5)
The Mervin Douglas Show (.25)
The Happy Hoofers (.25)
Wicked Fuckin’ Queeyah (.25)
Mrs. Darcy (.25)
Old Prospector’s Make-Em Up Jamboree (.25)
Baby Time with Winnie (.25)
The Colony (.5)
Onesixtyone (.5)
The Premise Keepers (.5)
The Benson Interruption (.5)
Director’s Commentary (.25)
The Smartest Panel of Experts In The Universe (.25)
The Straight Men (.25)
One Table, Infinite Waiters (.25)
Match Game ‘76 (.5)
A Dozen Red Roses (.5)
Improv with Attitude (.5)
Just Relatives (.5)
Mailer Daemon: Our Nuts Are Fuller (.5)
Retraced (.5)
Rogue Elephant (.5)
Police Chief Rumble (.5)
Sub-Total: 17.5 Hours of Improv This Weekend. Not bad.
Add in a three-hour workshop on One Man Improvised Shows And Musicals.
Sub-Total: 20.5 Hours of Improv This Weekend. Pretty Good
Add in a half-hour show performed with Judge Dredd Scott.
Grand Total: 21 Hours of Improv This Weekend.
Pretty good weekend.
