Week 1 - Farm Team Transition - One Step Forward, One Step Back.

The class last night was titled "The Transition Farm Team" and is a three week long class. It is a connector class between the beginning class and the advance class. It is a relatively new class as when they didn't have the transition class students would get to week one of the advanced class and quit as they didn't think they were prepared for the advanced class. This class is designed to give you the skills to compete with several different levels of performers in the advanced class. It is more of a teaching class with a lot of games but the games being stopped often to teach. It is going to be hard to explain some of the games that we did last night because you really had to be there to experience them. The class is taught by Herb Spice. He was assistant instructor to Patrick Short in Comedy Sportz101. Both are really good teachers with different teaching styles. Both have been doing improvisation for over twenty years. Herb's teaching style is more hands on but combined with a tremendous amount of fun.

The first game we played last night was called Remote Control. You had to be there to see this, words just cannot describe how funny this was. Four people get on stage. The class members shout out a location of where the scene is to take place. Last night some of the places were the post office, the airport, the park. The first person starts with a line that is in response to a line the person standing next to him hasn't said. For instance, in the post office scene the line was "OK, the I will just go get some stamps." Each one of the four on stage decides what he is going to do and when he is to enter the scene. In the post office scene, one of the four ran over to the other side of the stage and served as a postal clerk. Herb's remote control is a whistle. The scene starts going forward but every time Herb hits the remote control (blows the whistle) the scene reverses and plays the opposite direction. If you are going forward when he blows the whistle the scene is played backwards including the physical movements like walking backwards. Sometimes he hit the remote four or five times in ten seconds, sometimes when he hit reverse, he didn't hit the remote again until the scene went all the way back BEFORE the first line. I haven't laughed that hard in a long time. As did the rest of the class. The thing that was the most amazing is it was the funniest when people screwed up. That was the main lesson of the game, failure isn't always bad in improv. All that matters to the audience is that you are trying hard and giving your best. Seems like it is not only a good lesson in improvisation but life as well.

There were several other games played last night but the one that I enjoyed the most of course is the one that I think I did the best at. It was the interview, interviewee game that we did one week in the 101 class. However, there were two differences, one the audience yelled out the interviewee's character and two, the scene was stopped when Herb blew his whistle. He only blew his whistle when he felt the scene was at its peak and couldn't be any funnier. In our scene I was interviewed by Seth. It was the shortest scene of the night. One question, one answer, the whistle blew. Here is the two line scene:

Audience: Lasso Champion.

Seth: How did you get to be a Lasso Champion?

Me: I kind of got roped into it.

The Transition Farm Team Class is going to be very challenging, I have a long ways to go to be as good as most of the class, I am probably in the bottom third of the class but this is a very talented group and it really is an honor to think that someone felt I fit in enough to move up to this class.

May all your forward scenes in life be rewarding and may you only play the happy scenes in reverse!