The discussion forum for a camp in the making, as explained in the homepage for this forum, where you will find the navbars for the webrings this forum is on.
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The discussion forum for a camp in the making, as explained in the homepage for this forum, where you will find the navbars for the webrings this forum is on. |
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Joseph Dunphy
 May 9, 04 - 11:08 PM |
A lighter hearted conception of the Cafe
"Was that the idea that you were running with?", I can already hear somebody asking about an earlier thread. "No", I'd respond, "that was just one possibility". What I was sold on was the notion of incorporating African culture into the project, and making some kind of comical or semi-comical reference to things satanic. We're going for dark comedy. In any case, Satan was not going to show up to this dinner held in his honor. That role is just too much bigger than life for even a professional actor to pull off, much less an amateur. The lighter version? Forget all of the future / alternative history business. In fact, forget the idea of having a plot or having a defined setting, or a continuing story line. Just have episodic, purely improvised strangeness like a staged human sacrifice; a dinner party with the unnamed but probably recognizable dead (eg. Caligula and his sister Drusilla, with a baby hanging out her side which she keeps trying to stuff back in) being themselves; and other bits of horror-themed improv. Probably we're using filtered light more than makeup. A little twisted, but still comic - the dead are dead, and no threat to anybody, including themselves. Make a few of them Darwin award winners and you can reap some dark comedy out of flashbacks to the time of their ... um ... departure. Even Caligula who, in real life, was more a source of tragedy than comedy, can be a source of laughs. Think "Blackadder". This is not history class, and sick things aproached with an emphasis on their absurdity can be very funny, if still more than a little dark. The downside is that with no script, there is no safety net. Anybody who's done amateur improv knows that terrifying moment when one is on stage and has absolutely no idea of what to say next. "God, please let somebody tag me out"  ... andyou're not playing "freeze". Ouch. I almost suspect that Del Close invented the Harold just to try to prevent that. Go to Second City. Even professionals have those moments when they are totally lost, and we're amateurs. So, how do we avoid dying on stage, when we aren't trying to die on stage?  Rehearsal. We get together, before we head anywhere, and play improv games together until we're used to working together. Try lots of different kinds of scenes, and if you find yourself lost on stage, just draw on a scene you did once that kind of fits in and riff from there. You won't end up with a great performance, but it will be good enough for everybody to have fun, and you won't feel like you've bombed out. Recover a few times, and you won't be so worried any more, and you'll be a lot less likely to freeze in the first place. Personally, I think that this is one of the great reasons to do amateur improv. The reality is that being outgoing is not easy for most of us, but when you can be, that opens a lot of doors, in everything from looking for work to finding a date. The spontaneity you develop in improv helps one with that. For a lot of us, improv is worth doing, just because it's fun and it's a good way of meeting people a lot more pleasant and interesting to be around than the ones you might meet in, say, a bar, but also because it gives you something that carries you through a bit of your day. But this has turned into a sales pitch for an audience that might never show up, hasn't it? I will close with what you might say is >the line< about improv : it's funny when it's true. You might not buy the idea that a scene about a one-time mass murdering dictator with delusions of grandeur could ever be amusing, but you might be surprised. |
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