improvarama
instant drama, comedy and music
Quotes on Improv
We don't know if all these people who said all these things are nice or if they floss, but we enjoy what they had to say in the moment they said it.
"Craft liberates genius."
-- Dick Grove
"The only way to look good is to make one another look good by justifying one another and taking care of one another's ideas. That means that eveything we hear is the most important idea in the world. WE will be affected by it, use it, and heighten it. This is ensemble work, and either we all sink, or we all swim."
-- Charna Halpern, Art By Committee, A Guide to Advanced Improvisation, p.52
"As a performer, you are going to have to have more going for you than the ability to be raunchy. The people who have gotten the furthest in their performing careers are the ones who have managed to get their lalughs in more creative ways."
-- Carna Halpern, Ibid, p. 75
"Improvisers are trained to start their scenes in the middle and always eliminate clutter, principles that all good writers should implement...
making patterns and connections is much more important than making jokes."
-- Kim "Howard" Johnson, from the Introduction to Truth in Comedy, The Manual of Improvisation by Charna Halpern, Del Close and Kim "Howard" Johnson
"Strangely enough, many of the Laws Of Physics and the Laws of Improvisation are similar (including such principles as order out of chaos, anything can happen, the cycles and patterns that naturally occur). Understanding these laws makes life a bit easier to understand. We learn lessons from the patterns in our lives, and start to believe that there are no coincidences."
-- Charna Halpern, Del Close, Kim "Howard" Johnson, Truth in Comedy, p. 146
Insights into improv from Keith Johnstone in Impro, Improvisation and the Theater
"A comedian is someone paid to lower his own or other people's status"
"I'd suggest that a good play is one which ingeniously displays and reverses the status between the characters."
"We are pecking-order animals and ... this affects the tiniest details of our behavior."
"We have an idewa that art is self-expression -- which historically is weird. An artist used to be seen as a medium through which something else operated...a servant of the God."
"Think of something you wouldn't want to happen to you, or to someone you love, then you'll have thought of something worth staging or filming."
"The actor who will accept anything that happens seems supernatural; it's the most marvellous thing about improvisation: you are suddenly in contact with people who are unbounded, whose imagination seems to function without limit."
Improvarama
Boulder, CO