On March 22, 2020, Nashville joined many other communities around the globe as our Mayor, John Cooper, announced a “safer at home” policy in order to suppress the spread of COVID-19. On March 23, Unscripted began hosting online improv jams.
We had already canceled all of our programming scheduled for the spring. Many of our participants were older, immunocompromised, or just cautious about how little we knew about the nature of spreading this new virus. What felt like a scary radical move at the beginning became the norm for businesses all over the country. We were closed.
Thinking about how the next two weeks of isolation were likely going to turn into months, I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would be like to not improvise for the foreseeable future. Improv is my self-care practice. I was pregnant with my second child. I went from working mom to stay-at-home-while-“working” mom in a split second, and could feel the return of my postpartum anxiety threatening already.
In a more universal way, I also began thinking about what isolation may do for the rest of the world. Unscripted’s mission is to connect, heal, and empower people through improv. More than ever, these objectives felt very real, very relevant, and very important. On Sunday afternoon I made a Facebook event and shared over social media and our small but mighty email list. I also sent out an email to fellow improv teachers asking them to help me host the 30 minute “Zoomprov Breaks” twice each day until April 10, without any promise of pay (since the organization had lost over 20% of our expected revenue due to cancelled programming). Two of our best answered the call — and thanks to a grant from the Metro Nashville Arts Commission, were indeed paid for their time and incredible talent.
Mike, Molly, and I logged onto Zoom at noon on March 23 without knowing if we would see zero or one hundred faces in little boxes on our screens, ready to improvise with us for the first time. It turned out to be around 5 people, and we had FUN. Though we had only originally scheduled this for two weeks, we kept going much longer than that. Over 100 sessions later, our final (for now) Zoomprov Break was on June 12. We had improvised online almost every day for two and a half months with about 300 people. Here is what we learned.
You CAN improvise online. Improv is largely an in-person art form. Improv purists often balk at the legitimacy of recorded shows, podcasts, or other non-live improv formats. Collaborative art making relies on the ability to tune into, and respond to, energy, which becomes rather difficult when that “energy” has been turned into digital bits, sent through space, and reconstructed in another place (you can see that I definitely understand how the internet works). So, these exclusionary sentiments about anything other than live theater feel founded.
When we first started zoomprovising, I received emails from two theatre companies asking how we were “making it work online.” I didn’t really know how to respond, other than the obvious: well… we improvise. I think part of our success at the beginning was all about expectations. While Unscripted programs teach improv from a performer’s perspective and training methods, our goals are never performance-oriented. We are more interested in what improv can do for people, rather than training players for the stage. Knowing that Zoomprov Breaks would connect people, even if it was the worst improv you’ve ever seen, gave us “permission” to just try it. How liberating! (How improv!) But…
It WASN’T the worst improv you’ve ever seen. There were some moments where I was belly laughing just as I would have in the audience of a main stage show at our partner theatre Third Coast Comedy Club. We played short-form games, we improvised long-form scenes, and we created entirely new forms and warm-ups. Some of it teetered on, dare I say, “revolutionary art-making.” Just like when it was live and in-person, I felt the same kind of endorphin surge when you knew “it” was coming together in a scene.
We learned all kinds of things from strangers. In every community, you tend to fall into the same patterns, play the same games, experience the same style of play again and again. It’s why people travel to festivals or out-of-town workshops/intensives. Zoomprov Break participants became less and less centralized to Nashville as word of our daily sessions spread via Facebook and online improv calendars.
Not only did we learn new games and forms, I found that my own personal style became a bit more flexible and open.
The world became a little smaller and improv became more accessible. From my little desk in Nashville, I played with people all over the US including California, Arizona, Oregon, Virginia, Kansas, and Texas. Players from international countries including Ireland, Germany, and Belgium joined too. We only had a few cultural and language barriers, none of which proved too difficult (in Belgium, they call a car hood a “bonnet” which is very cute and made for an excellent scene painting moment).
One of our Zoomprov players from another state had never improvised before, but actually signed up for our online Improv for Anxiety and Improv for Life classes after finding that improv helped him in his daily life. He has continued to take improv classes in his own city.
Challenges became opportunities. Overtalk happens. All the time. Zoom prioritizes single audio channels, so if everyone is unmuted, then it’s a chaotic grab-bag of options for who you may hear at any given moment. That said, we sort of got used to it. When I would join other Zoom meetings, the overtalk didn’t bother me because I had practice in tolerating it. I became much more comfortable with the discomfort of not being in the same room as others. This audio challenge also made us all better listeners, and developed new ways to “feel the energy,” even through a 15 inch screen.
Additionally, this little box on the screen limited physical expression at first. It’s difficult to think of your character with only half of a body, but we found that when we continued to be physical in our own spaces (even off-camera) we were able to express a lot of the same characteristics of in-person improv. Committing to character physicality helps create better performance, even if no one sees it but you.
Sometimes we had “audience” of participants who weren’t playing a particular game, but most of the time we didn’t. Our suggestions came from the game “Codenames” or websites meant for giving random word suggestions (http://www.can-i-get-a.com/ is my personal favorite). When people froze, or their audio glitched so you couldn’t hear a word correctly, we embraced the moment and improvised in our reality. They weren’t mistakes, or roadblocks to play. I can’t say we never had frustrating technology moments, but improv allowed us to honor the digital confines of our reality, rather than fight them.
We used the hell out of the chat function. We chatted late-comers to let them know what game we were playing, we used private chat for games like “blind line” and guessing games like “press conference.” Sometimes we posted links to source material, or to gather data through surveys. Breakout rooms provided the chance for us to play in smaller groups, or to send a guesser out of the room while we compiled clues to play. We played with the video and sound functions, and explored how “hide self view” affected your improv experience. Zoom isn’t perfect for improv, but it provided us with a lot of opportunities to discover and explore new methods of play.
We made real, true friendships with people all over the word who had previously been strangers. I have no science to back this up, but I don’t think I would form the type of friendships where you remember a birthday without a Facebook notification, or get a message checking-in on your overdue baby from people you only met through a Zoom meeting without sharing the love and joy improv cultivates between people. It has been over a month since our final Zoomprov Break, and I genuinely miss seeing those friends every day.
In addition to improv being a connecting and joyful experience, Zoomprov Breaks were also extremely consistent. We were online every day-two or three times a day when we first started. Checking in with friends daily did wonders for my mental health during isolation/quarantine. We eventually eliminated the Saturday break due to low attendance, which we attributed to people needing some time away from a computer screen after a work week. By the time Sunday came around, it felt like a huge relief to see familiar faces and laugh together again. It wasn’t about being the best or funniest improv jam online, but we always had each other’s backs. We were there, ready to support and laugh and create, every day at the same time. Unless, of course, my internet went out and I flailed online after minutes of panic while attempting to tether to my phone.
All that said, I still really miss the stage. I’m so grateful for Zoomprov Breaks. I can’t wait to improvise on a real stage again. I can’t wait to walk into blinding stage lights, smell a spilled beer, decide whether it’s worth it to try to run to the bathroom once more from the green room before curtain, get annoyed by an overused smoke machine, or hug people I don’t know after a show. There is no replacement for real, in-person experiences. We have mourned the loss of life in so many ways during this pandemic, and improv doesn’t change any of that. It does, however, provide light, joy, connection, and practice in embracing the seemingly unfathomable reality we have been offered. For that, I am always thankful and always learning from this art form.
Originally posted on Medium here.