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NOLA

October 31st, 2008

I went road tripping to New Orleans last week, for the yearly Improv Festival held down there.

Side note for the curious:  There are only eleven waffle houses between here and there.

The festival was eye opening, with three solid nights of performances, as well as two great upper level technique workshops.   The experience solidified two thoughts in my mind.

• First, I’m not as good as I thought I was.  Problem is, I didn’t think I was that good.  The talent at this show was very solid, with packs of New York, Austin, and New Orleans troupes extruding solid, polished shows.  It’s pretty intimidating, getting to perform on the same stage.  The benefit to watching them, of course, is that you get all kinds of ideas.  Not ideas for scenes, but for tricks of timing, edit techniques for stagework, as well as how to properly support teammates.  Just seeing other troupes perform is quite helpful.  I’d go into details, but, heck, my improv nerd would be showing.
• Second, the experience stripped me of some misconceptions I had cultivated.  For some reason, I was convinced that a troupe had to field about six to eight people, so that offstage actors could easily edit the onstage action.  I believed that if only three or four people were available, recurring characters would become muddled, in the audience’s eyes.  However, multiple troupes fielded four or fewer improvisers for a half-hour long set, doing some fantastic work.  One group only fielded two people, and one of the show closers was a three person group who nailed everything they tried.  No problems with edit or flow for them.

As far as everything else that happened, there were also standard New Orleans hijinks, centered around Burbon street.  Some random girl punched me in the arm at a bar, and asked what the hell was wrong with me.  Apparently, she was mad at men in general, and wanted to know what was wrong with the gender.

“Oh, we’re all trained at birth to be awful to women.”

“You’re too cerebral.  I’m talking about all you MEN thinking with your penises.”

“No, no, that’s just it.  We don’t.  We act this way because it’s a big conspiracy, passed from father to son for thousands of years.  It has nothing to do with penises.  That’s just our excuse.  I really shouldn’t be telling you about all this …”

She wandered off pretty quickly, with a confused look.  I don’t know what she was expecting to happen after punching a random stranger, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t deliver.

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