back of a spreadsheet; back of the net

I’ve recently finished running a series of classes on Improv for Beginners.

I’ve enjoyed teaching them. I’ve learned quite a lot about the theory of improv from teaching the practise. Preparing the sessions took quite a bit of time despite having helpful notes from one of my colleagues. He’s done much more improv and improv teaching so his notes were more of an aide memoire whereas mine were more worked up. My output was okay.  I think the next time I run them it will be good. I’ll have some extra time to think about how the sessions could link together and how to coach people to get the most out of the sessions and the games and exercises I’m using.

The Illustrator ran a very good session on How To Get the Most Out of the Games. It was very practical guidance on what to be thinking about when you start on a scene and how to make them work well. For example, in a Secret Endowment game (one where one player does not have know what they have been endowed with, like Repair Shop or Actor’s Nightmare), you get a better result if you keep making Offers to the other person. If you are passive and wait for them to give you clues the game is a little dull. Not only are you not really playing the guessing game that lies at the heart of the handle but it tends to make you a passive character and that’s dull. If you take action it is easier to shape in the right direction.

I’m finding some of the Fixture Secretary stuff hard going at them moment. I’m not getting much input about what we should be working on this term or how we might work on it. I’m certainly not getting any volunteers to do anything. I want to avoid the situation where I do all the thinking and all the doing. I don’t have time. I’m not a good enough improviser or teacher. I don’t know what these guys want so I’m not going to guess (although see para above on Secret Endowments).

I still enjoy it and the difficulties are far far outweighed by my enjoyment of the actual work and the value that I get from the group working well.

The other big improv wrestle is what is our overall objective. Do we want to put in the effort to improve our quality? Should we be a small, very committed group of improvisers who aspire to excellence or do we want to have an open access policy? There are pros and cons on both sides. More I think on this anon.

Over the next few months I want to work on narrative and character based games, some long form stuff and being snappier about how we do operate on stage (Get On, Get A Laugh, Get Off).

I'm also very excited about the prospect of doing a devised piece. (This is a piece where the performance is static but the content is created through a process of improvisation.)

Inter alia this emerged in a fascinating conversation with star_tourmaline  last night. It’s primarily directed at her but, obviously, anyone can play.

We were talking about alpha males and pack behaviour, me from an improv status games point of view. Neither of us wanted to divert the conversation but here is the cul-de-sac that I was strolling up.

Pack behaviour is an evolved behaviour. As social animals it’s a behaviour we fall back into. People often behave as if they lived in a pack or a troop and not in a city. (Civilisation is the art of living in cities where you don’t know everyone). Through the application of reason and wisdom we can learn to live and work together better. I don’t mean we only tap into our reason and only deal with thoughts not feelings. I mean we consciously go about designing the society or organisation that we want to live in and set about encouraging the behaviours that support best living, rather than revert to instinctive behaviour.

Instinctive behaviour is often not your friend. Your instincts are largely designed for a small number of environments and a limited set of emergencies where your personal survival is only required on average.

 Here is why I think it might not serve us well to rely on pack instincts. Firstly, pack behaviour is about the strength of groups directed against other groups and individuals. It’s  about structured co-operation. Nothing wrong here. Mainly, it is about rationing access to sex and breeding opportunities.  Your position in the hierarchy determines how many breeding opportunities you have and how much group resource is put into supporting your breeding success.

I put forward the testable hypothesis that the closer the kinship relationships between group members the more curtailed access to breeding opportunities for non-alphas will be and the more rigid the hierarchy will be. If we are all related there is no need for all of us to breed.

I also think that the more opportunities there are for either functional specialism or different ways to make a living the less rigid the hierarchy and the more open access to breeding opportunities.

So in a pack where members are distant cousins rather than siblings and where there is more than one way to make a living there will be more individual freedom. I offer a comparison of mole rats and chimps.

I am wary of a placing reliance on a system which is mainly evolved for preventing fraternal bloodshed over access to sex for anything more complex than stopping us killing each other all the time. Constitutional democracies are a designed system for a reason (and with reason).

This is my second issue with relying on pack behaviour. It is an evolved system. So it has emerged from what has come before, which was not perfect. It hasn’t been designed from scratch to suit the current situation. It is cobbled together out of the bits left over from the last attempt to do something new. Evolution is also brutally indifferent to the wants of the individual. It follows a satisficing strategy (good enough with the resources we have) to get as many genes as possible into the next generation. It cares not a jot if you are happy, or even if you die. So long as on average some genes are passed on, the individual is not important.

I think pack behaviour is therefore unsuited for the large communities we live in with their rich and complex abundance of ways to get by and with our self-aware focus on the wants of the individual.

It’s why I am wary of any one who tries to lead by being an alpha male. As a way of leading a group it rather went out with the stone age.