Are You There, Del Close? It's Me, Jenifer.

I think I hit some kind of an improv milestone recently. A bad thing happened, but it may be indicative that I'm developing more trust in my own instincts:

Saturday, January 17:
I fucked someone over in a class scene today. I didn't mean to. I have felt fucked over in a scene, plenty of times: my idea got blown off, someone rolled onto stage like a bulldozer and wouldn't let me get a word in edgewise, my physicalization might as well have been invisible. Snaps me right into my head every time, if I managed to get out of it in the first place. And today I handed someone a huge denial. I can think of a lot of reasons that what I was doing wasn't wrong. But it was still a big fat denial - not only of the person and his idea, but of the discovery. Why couldn't what I came in with, and what I heard when I got there, BOTH be right?

On the other hand, now that I've been on both sides of a fucking-over, maybe fewer will happen, or (from the fucked-over side) I won't even read it as a fucking-over. It's never an intentional fucking-over. Nobody's doing something to me. Everyone's just doing. What happens to me onstage and how I handle it are my own responsibility.

I found some kind of a trigger during Improv Gym last week, too, and I am really grateful to Nathan. He put us in physical poses to start a scenic exercise, and all he did to me was push my shoulders back a little, and my chin up. About half a second into the scene, I reverted into a more withdrawn physicalization and a low-status character. By the time we got through everyone and discussed the exercise, I realized what I'd done.

Me: You gave me a high status pose.
Nathan: I did that on purpose.
Me: And I played against it.

The rest of the session, I barely recognized myself. My old friends doubt, fear, hesitation... I don't know where they went. I found boldness. I found emotions coming from somewhere real inside me, not just my brain saying "pretend to be angry, pretend to be overjoyed." I don't have some kind of perfect visualization that puts me there, but I think I was able to call that state back on Saturday, in class and in the Student Showcase at the Imp.

I also tried an experiment in that same Improv Gym. During the Great Kiss Debate, John said (I'll link to it later) that it's difficult to heighten from a kiss, which is why it would probably be the end of a scene. So I initiated a scene with a kiss, just to see what would happen. The first thing that happened is that my scene partner was not expecting to be kissed, and flinched. I've flinched from an unexpected kiss before, and just botched the scene. Scott incorporated the flinch into his character, and how his character felt about my character, and we ended up with a really cool, if somewhat sad, scene.

I'm noticing a lot of violent themes in my scenes, and I'm often the one who brings in the violence. Beatings, bloodletting, devouring my scene partner as a dinosaur. I die a lot, too. I can really milk a death scene. But as much as I enjoy playing a corpse (entire third beat of a French Braid scene!), I hope this is just a phase of discovery, and I am not destined for niche horror improv.