An Exercise to teaching sharing the stage and Listening.
Six players on stage, in three pairs, numbered 1, 2, and 3. You are at a cocktail party. Hold (imaginary) drinks in your hands and pretend to converse but don't make any sound.
A Conductor calls a number to indicate which pair is to speak now. If the Conductor calls 2, then pair #2 speaks while the other two pairs pretend to converse while keeping silent. Each pair says a few lines, and the Conductor switches to another pair.
When the Conductor comes back to you, don't pick up the conversation where you left off. Pick up much later, maybe talking about something very different.
Also, when you begin a new snippet, don't pick up someone else's sentence as if it were a Symphony game. Yours is just a different conversation.
Same as #1, except that while the other pairs are talking, listen to what they say. When it comes time for you to talk, incorporate words or concepts from their conversation into yours, but in the context of your own conversation (where they possibly mean something very different).
For example, if another pair mentioned New Mexico in their conversation about off-road vehicles, you might mention the summer romance you had in Sedona when you were 19.
Let the connections between conversations build up gradually. Possibly a theme will arise that connects all the parallel conversations.
(You might start by trying it with only two pairs on stage.)
Now, do it without a Conductor. Now that you have a feeling for how long to go, what makes a good transition, etc., just give up and take "the floor" without anyone coordinating you.
Best to start the non-conducted version with only two pairs.
Prisoners and visitors. The pairs sit across from each other in two columns extending from backstage to frontstage. The prisoners are all on one side; the visitors are all on the other side. They are separated by an imaginary glass wall.
At the beginning of the scene, start your conversational topics very far apart from each other. This creates possibilities to make surprising connections.
Establish a relationship early. Call your partner by name.
Make A Strong Choice of conversational topic in your first line. This will make it very easy to incorporate what other people are saying into your conversation without just duplicating what other people are saying. For example, if in your first snippet, it comes out that you work at a bank and are poking fun at some of the people who are coming in for loans, this creates a million ways to incorporate what other people are saying. Someone else mentions digital cameras, you mention the security cameras in the bank. Someone else mentions Rembrandt, you talk about some guy who wanted to use his art collection as collateral.
Early in the scene, make your snippets last a while. That lets you establish a strong reality and relationship to build on in later snippets. Once that's set up, then the snippets can become pretty short, as you play out what you've started and make surprising connections between conversations. (And as Conductor, let people's early snippets last a while so they get a feeling for this.)
Listen. All of improv is about listening, but this game is really about listening. Try to catch everything that everyone says. You won't catch everything, and that's ok, but by trying, you'll catch an amazing amount, giving all sorts of fuel to your imagination. You'll be in the scene, not in your head.
There are all sorts of ways to incorporate elements from other people's conversation into your own. You can take a word in directly, you can take a concept related to that word, you can take a theme that you've heard developing, you can even pun off a word you heard. Any spontaneous mental association from other people's stuff works. For example, if someone says "management" you can refer to the coach of your son's Little League team in your conversation. Don't worry if no one else sees the connection, just take the connections that come to mind. The stronger your original conversational topic, the easier and more interesting it will be to incorporate other people's stuff into it.
Occasionally slow down mentally and observe what's been going on. There might be a pattern, which you can then play along with to build a really strong scene. For example, if one person mentions spanking, another person mentions prison, and another person mentions having to stay after school, you might notice that there has been a lot of talk about punishment. What does punishment make you think of? Hell, perhaps. Now you can reinforce the punishment theme by incorporating Hell into your conversation.
Listen. Listening is the main trick that enables people to share the stage. If you are hyper-aware of what's going on, you'll know instinctively when to cut in and when to drop out.
Once you have said something, stop talking. Don't drone on waiting for inspiration to come (even if the character you're playing is like that). Allow dead air. By stopping talking very definitely, once you've gotten one definite thing out, you make it easy for other people to speak and use what you said. Also this makes it easy for another pair to cut in.
A certain amount of dead air seems to allow a much richer reality to form. The slow pace lets people's imaginations work.
When you begin a new snippet, you can start in the middle of a sentence. This gives your partner more options for interpretation and it enables you to start with less of a thought. For example, in one real scene, a partner started a snippet with "fell asleep in a blimp!" He had imagined that he was referring to a third party, but his partner imagined that she was the person who fell asleep in the blimp and she began making excuses, leading to an interesting conversation.
If you get stuck, if you find that your threads have played out, just bring in something out of the blue. That will shake things up and create possibilities for new connections to form. The "fell asleep in a blimp!" line was actually an out-of-the-blue line to pick up a conversation about fru-fru drinks that had run out of steam.
Here's an article for people learning English as a second language that uses a mock cocktail party as an exercise.
Version 14 2003-Dec-22 20:32 UTC
Last edit by Ben Kovitz
