Do You Have To Prepare to Improvise? YES!

When clients assure me that they do not need to prepare, that they are better when they “wing it,” I remind them of Mark Twain’s remark, “It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.” Exactly. Improvisation takes years of experience, weeks of rehearsal, and is grounded in strong structure and technique.

Think of playing a sport: we spend years practicing, building the skills, learning the rules, and playing many games before the structure becomes integrated and we can be agile, flexible, and react to whatever comes at us!

Improvisational actors practice the clearly structured “forms,” techniques, rules, and games developed by pioneers Keith Johnstone and Viola Spolin, which are the base for all improv performance and are often used for creative script development.

Christopher Guest’s films are scripted and structured, but developed through improvisation. I love this description from Parker Posey about working on his film Waiting for Guffman in Vanity Fair:

“It’s like jazz,” says Posey, …Everyone is a different instrument and adds a different element. [Guest is] very much a maestro, an auteur. . . . On Waiting for Guffman we’d do these long improvisations until the mag would run out—that was back in the day, when we shot on film. For like seven minutes, we’re just lying on the floor, doing some acting exercise where everyone is talking and ‘Yes-and-ing’ each other”—an improvisation technique meant to help a narrative build.”

This week, prepare to be improvisational!