16D. Shift by Interruption

• Get into trios, standing in neutral. This improvisation focuses on a direct relationship between the partners, and will begin once one of you shifts. The shifts may be forms of movement only, sound and movement, speech and movement, sound alone, speech alone, sound and speech together, or speech, movement and sound combined. Whatever expresses your content most appropriately. Develop the shift until one of your partners interrupts with another shift. Each shift should be a response to the previous one. When you're interrupted, freeze your action immediately. Your partner develops their shift until either you or the other partner interrupts, again with a different shiff that's a response. Continue to switch back and forth this way, the interruptions coming randomly from any partner at any time.

• The instant you get interrupted, freeze, or pause, and hold that shape until your next shift.

• Each of your shifts will be different, since you always respond to what you interrupt.

• Remember, you're always responding to each other's timing, shaping, use of space, dynamics and content. Use the whole room. You don't need to be confined to the area you're in right now. Particularly focus on the space/shape relation between your body and your partner's.

Direct/Indirect Relationship Again

Remember, when people are improvising in groups (two or more), their relationship may be direct or indirect. In an indirect relationship the partners don't look at each other, or, if they do, it's without recognition. In a sense, they play side-by-side, or parallel. They're aware of each other, and each other's actions, and use that information in their side-by-side play. Their content may be related but doesn't have to be. They're only interacting through the formal (time, space, shape, dynamics) aspects of their actions.

In Shift by Interruption relationships are direct. The partners are talking to each other—action-response—as curious and feeling human beings sharing their inner worlds. They look directly at each other when appropriate. They're communicating within the same context, the same story or situation. They're in the same time, space and place. They believe one another's actions are true and real, and respond from their personal resource.

Alternating allows them to experience their separateness and feel their action in relation to the others'. Having the partner stay still while the other is active breaks up the habitual need for concurrent response.

Each action stands alone. The links are temporarily broken.

In direct relationship, what goes on inside of those pauses? Attention stays focused on the partner's actions, alert and receptive to the ongoing events. Feelings may change in response. These feelings lead to the next shift. An audience watching would see the performer's face registering their inner process, whether the performer is listening, thinking, feeling, emoting, spacing out, planning or judging. All this takes place in pause.

When students relate to each other's content directly, their improvisations often become mundane, ordinary, "real-life" like. Content constricts and becomes predictable. The physical relationships become subordinate to the story or emotional interchange between the actors. The improvisation loses its energetic and visual appeal.

Rather than just focusing on the narrow content field, students need to perceive all aspects of current action, the how as well as the what. In detail. The choral aspects of speech, tones, and rhythms. These improvisations are not to be necessarily realistic. They are to broaden their vision of life, not copy it. Interruptions are important components of the music. Each shift is the next piece of rhythmic interplay between voices and bodies. Students need not be polite. Students don't have to wait for a partner to conclude before they interrupt, but they should always remain curious as to what their partner is up to. They don't blindly cut off their partner as soon as they have an impulse. These interruptions result from a balanced interaction between impulsive curiosity and a sense of music.

We'll take this "Shift by Interruption" a step further, widening the possibilities of choice.

16E. 1/3-1/3-1/3

• In trios. Now, you're always active, no longer alternating turns. Proceed through the improvisation by shifting. You're always in the same world/scene and your relationship is direct.

• Whenever you shift, you have three choices. You can:

• Introduce new material,

• Do what your partner is doing, by joining him or her in form and content,

• Be still and silent, in pause.

• Keep a balance between these three choices, generally 1/3 of the total time in each. So, 1/3 of the time you initiate, 1/3 you copy, and 1/3 you're still and silent.

• Whenever you shift, there's some thread in your internal world (subtext) that connects one shift to the next. When you choose to do what your partner is doing, that choice must make sense to you. It must, in some way, fit

• The subtext of an action refers to the thoughts, feelings, or emotion that the performer is experiencing, but why you're changing from your action to theirs. Don't pick up their action, just for the sake of it, unless, of course that in itself is the thread.

Dividing your time into these thirds invites balance. It places equal value on the choices of initiating, joining, and pausing. We all have habits that make one of these common to us or more difficult. This forces us to explore what it feels like to do the less accustomed mode.

Subtext

The subtext of an action refers to the thoughts, feelings, or emotion that the performer is experiencing, but not communicating directly. Subtext may be subtle or blatant. It may even be antithetical to the text. It's all the hidden stuff that we normally bury. An action's meaning is the combined information of the spoken text and the unspoken sub-text.

A skilled performer expresses both the text and the subtext simultaneously. He or she may even be able to express a sub-sub-text, an undercurrent riding beneath both.

For example:

Text: You look wonderful.

Sub-text: She really looks ill.

Sub-sub-text: I wish I could be more honest.

Trios offer dynamic to relationship just by being a threesome. It's not uncommon in 1/3-1/3-1/3 that a partner finds themselves the odd one out. This two-against-one dynamic plays into an archetypal situation: being left out, abandoned, not liked, not good enough, etc. The other two may be in a unified action that ignores the partner, or they may be relating directly to each other, leaving no space for a third party. The odd one out has an opportunity to reorganize their perceptions and responses to a familiar scene. They can choose how they want to play. They don't have to identify with it, since the situation really doesn't have anything to do with them. Or, if it does address them personally, they don't have to buy it. Here's an example:

John and Camille are reliving an old High School experience. Now, six years later, they're laughing, howling at their innocence. They're recalling friends who played significant roles in the episode. Phil isn't a part of the situation. He can:

1. Stand quietly and look at them

2. Stand quietly and look off in the distance

3. Pace back and forth, indicating his current emotion or indicating nothing

4. Brush his hair back in slow motion facing the audience

5. Sit on the floor and rock

6. Intersperse his words with theirs and deliver a text about a different High School experience, or what his politics are, or his love life, or just about anything that comes into his mind

7. Hum

8. Do a soft shoe dance with intermittent pauses

9. Deliver a text placing John and Camille in historical context (reframe)

10. Anything at all

Jumping the Fence

There's a fence one must jump. On one side of the fence is a sense of powerlessness. One can be an object to unrelenting forces, dodging and darting around them, weakening, even dying. On the other side of the fence is a game, in which one is the subject, the player, free to interpret, redirect, or do nothing with the endlessly changing phenomena. If he remembers the fence, the performer can jump it. He can handle the scene, by taking control of his own destiny. Every improvisational scene is manipulable—it can be changed.

This is not true, of course, in regular theater. An actor might play a character who has been abandoned. The key here is the phenomena of "character." The actor has no personal attachment to the outcome of events. She's not playing herself. When we're improvising, we do play ourselves and often get stuck within our limitations. This practice gives us a broader concept of who we are.

Here's a fence-jumping exercise.