What Are We Doing?

The Radical Agreement Project (RA) Is four years old this month and like most four year olds, there is a lot we haven’t figured out yet. I want to use this post to dig into what we know about ourselves and what we don’t. I don’t expect I can fully answer the question “What are we doing,” but I think I can start to at least define some of our goals and practices so that the larger community can start thinking about it more effectively.

A physical illustration of the state of online improv.

So, what are we doing?  Let’s start with what we know.    

Last weekend I hosted RA’s first all community meeting and we had good attendance, maybe 15 people or so. Not everyone who is dedicated to RA was there, but a very committed group of online improvisers were. I asked what people liked about RA and some very clear trends emerged:

People liked the social component of RA sessions. They liked spending time with others from around the world while engaged in a mutual activity. That’s a very good thing for us to know about ourselves and it does mirror one of improv’s earliest goals:

To be an art form of the people, all people. An art form where individuals from very diverse backgrounds learn about each other’s lives (and perspectives) while successfully collaborating on a piece of art together. Sam Wasson’s book, Improv Nation, describes this ideal as very present among the founders of The Compass Players and then Second City.

So we’re a social group and we’re in some very good company.

People also expressed an appreciation for developing speaking skills, valuable to them in their professions and personal lives. They liked the short, daily opportunity to gain comfort with extemporaneous expression. 

People also largely expressed a disinterest in studying improv as a means to finding success in the entertainment industry. Improv, for them, is not a means to an end, but the end itself. Yes it has outside applications, but improv was not regarded as a way station on the journey to a much more exciting career as a staff writer at ION or TBS.

So RA’s community is engaged in a practice. We are collectively committed to a process, a study. That makes us a true artistic community, IMO.

I put my thumb on scale at one point, by suggesting that while we are a socially-minded artistic community, the quality of our work is still important. Striving for excellence is still important. People agreed, though not as emphatically. 

This is a hill I would die on though. In order for RA to grow, or even continue, our work must strive to be excellent. So we take pride in our work and we do look to improve and to create excellent art. 

But what is excellence in online improv?  

Well, that brings us to what we don’t know. I don’t think I am too far out on a limb when I say that online improv is not generally regarded as good, much less excellent. And don’t forget, because of the two or three years I ran E-MPROV (2014-2016), and my four years with RA, I have seen a lot of online improv.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen good online sets. Krompf, a team from the PIT, Sandino, Three Pot, a musical Megawatt team out of the Magnet Theatre, and my own team Fuck That Shit have all done sets I thought were flat out funny.

But no one has ever gushed to me about how much they liked an online set. I’ve never seen an online set and thought to myself, “I need to set aside more time to watch more improv online.”

So what do I mean that RA should strive for excellence in online improv when I can’t even say that there has been excellent online improv? Well, 

I 

do 

not 

know.

For the last four years I have tried to teach and cultivate at RA what I think of as excellent long form improv from my time at UCB and other theaters. I have developed classes geared towards the performance of The Harold and other long form improv structures. I have taught game.

I have done what I have seen work and what I have made work in in-person environments. And it has not worked the same way online, not even close. 

Online improv is different than in-person long form or short form improv. It may be more different from those forms than long form is from short form, or game based improv is from narrative improv. It is time to acknowledge that simple truth and to start finding the form or forms of improv that work online rather than endlessly trying to cram what works in-person into a Zoom session.

I am inviting everyone reading this to join me on that journey. To discover and to define collectively what excellent online improv is. 

How are we going to do that?

Well, let’s start by placing everything we think we know about improv under review and leave nothing off the table. Let’s experiment and evaluate and most importantly, let’s share our ideas with each other and try to incorporate what is good about them into our own ideas and to augment what is good about them when we can.

A deep part of me recoils at what I am about to write, because I consider it deeply true that improvisers should not wear costumes or use physical props. Yet last Friday, during Evan & Jude’s JAZZ ANDS set, Jude did something I had never seen her do before. She wore different hats and even wigs for each different character she played.

“This is anathema to good in-person long form improv,” I thought. “This is obscene.” But as I thought that the chat blew up with comments like, “OMG the hats are so funny!!!” and “I LOVE THE WIG!” My bias against wigs and hats and props, my calcified, crusty belief was confronted by reality.

Now that doesn’t necessarily mean we should all start wearing costumes and using props, but it does mean that we should ask ourselves why people liked the costume changes so much. To the delight of audiences, people playing multiple characters in one scene in in-person improv often quickly flit to different areas onstage where it is understood the characters they are playing are located. You can’t do that online and maybe that is the dynamic the hats captured.

I don’t know if that is right or not. In fact, it is at best only partially right. But this is the sort of conversation I would like all of us to be engaged in.

To that end, RA is going to be encouraging us all to do and watch more online improv. 

Shows are already on the rise, and we have started a House Team program. Two teams of RA students will be practicing once a week starting this week and performing every other week starting in October. This program is meant to be a lightning rod for the development of online improv. It will mix and match RA’s best students together so that they can learn and grow together. 

Perhaps most importantly, this program will require teams to receive notes from coaches providing critical feedback. Feedback will be our form of communication about our work, allowing us to, over time, stake out artistic ground and define what we mean by excellent online improv.

Wherever I can, I will look to add more performance opportunities and also feedback mechanisms. If you have ideas for shows or ideas for better communal communication, please let me know.

Okay, that’s the blog post except for this last thought.

I’m not sure if I’ve made it clear in this post how exciting and cool I think this project (of defining good online improv) is. When I was a student at UCB I was fortunate enough to take a class from Chris Gethard. During it he shared a thought that hit hard.

It was something like, “Improv is a young art form. It has only been around for about 80 years. Not like ballet or theater or sculpture, which ave had hundreds, thousands of years to develop and stands now on the shoulders of giants. So take every opportunity in class, on stage, or in practice seriously. Always give your all. You never know, you might be about to do the best Harold, the best opening, the best fill-in-the-blank-type-of-scene, ever. You might be about to permanently define what we are all aiming for.”

Well that is a very exciting thought to me as an artist and it is fifty times more true with online improv, which has only really been around for 4 years. There are no great online improvisers and there are no famous online sets. I look forward to creating and facilitating those with you.