It's delightful, it's delicious, it's de-constructed ...

I'm re-reading two passages that I hope will stick with me later. First is, "avoid preconceived notions" (from Charna Halpern's 'Truth in Comedy'), and second is "avoid justification" (from Mick Napier's 'Improvise'). I think, to combine the two ideas, an important tip for me is not to resist, nor try to explain, dilute, or overpower any emotional offering made by my partner in a scene. I want to stay rooted in my own deal (my character's modus o.), and I can actually do that better by letting the character respond to another player. Otherwise, I get thrown back inside my head as I make my own free asociations (which probably will lead me to violate the initial feeling I had established for the character anyway).

The great thing about improv is that it's a wonderful contrast to anything in my other (academic) life, where you definitely try to respond with your head rather than your heart and where it's important to spend a lot of time formulating and planning and trying to accurately describe & delineate micro-universes. With improv, you also create and learn about little conceptual universes, but the goal is to feel them/ react to them/ show them in such a way that their laws will be clear (though actually imagined differently by each person present). "Man's encounter's with an untamed nature" by be seen and interpreted by another person as "Rites of passage gone awry,"

Yesterday afternoon I was in a long workshop where among other things we debated the date of the end of post-modernism and/or the 20th century. (Apparently, December 31, 1999 is not the answer.) Thursday evening, on the other hand, I went to see "Anything Goes" (TUTS), where even the flightiest notion ("all aboard") turns into a powerful, romantic sentiment fitting for a huge musical number. I think tonight I'm shooting to land somewhere in-between.