take yourself

I fell asleep last night reflecting on an amazing feeling I once had, and have never been able to reproduce. I did improv drama and comedy on a competitive team, years back, and at one point, I found myself, nerves shot to shit, performing centre stage of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. On par with the Royal Alexandria in Toronto, it’s sort of like the Broadway of Canada, but not nearly as well known.

The interesting thing about improv is it’s an endurance race in prestidigitation. Everything is fluid, the script, the motions, the characters, and the approval of the audience. Unlike a play or production, they have no patience for misunderstandings or dead jokes. They have no reason for faith – you must consistently impress, every time, every second. You trip up and the fanfare passes to an opponent.

The beautiful thing about the whole ordeal is, if you’re able to wield and control that chaotic energy and mayhem, and cast it about the auditorium like cloths in a wind, a most amazing catastrophe transpires.

It’s rhythmic, but what isn’t? It’s pregnant and charged with momentum, rocking and swaying. You build on a joke and a pun and a gesture, the audience climaxes at the punchline. The energy goes back and forth, with the actor juggling not chainsaws or apples, but emotions and attentions.

It feels like that great image of the two wizards battling, their spells clashing together, the energy sparking off in all directions as the pressure of colliding wills staggers back and forth. It’s the audience’s expectations versus the wildly overinflated self-confidence and unrestraint channeled by the actor.

And so dishonest it is, this armour of the actor; the fool! But for all his lies and unjustified self-image, his unwarranted confidence, his undeserved attention, he needs every scrap of his delusional god-complex to pull off this glorious illusion.

To pull that off, you cannot be alone. You invent and dream up invisible props, you rewrite reality. Everyone becomes a gag man and stand-in. Memory and story and perception become blurred together, everything is useful, channeled and connected.

And every time these two forces come together (the outrageous fool on stage juggling about and the outrageous demands of the audience), clashing and pushing against each other, the fool must land a blow and strike a point, forcing the audience into bursts of childlike laughter.

And the grapple and struggle begins again straight away, on and on until the actor dies, and in his place remains just a man, just a nobody; the same guy who walked out from behind the curtain, and the same guy who quietly shuffles the fuck off the stage.

So what’s my point? I don’t really know, since I’m not comparing this imagery to anything. I guess it’s just so sweet to reflect on, that moment, that evening.

I quit improv after that performance/competition, and haven’t done it again since. We won. I think it takes a certain amount of innocence, or maybe naivete, to fit that job and honestly bear the weight of such greasy and unshakable assuredness of self. You have to take yourself more seriously than anything else in the world, to fill those shoes. You have to take yourself, period.

I can’t even take myself seriously when ordering pizza anymore.

~ Driz

~ by drizitche on April 24, 2008.