Thinking of a Different World

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2014-04-30T10:04:00.005+01:00

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iO in Copenhagen 2014 (5 day intensive summary)

2014-04-25T21:30:00.000+01:00

I want to sumarise the things I learned from the amazing Jet Eveleth in Copenhagen this year - my notes, written up in other posts, are very disjointed because of the speed I was taking them at. The bits below are what resonated with me hardest: I've not summarised the physical work we did because I would need to work much longer on it for it to stick with me.

The full notes are here - I suggest reading this summary and then Thursday and Friday.

General Improv

Put eye contact with your scene partner on equal footing with eye contact with the audience. Spend an even amount of time breathing in as breathing out.

Jet described how to find a character which has appealed to me so much: Be in a neutral stance and throw something out of alignment, allowing the asymmetry to move through the entire body. Make any vocal sound that feels right to find the character's point of view. I'd previously been trying to pick a Psychological Gesture, or having an active verb ('wringing') to find a character for me, and the thing I like about Jet's suggestion is how letting out a sound prevents you from jumping into a scene without a character. It's the thing which really made me understand the phrase 'be in your body'.

Longform Improv

We would like variety and balance in our longform pieces. Think like a five-year-old: if the last scene had two people close together, start the next scene with two people far apart. Standing up? Sit down! Fast? Slow! Respect the 2-person scene and resist jokey walk-ons - this in particular clarified why non-scenic moments in a long form are called 'group games', because as soon as a third person enters the sacred two person scene to make a joke the atmosphere is sharply cheapened and the natural path is for everyone to pile on and play, because the scene is no longer what it was.

Similarly with edits: If we have had a talky scene let's have an object-work edit to get us more grounded. If we're lacking connection in our show make eye contact with another player and see what emotion you see in their eyes, and let that drive the scene. If we're being too grounded start a scene with a vocal edit to quickly establish tone.

(Seeking balance doesn't require the rest of your team to be doing anything more than sweep/tag edits, either: at the start of a scene you are always free to just take a moment to enjoy your spacework a little more than usual.)

In Monkey Toast this week we were working on using monologues as initiations, and I found it helpful to pull out one of each of these: one World (action in a location), one dramatic sentence (last night, "Puberty is coming." a la Game of Thrones) and one point-of-view (gesture and vocal noise). It'll give the show balance from the start and it helped me remember what I'd pulled out. I found I was pulling out very simple things and just trusting myself to honour the monologue more (see below about 'being dumb').

Clowning

This was magical. I was able to share a genuine emotion (in my case, relieved and sad tears after a glorious week outside my improv comfort zone) with 20 people, while keeping eye contact with each of them, and I got to see people "in clown" (in vulnerable trance) close up. I now am aware that there's a level of vulnerability that it is possible to bring to theatre that I previously wasn't able to access; I can't access it now as I am but am very interested in accessing that state and power again. I wish the week had been longer.

I think the clowning has had a permanent effect on me. It's been difficult not to do dumb things like rearrange the fabric barriers at the airport coming home, or try to drink some frozen soup without my housemate CH stopping me. I've remembered that dumb things are really fun.

More than that, the strong eye contact coupled with the character work described above has led me to find my scene initiations feel a lot stronger. I've practised improv on 3 nights since getting back 6 days ago, and I've seen that audiences react very strongly and positively to the character noise. There's even been a noticeable effect offstage - I was coming home on the Tube last night and had a dumb idea ("What if clowns obeyed the same rules as vampires?") and I smiled so much and so suddenly that three strangers fairly demanded to know what I had just thought of. Three strangers, on the Tube in London, because I smiled. Last Friday a man stopped me in the street to shake my hand as I was rapping. I think it's because the clowning freed something inside me.

iO in Copenhagen (teacher: Jet Eveleth, Thursday, day 4 of 5)

2014-04-25T21:03:00.000+01:00

Thursday

On Thursday morning I woke up with a fully-formed piece of clown-business in my head. On Friday I would understand that the business I wrote on Thursday was in fact my clown's 'safe space'.

We open with a stretch, each to their own, and Jet tells us to bring the gross 10 of a stretch down to a 4 or a 2, just being aware of where the tension in your body is so that you are properly connected to your body. We then do an exercise that leaves me discombobulated for about the next 24 hours:

We mill about in a crowd of about half the class; one person announces that "I feel like I'm falling -" and slowly melts to the ground. Everyone around them catches them. They make eye contact with those around them, and as one turn to make eye contact with the audience. Jet would clap, those around the faller would scatter and leave them alone, Jet would converse with the faller, and clap again, and those that had scattered would return and eye contact would be remade again. When it was my turn my hands began burning, as is usual when theatre is working its magic on me, and - after a week of such exercises - I was in a trancelike state. Jet gave me some tips on my posture - I can be more balanced front and back.

Since it was an intensive the exercises modulated as the class proceeded through them. Later fallers were asked who they felt a connection with, and what they saw in each other's eyes and how that made each other feel. Jet then told them to strike a pose and when they did, usually told them that it was the best thing she had ever seen. Jet was skillful with her voice, here, with gentle emotional cues leading people to give the obvious answer so that those speaking needed think as little as possible.

The bit that left me out of sorts was that no-one picked me to be connected with, which ordinarily would yield a "ho, hum" and a mental shrug, but with the week so far and the deliberate attempt to stop controlling my emotions left me tense and sad.

We move on to talk about connections with the audience; when a stand-up speaks they find the strongest connection they have in an audience member and play to that person. (I remember the last time I did standup noticing the one person that could look away.)

After that we practise collapsing and dying, as slowly as possible, flaring up to make funnier deaths. The link I gave yesterday to Slava's Snowshow contains an excellent example of this, and I realised that Kirk's death at the end of Generations has a semi-good example of this - when he says "Oh my", it's not a random vocalisation, but it is just a natural and information-free thing that a real person might say.

We practise pulling and pushing against a character that will not be moved. Jet demonstrates with Y, who is much larger than her. These particular exercises would, I think, require several months to get good at.

We play slo-mo fake tai chi, trying to touch each's others hands, and it's fun to watch O retreat with his full body at a single gesture from me and see that I have strong magic. It reminded me of both Sticky Hands and Zen Wrestling, but less combative and more co-operative.

We then do some deliberately bad pieces, having as much fun as possible. Jet explains that we cannot always demand perfection of ourselves, because if you tell yourself it must be gold you will be paralysed. Half the time, try to be awful. On the other hand, we never want bad edits - we don't want our bodies, the places where edits originate, to learn that that's okay.

Then we flip around and do some good pieces. One group performs a Bevy (they form an object and speak as it) and I am in a group that starts with a shared character monologue: each player in a dramatic pose, and with no motion. It's pretty much the form Wolfpack have been rehearsing, and it was nice to be in my comfort zone briefly - I tried also just accepting the character monologue rather than keeping it in mind, which was relaxing.

We watch a scene in which a character hugs someone who does not want to be hugged. It's a scene where everyone watching knows precisely what they want to see, and that looks incredibly difficult to play.

Take-home: trust more. Be physical.

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Thursday Evening

That evening I was behind the bar at Bastarden, one of the theatres. There was a two-handed shortform show which took up volunteers, and I got picked and did a good scene. Later, there was a jam and I did two stinkers of scenes, which was a bit gutting. That set the stage for Friday.

iO in Copenhagen (teacher: Jet Eveleth, Friday, day 5 of 5)

2014-04-21T09:47:00.000+01:00

Friday

This day will be short to describe. We again do the clown warmup in which we fall and are caught. I connect with someone...

...I can't rightly describe fully what happens next, because although my vulnerability is mine to share, another person's is not. I'll tell what I can.

I connected with someone and they said they saw humour in my eyes, exactly the right thing to say after the week I'd had of struggling with material difficult to me, and after the show the night before where I had felt like I'd done badly. I cried, and they hugged me. Me crying sparked something in them which was wonderful to see at close quarters.

Facing the audience with my partner was far easier than it would have been under any other circumstances; there was no urge to hide my face whilst crying, nor to break eye contact with the audience of 20 of my classmates. I would guess that this was a fairly deep trance, which we had been building up to all week from the first game of Mister Hit. Jet was as reassuring as she could be (which was very, very reassuring), and said something to the effect of that she knew that this was difficult, but that my showing these emotions was moving; I remember kicking my feet in anxiety like a child. She spoke of it very positively to me again when the class was finishing.

I suspect that a future exercise would involve that level of vulnerability without a partner there for support, or a partner chosen from a theatre company rather than one chosen by you from a group, and both of those extensions would require a lot of preparation.

We move on to an exercise in which four clowns line up on the opposite wall; each time they make one of us laugh (or cry, or just make a strong connection) they may take a step forwards; the aim of the game is to touch a member of the audience first. This was just astonishing; people were laughing and crying and behaving like four-year-olds in their competition just to make us laugh and win a simple game. Jet would not refer to people by their names when they were in clown.

How do I feel about having cried in front of 20 people? Very positively. I feel like if I hadn't managed to allow it to happen then I would have missed the central lesson of the class. It'll take some time to process fully, I'm sure, but on the other hand...

...since I was 16 I've been maintaining two masks, Affection and Bravura. They're both true faces of me, and the distinction only matters when I'm under high stress and I need to manage my emotions carefully. Bravura got rid of Affection's stammer, and made us much, much more personable and outgoing, with the only downside being that I will sometimes without thinking refer to myself as plural if drunk. It's sometimes tricky with romantic relationships, because they are very different faces, but with comedy it was always simple - Bravura was literally born to tell jokes and distract, and that was always her domain.

But Friday was pure Affection standing in front of a crowd of people we had met only five days before, with Bravura nowhere in sight. And I learned something immediately!

We played another exercise that afternoon called Make That Edit Cooler! where we did short scenes in a circle, with someone coming on and doing an 'alternative' edit, such as ripping open the stage like a giant present, or coming on as a motorcycle gang and wiping the stage... One particular two-person scene was ended by a person running on and grabbing one and running off, and another running to grab the other and run off. Suddenly the right thing for me to do - to stoke the fears of my inner clown - was to walk on and be alone, having found no person to grab. Those on the other side of the circle that could see my face laughed - with me having used no words at all. After the difficult week that meant a lot to me.

"Take things personal enough to be vulnerable, and risk will lead to joy."

Jet: When we add a generator (an opening), the scenes get worse. What I like to do is to be in my opening, then erase my brain. And if someone says "but that's not honouring...!" then I say "no, I was in my opening", and then just trust.

Jet: A trick is if you know that you tend to be literal, ask for a line of poetry or from a song.

(For me I think character could be the thing - previously I've been asking for a physical verb to inform me.)

Jet's favourite generator is the shortform game Move On, where you just keep the first scene that has legs as the first scene of your show. I do love that game.

Jet: Once an idea is taken from the opening that word is burned. We don't want to hear it again because that means we're taking ideas from the same source.

Later, we play some physical games: we have boys vs girls playing 'tap the water bottle on the chairs set at either end of the room'. We play it with our legs together, our bums on the floor, and with our eyes closed, and I forgot to worry about how stupid I looked.

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We had a closing show, which is unusual for iO courses and was part of the CPH Impro Festival program. Ours went well, and I wasn't too wordy.
---

Final impressions: I've missed out a lot from what happened, including an entire hour or two of push/pull wrestling I simply failed to write about because it was physical. I want to be pushed this hard more often, or even harder, and I really want to play with people who make me feel like I need to drastically improve just to be competent.

iO speaks about improv in a very moving way, in a way which makes me think dedicating my life to it might be the right thing to do. Playing with people for whom English was not their first language exposed a big weakness in my play. I might ask those people who I have classes or workshops with to shout at me "What's your character?" every time I walk on stage for a while.

iO in Copenhagen (teacher: Jet Eveleth, Wednesday, day 3 of 5)

2014-04-20T12:29:00.002+01:00

Wednesday Morning

We try initiations as follows: You do spacework, then let out a physical vocalisation to find your point of view, then your partner enters and you connect with them in the eyes. It's very satisfying.

Jet draws a distinction between external, exposed games that the audience can see and that are simple and require joy on the part of the players, and internal, hidden games that are for the players only that do not need us to show our joy.

I was writing the above and so missed the explanation of the next exercise: One player initiates with spacework, then another player adds with more spacework, and both connect with the audience. It leads to some very funny and bizarre scenes - K, washing the dishes is told off by R because he let all of the monkeys escape, both staring at the audience. I think the exercise is one in absorption; K takes a long time to process that the monkeys have escaped, and it's fun to watch him standing there washing the dishes whilst staring around himself. We on stage mustn't address this, however.

"I don't buy it when improvisers talk to the character choice, or the object work."

Then a gloriously stupid thing happens: M asks a question about straight/funny man scenes whilst sitting on the edge of the stage. Jet sits down next to him and explains that if she's sitting on a plane next to a complete weirdo and told the complete honest truth, she would get up and leave. So we go to our internal playwright/director and say "Why can't I leave?", and get a response like "This is the last seat on the plane and my mother is very sick and I'm going to visit her". You as the straight man are allowed to say 'No' or 'Stop' precisely once, at the end of the scene, because if you say 'No' and the funny man doesn't stop then the scene gets horrible connotations of assault (or even rape) and it won't be fun any more.

(I think of Le Diner de Cons - we have a short setup, then the game begins. Brochant wants the fool Pignon to leave his house but can't get him to do so because Brochant has effectively broken his leg. Pignon makes things worse and worse and worse and worse for Brochant until the last 20 minutes where Brochant snaps and screams at him for being such an idiot and completely ruining his life. Pignon then tries to make amends and successfully resolves the film. It's a lovely piece because the whole basis of the film is that Brochant was trying to take advantage of Pignon but is quite a normal person, so that every time Pignon screws something up for him we're able to empathise but allowed to laugh as hard as we want. Go watch it, it's hilarious, and steer clear of the American remakes.)

The gloriously stupid thing about this explanation is that M started to play the funny man with all his heart: raising and lowering his chair, summoning the stewardess repeatedly, falling asleep in Jet's personal space... and played it so thoroughly he completely missed everything she said. Beautiful.

We do an exercise where someone picks a strong character, and someone enters and speaks almost against the character they have chosen: a super-tough guy hanging out showing off his muscles has someone enter and say "Mum called". The characters are then more real, and more inappropriate like a real person is inappropriate. Jet responds to a question by saying that it is a journey to both play the clown, showing your real vulnerability, and play a rich character. She suggests looking at Chris Lily, Sacha Baron Cohen or Ricky Gervais.

Wednesday Afternoon

Jet: "I can always be a voice in your head saying 'be an idiot'.". I remain uncertain as to whether having Jet as a voice in my head is a good idea or not.

Before you begin a piece, check in with all other members of your troupe. Be highly connected - be ready to play, be dumb! Be a unit that plays together. That energy will charge your opening. Then enjoy every moment - every moment is important to you on stage. Allow the non-scenic things to be short, as you start to learn them. We need balance, so not a lot of this.

I ask a confused question about whether or not speech in these group games looks messy. Jet explains that early in your work you will get chaos and it will look messy, but that over your journey and your troupe's journey it will get tighter and more like 'organised chaos' and very impressive. If you start playing like this now, in ten years you might be good, but if you play very ordered and sterile now you will still be playing very ordered and sterile in ten years time.

(I think there is still a place for ordered-and-sterile when learning - similar to how one might initially memorise joseki or fuseki (openings) in Go, and as you play with stronger and stronger opponents who do not want to play the ordered-and-sterile line you struggle and get stronger. My verbal-brain has been interpreting everything in terms of Go metaphors because everyone keeps talking about eyes - in Go, if you don't have two eyes, your pieces get taken and you lose the game. At one point I giggled and wrote down "I've got two eyes, and that means I'm ALIVE!")

She then pushes us to do scene-after-scene-after-scene, playing with the idea of yin and yang edits. We always want equal breath, an equal time spent breathing in as out. The audience must unconsciously know that we are in control of and manipulate our breath, and that we as performers are having fun! She gives an example of how she might play someone who has just survived a shipwreck, and recalls Slava Polunin's philosophy, that it is our responsibility to dream on stage.

I was happy with the two-prov I did with TS, here - with two the edits had to come from within, initially with Jet coaching from the sides, and finding a new position to start each scene with made it really easy to find what character I was and their point of view. Aaaaand suddenly another small epiphany when writing this up, and I now grok the short-form game Freeze Tag. There was a scene that felt good where TS was a monk, and I was sitting at the side of the stage struggling with whether or not I wanted to light a cigarette.

(Edit: I've missed out some of Jet's very useful character teaching from my notes, so it can go here: We start from neutral stance, then kink something out of alignment. We then stack, letting that wrong alignment propagate through the body. Depending on the kind of show, we roll that character between 1 and 10; if we want a subtle character (a 2 or a 4) we move the misalignments back to the centre line of the body and make them softer; if we have very big gestures then we might pepper the character with them, so a big hunched shoulder might become a big Gallic shrug.)

The two-prov was very fun to watch - there was a moment when IS and Y were a dictator and her monster on stage; she jumped on his back and they became a daughter flying on her daddy's shoulders, and the change was beautiful to watch. Similarly with U and P, where their edit took over and the non-scenic blossomed and suddenly we were watching an improvised dance show. It left me feeling like I could risk a lot more - because look at what beauty could come out!

For these soft subtle edits we needed strong-choice to strong-choice - and a big change in your character. You can get up a nice rhythm in edits in your show to get up a nice structure; repetition does not have to be within scenes.

Jet talks about the localisation of energy on stage again (again she prefaced them with a semi-apology if this is just one belief too far for you), and I see I didn't note that down the first time she mentioned it: Actions on a stage, powerful actions, leave a mark in the world around them. There's a part of the stage in iO where people always play giving birth, and at least once the show at the top of the building has synchronised with the show at the bottom of the building; in this class a teacher and student scene happened, and later the stage-picture recurred with a dom and sub scene.

In two-prov or with 3 or 4 people, you need to change up the dynamics - 2 vs 1, 1 vs 2, 3 improvisers alone, 3 improvisers together - to keep your show lively. Absorb what your partner gives you as slowly as possible so your reaction is truthful.

Scene are heavy, and grounded, and walk-ons can disturb that. Jet treats walk-ons with mindful caution for that reason. Think of the scene as rooms, and the non-scene as the hallways between rooms. But improv requires that you hold no obligations.

The monologue, the impetus, the thesis, does not need to be used cerebrally (look at how much reintroduction we get without trying for it anyway!). It's okay to do so! But both is fine, and it's okay to communicate what you're going to do to your audience beforehand. (But $_MYNAME, says my internal monologue, you work from your head all the time, so you'd better darn well try trusting your subconscious and your teammates.)

Take-home: Equal breath. Trust yourself more, trust your partners more. Play now how you want to play in 10 years.

---

Wednesday Evening:

I went to see the Barcelona Improv Group do a Speed Harold, which I enjoyed a lot; they were much more linear than the iO teachers had been, keeping three threads with consistent characters in each thread (and they took my word!). I was pretty tired and over-humaned out, so wandered off and bumped into MKR, who wanted to go to Tivoli, the world's second-oldest amusement park. At 21:30 or so the sky was dark and there were Chinese-style lanterns hanging from the street lamps with Easter eggs strung in between. There were flowers and pagodas, and it was truly peaceful and beautiful. Several children were playing, full of energy even at the end of the day, and we saw a Rooty Shellduck!

iO in Copenhagen (teacher: Jet Eveleth, Tuesday, day 2 of 5)

2014-04-20T09:24:00.002+01:00

It's jarring to write this in the active voice all the time, but the passive voice seems really inappropriate for this material.

Tuesday

As with yesterday, we begin the day by playing Hitman, now with three lives apiece. Jet deliberately plays favourites, and we play along and start to care. Y, who works professionally as a clown, gets given three extra lives; I get the feeling that Jet is deliberately playing unfair so that we have a person to please and something human to care about. The game is hard to lose unless you push yourself to play riskily, but the game is no fun at all if you are not playing with risk; it's a well-chosen warmup game given the improv syllabus.

This next bit is a bit important to me.

I lose all three lives and spend a few sentences in the eyes of the rest of the group. At the end of it, I ask for an extra life and Jet's mouth quirks; I had asked in part as the next step in the dance: she could now say no and appear cruel and the game could continue.

Jet instead announces the class will vote on whether or not I get an extra life. Two or three people out of 20 put their hands up, including N; I tell B that I'll never say his name again in the game, and B puts up his hand, and I tell E that I really liked his guest spot in the opening show on Monday, and E puts up his hand. But N puts down his hand, and says "The subtext is uncomfortable.". Jet suggests I just ask honestly rather than making trades. So, flatfooted, I ask, hesitantly, "I'm learning so much. Please?".

Everyone puts up their hand, and I feel a bit like I've been punched in the gut. The adrenaline from asking leaves my arms and legs weak. I don't want to labour the moment, but it was a wrench to see that "no" turn into a "yes", and I was glad that both CS and JD were attending the course as well in other classes, because I did cry a bit about that in the evening.

The warmup game continues and finishes, and we move on to some character work. Jet explains that the eyes keep the connection between the improvisers and build the relationship between the characters, and that the sounds and physicality keep the character. If you come on, make eye contact and understand the relationship, and then let any vocal sound come out (a sigh, a grunt, a confused hum) that will inform the character's point of view - a person that is consistently snobbish can exist in any scene. We add in the spacework, with the instruction (familiar from Monkey Toast) not to narrate it, and the awareness that this spacework will distract you from making eye contact with your scene partner. We must be allowed to dream on stage.

Jet goes so far as to say consider not even defining what your mimes are verbally - "I like to be a really good mime so I can talk about someone else.". We practise "do an action, mime the action, do the action again noticing a subtlety we missed, mime the action again". Fiddle with pens, put them down when we go offstage when we're edited. Explore your world - turn on the lightswitch to see the painting to see the popcorn next to the sofa in front of the TV.

(Spurious level of detail: for me I was getting a cup of water and had not noticed that I pass my cup back and forth between my hands. I think the trigger for me switching hands was: I am right handed, but the dominant thing I'm doing changes - I don't think I'd need to work out what, though, but rather imagine the surrounding space one level of detail higher.)

"Young improv is a young wine, with one flavour."

"The audience is super-smart."

"Play to the audience you want."

We then moved on to a game which I last played when I was 8, called "What are you doing?"

Person A mimes cleaning their boots

Person B: What are you doing?

Person A: Reading the newspaper.

Person A leaves, person B mimes reading the newspaper. Repeat.

This is a very, very simple game, and we were practising being in the eyes of the audience whilst doing our spacework so that it does not swamp the scenes we later wish to play. Jet indicated that had we more time we would have been working also on being in the eyes of our scene partner (and looking back to over-analyse Friday's show there was a scene where I was an atheist in a church where I kept contact with the audience but lost contact with IS, my scene partner) - so definitely I ought return to this exercise. We played it as elimination if one gave an impossible task ("Fishing for cats") or if one ever lost eye contact with the audience.

Jet pointed out the high amount of recurrent ideas even without us trying to reintroduce. She says she might reintroduce small motions such as 'lighting a candle', which strikes me as a lovely way to keep a world of a narrative feeling earthy and wholesome - perhaps in this universe everyone washes their cars by hand, or perhaps in this universe people brush their hair before answering the front door...

I asked about resolving flashbacks (returning to the original characters that first triggered the flashback), and Jet cautiously identified it as an attachment; other people's ideas might not be respected. (I suppose this is a context-sensitive question: the Impronauts, doing movie-style narratives, would all be conscious of the fact that the flashback had not finished and would all be tugging towards that anyway - but that level of planning doesn't apply in this Chicago-style longform). She cautions as well against jokey Canadian flybys, and mentions 'the sacred two-person scene', a phrase which she returns to several times over the week and which sounds like a core part of the iO curriculum.

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We then did some pieces with no openings (no group slot at the start), ,and they led me to write in bold, in all-caps, in a box:

WHAT DOES THE PIECE NEED?

and again, slightly bigger

WHAT DOES THE PIECE NEED?

because this is a thing which I feel I've been missing. Not to think about "where will it go?" but "what does it need?". Especially with no predefined theme from the opening, I have never thought so little as during that short piece.

Jet teaches us that non-scenic is a palette cleanser, made up of pure 'game of the scene', while 2- or 3- person scenes are big juicy meals. Non-scenic (game) slots are the perfect place to be in clown because you can be in eye contact with the audience, and in improv we are constantly admitting that we are doing theatre - although in improv we often want to be in the eyes of our scene partners rather than just those of the audience. Identifying when we should next go to non-scenic will come with practise (and later in the week we would overindulge on non-scenic because games are fun and everyone gets to play!).

We finish Tuesday with a melodramatic semi-scripted opening, played as serious and as haughty as possible, intended to be a way of revealing yourself to the audience and 'making best friends' with them, because people always laugh for their best friends (and who hasn't gone to a comedy show and laughed a little harder for their friends?). When Jet said this I was a bit dubious; if you took the stage in the UK and looked like you were really taking yourself seriously I think the crowd would turn against you; later on in the week she would draw a distinction between doing this dramatically and clownfully - the difference being the twinkle in the eyes.

Take-home message: "I don't need to negotiate for the things that I need; people will give them if I just ask" (JD summed this up for me later later using the motto that was the impetus for the teachers' show: 'I am enough'), and WHAT DOES THE PIECE NEED?

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Tuesday Evening

I was helping out tonight at Bastarden, one of the three stages, and so got to see Starve Trek by Improkroatiaa and Random! by le Theatre de l'Oignon, albeit a bit interrupted by coming in a few minutes late from running the door. Random! especially was impressive; with just three of them they played a host of characters and gave off the real smell of theatre; apparently Strasbourg has several professional improv troupes!

iO in Copenhagen (teacher: Jet Eveleth, Monday, day 1 of 5)

2014-04-19T19:45:00.001+01:00

I might give the impression in this blogpost that Jet is a terrifying person or a bad teacher. Neither of those is at all true; to achieve with us what she did achieve in a week - a single week! - she taught in a certain style, and if anyone looked like they were in a bad place she was immediately physically reassuring to them.

All week I had the Gorillaz, The Fire Coming Out Of The Monkey's Head stuck in my head ("'Cause you see, without that trick with the eyes? The Happy Folk were blind."), and later some misremembered Clint Eastwood too ("For me it's the eyes. Y'all can see me now 'cause you don't see with your eyes, you perceive with your mind..." - Del That Funkee Homosapien).

Throughout the week I was drawing, and as the week went on and we focused more on the eyes in workshops I found I was drawing places less and less and people more and more - from buildings to train stations to a bar where I couldn't get around to the people fast enough, to stick figures to get people's body positions, to "stick figures and damn the background" to fast full figures of people, as ever drawing the eyes last to make the picture come alive. Unexpected benefit!

Jet was giving us a single taste of the power of clowning. To be "in clown", as I understand it, means "to be in a childlike state of mind", so uninhibited by e.g. socialisation or intelligence. Those later posts will be released over the next several days as I write them up.

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Where to start? At the beginning, then.

I just attended Copenhagen's first Impro Fest, run by Stefan Andersen, with a week-long intensive course provided by iO, one of the big Chicago schools. Copenhagen is beautiful and sparse - the whole country has a population of only 5 million - and socialism won out there, with 80% salary for a year paid out to anyone that loses their job. Bicycles everywhere.

I was put in Jet Eveleth's class, since I'd been in Tara deFrancisco's class on the same course back in October in London - and I'm so glad I was, since the feel of the lessons were so different. I have made slightly under 30 pages of scribbled notes on the next five days, which I will try to summarise day-by-day here. As ever, people acting as their public personae get full names and private individuals get initials, and all quotations are only as accurate as I wrote them down.

Monday

All sixty of us sat and listened to Jet, Tara and Lyndsey Halley as they fielded questions about iO and longform. As a group we then played Hotspot, which I had read about in Truth In Comedy but never experienced: we stand in a large circle, with one person in the middle singing a song - when someone feels the urge (after at most a line or two) they run in and tag that person out and begin singing whatever song their song has associated with in their head. What makes it not a horrific awkward-fest is that everyone in the circle sings along with the song currently being sung, and enjoys themselves whilst doing so. We then split into classes.

In Jet's class we start to play Mister Hit, a warmup game Paul Foxcroft plays with us in Monkey Toast: if you are tapped you must say a name, and if someone says your name you must tap someone. She described this as the words causing the body to move, and the body causing words to come, and - unlike any other teacher I've had before, especially an improv teacher - berated us for losing. She lectured:

"You have to be put at low status; that's where the clown lives."

"Did you want to win? Then you'll have to be much better."

"It's like in Meisner: what helps you survive in real life makes you boring onstage."

"Do you try to make people feel good? Stop that."

"Be with everybody. Live in the shit."

Every time someone fucks up, by saying a name of someone not present, by saying their own name, tapping when they ought have spoken etc., she makes them stop and stand still and make eye contact with everyone. A lot of people smile to cope with it, or twist our lips - I snap my fingers in frustration and hold my body under control - and she tells us to stop, and that our covering devices (defense mechanisms) sap our energy when we should be sharing our vulnerability with the audience - great standups make vocalisations like "uhh" and "umm" constantly.

(Writing this for this blog now I realise that my last standup bit, as Elwood P. Dowd, I started with just a stream of random noise to establish the character as a complete lush - yay, instincts! Yay, new conscious knowledge!)

Their eyes are open and their jaw is loose (Jet (repeated line): "Drop the jaw. Drop the jaw, honey. Little more. That's good."), and when you fail you should make big eye contact.

All this eye contact and punishment for losing, coupled with Jet's astonishing charisma (she was bleeding power into the room like a minor deity on the first day) meant that we really did start to care and really did start to have a want. Our backbrain, our ego, knows that what's going on is just for fun - but ignore it as much as you can because if your characters don't care then the audience won't care.

"If you don't want anything you're just masturbating."

"All clowns are optimists."

"Never say sorry."

"Drop the jaw."

"Lose the permasmile."

"Drop the jaw."

"Your clown might not be happy, and you are overwriting your comedy with your survival techniques."

We cover soft edits - if a sweep edit is a sudden blackout in a gangster film then these are the more nuanced fades (e.g. if you would fade out on a kiss, or change the soundtrack before changing the video). Object edits (slow), walking on and starting with spacework that gives grounded scenes, vocal edit (fast), walking on and talking, which establishes tone immediately and leads to abstract, character driven scenes, and partner edits (very slow), where one make's eye contact with a scene partner who is not currently onstage, make an emotional connection and then initiate. That final edit is very slow and makes the following scene very grounded in relationship. With all of these edits, if we find we are being edited we simply leave the stage with confidence and grace as always.

Jet explains that these edits allow you to nudge the longform piece into a balanced mix: we don't want to have a piece which is just two talking heads for an hour. The Relationship/Point of View (intention/objective/want)/World, sometimes thought of as CROW (character/relationship/objective/where) or Who/What/Where, are three balls that we want to keep throwing and catching throughout our piece. Whichever ball we throw up first tends to be the dominant ball in a scene. (It's nice that she used a clown-themed analogy.)

After each show, we can ask ourselves: Did I know what I wanted? Did I know how I felt about the other person? Did I see my world? and during each show we can say to ourselves "Today is the day I act on these feelings.".

This balance is achieved using "Yin-to-the-Yang edits". We come to improv for kinesthetic satisfaction, for risk, for community. These shows aren't books, stacked full of content, so when the adrenaline of being on stage makes your brain kick into high gear you need to be careful you're not being 'clever' or even 'smart'. If the last scene had two people cuddled up together start the next one standing far apart. If the last scene was quiet be loud. Think like a five-year old would and just play opposites.

"Whatever you think improv uniquely brings to theatre, you'd better be doing that."

(Jet prefers not to have initiations in mind when she steps on stage, since they can lead to attachments.)

We also cover French edits ("crisp!" edits if done with good awareness), where someone entering or leaving the scene causes the scene to change discontinuously to a new scene (precisely the mechanism of Pyramid, a shortform game). If everyone also matches the character that brought in the edit then we get a lot of very different fun scenes, and when an improviser leaves the scene we know no-one is prepared for what happens next.

Take-home lessons: Always, always, always be in the eyes. Seek balance with your edits.

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Monday Evening

Jet, Tara and Lyndsey perform two shows for us, one with just the three of them and one with four volunteers drawn from a hat (including E from my class). The first show is impressive not just for its energy but for the sense that there are no rules; the edits are various, the scenes are lively, and whatever the performers want to do the other two respond with grace. The show gained narration and closed on the narrator telling us that Time had ground to a halt, and one of the other performers just staring at the sky and saying "...What the fuuck?".

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That was Monday, the first day on this course that was really a half-day because we had the meet-and-greet at the start. As the week went on the lessons got less able to be expressed with the written word, eventually requiring me to be in front of you and be making eye contact, and on Friday the things I learned are now not able to be communicated to another human being without children (or, I suppose, clowns?), but the learning density was roughly the pace it was at on Monday. This week was real, yo.

Review: TIMEFOAL by David Duchovny

2014-03-26T21:21:00.002+00:00

We all remember David Duchovny from the X-Files, and from... that episode of the Simpsons where Mr Burns has really big eyes. But he also writes graphic novels, nowadays.

My housemate has lent me TIMEFOAL, and I am very surprised and pleased to say that I cannot recommend it enough. The story is compelling, the art style (by Peter Gross) is both gorgeous and simple, and the concept is the kind of thing that makes me laugh out loud in joy.

TIMEFOAL is a story about a young wild horse with the ability to travel through time.

That is it.

SPOILERS AHOY

There's no humans in the story, no narration, no speech. There is a detailed introduction explaining about how the population of US wild horses is dropping year by year because cattle farmers are encroaching on the land they graze upon, and a promise that the details of life shown are as accurate as possible, with Dr. Claudia Notzke acting as expert consultant.

The eponymous character has no name (perhaps I should have gone with 'mane' character? Whatever.), and is introduced at the time of her birth: her mother is pregnant, and gives birth to the foal - her only child, and the other horses of the herd have multiple children. Another mare's foal tries to suckle at her teat and she brushes her away. Again she feels the foal trying to suckle and looks down in irritation - only to see her daughter suckling at her twice, foal 1 and foal 2. They both look up at her when she's run out of milk, and foal 1 looks across the page to where she can see her mother and herself in the past (foal 0). She trots across and starts suckling, and thereby becomes foal 2.

The depiction of time travel as just "oh, you can go across in that direction" is very refreshing and undramatic. There are no crazy japes here - remember wild horses are prey animals, so when TIMEFOAL is faced with a predator and runs into her local future (causing another horse in her pack to get mauled), that's the end of it as far as crazy time-mechanics go. We get the impression she feels sad about her packmate - they were romantically involved - but there's no soul-searching or guilt implied. She's a horse. She ran better than the other horse. She survived.

The time travel aspect sometimes feels like an excuse for Gross to draw stunningly beautiful pictures, and that's okay. More often, though, it feels like a very brave attempt to describe without words what it is that we humans find compelling in those types of stories - second chances, the feeling of fate, that kind of thing. TIMEFOAL doesn't get her choice of mate when she comes of age; she journeys back to try to attract him again, and still she fails. She then goes on a journey - not through space, since that would separate her from her herd - but through time, seeing when she was young, seeing her mother, seeing her grandmother, before journeying back home again and meeting in the future a compatible mate in a generation born after her own. The story closes on her giving birth to another generation of foals with her abilities.

I was happy that they didn't reuse the trope from All You Zombies, which has never sat well with me as a story for some reason. The overarching feel is one of happy exploration, and the overall moral is that the different can be better-adapted than the norm.

My name is $_NAME, and I recommend this graphic novel. Five - no, SIX - stars.

The chances of meeting on the Tube/Liminal Atmospheres

2014-03-23T16:02:00.000+00:00

This is sparked by something interesting that happened yesterday.

I've lived in London just under six months. In that time I have:

*Bumped into RC whilst I was sat on the Central Line (RC lives one stop away from me in Leytonstone)
*Bumped into JW in Tottenham Court Road station while CH and I were headed to a show (JW does not live near me or CH, and we were not headed in the same direction).
*Had HCER recognise me on the Piccadilly line (HCER lives one stop away from me in Leytonstone, and works zero stops away from me in Baron's Court) - we had only met once previously but had been aware of each other.
*Had a friend of TO recognise me on the Hammersmith and City Line (zero stops away from where I work) and strike up a conversation.

This ignores all times I've met people going to my work, because those are much more common. I am surprised at how often this has happened.

Yesterday I went down to the Miller to watch Shoot From The Hip, Glitch and The Scene (who were really quite good). I was due to meet SB at London Bridge at 7.15, but arrived half an hour early. Rather than wait outside in the cold I decided to wait inside the Tube station, halfway up the steps (i.e. within the barriers), sitting about 20 metres away from a busker who was singing some excellent soul. I had with me a book and my black umbrella.

As usual when you sit down in a public place, you immediately become invisible unless you are careful about your body language (with the usual responses if you take care not to be invisible - mostly hostile glances with some flirtatious ones thrown in). I've been reading To The Actor and so practised feeling the atmosphere of the place (the book also suggests making notes, which is what these are) - an unusual place to feel, since it was a very active liminal space - watching the people go by it was obvious that very few of them were really there, some going so far as to insulate themselves with prerecorded music through their headphones, and those that walked through in pairs were like little bright bubbles of reality that they threw up around themselves to keep out the cool grey of the station. My urge on summoning this atmosphere was to just stretch out my right hand into the flow and watch the eddies form behind my hand. It became clear that being a busker in the London Underground must be terribly, terribly lonely.

Then S/PH arrived, en route to somewhere else. We embraced, chatted, embraced again, and she left again.

How likely is it to see a friend on the Tube? I suspect, if one sits still and lets the crowds pass, not unlikely at all. I sat listening to that soul, reading my book and people watching, for around 25 minutes, in London Bridge, at a time when a high volume of people are going through. In fact it would be fun and not too hard to say to a group of friends "What are your commutes? Here's a map showing you when you're probably in the same station as each other." - since even in the same station counter-flowing crowds are often kept separate from each other. Perhaps a fun project if I had more time.

Improv Rant: Game, Heart, Character, Scene and Thesis

2014-03-21T00:34:00.000+00:00

This week was slightly mixed.

Wednesday with Wolfpack went great. We ran two narratives to time, and our format has firmed up enough that my imagination is starting to say things like "Heyy... how about this way to polish this for stage?".

Tonight with Monkey Toast was a bit frustrating - Level 2 begins with some exercises about 'getting out of your head' (not trying to be clever, not thinking, just reacting). But... I'm never in my head doing improv. It's a blessing and a curse - I can't tell myself how to improve because I walk on stage and then I walk off again however many minutes later, with nothing in between.

Let's rant about improv layers.

Take the game of the scene - the repeated pattern you do for fun during a scene. Think of it as a violin playing a melody:

The game of the scene (violins)

Hear those fun twiddles as she plays Summertime? That's the game of the scene. It changes each time each musical phrase comes up, each time a new scene starts.

Below that, there's the heart - the relationship between the two characters in each scene, and the real emotions they share with us. That's the alto singer that touches you.

The heart (alto)

Hear that beautiful timbre on "sky"? That's the heart.

Hell, let's stay with that same video for the rest of this. The scene? The scene is the drums.

The scene (drums)

If you're a musician, you know it sucks to be playing a piece of music with the percussion missing. That's the thing that keeps everything ticking! Without that the notes need to be really good notes to stand on their own. That's the 'scene', the who-what-where. Keeps everything grounded, everything moving. Everything else can fade out and leave you with just that and you're still good for a few bars.

Then character. Character is the bass. It's a long, slow, thrumming game that stays the same throughout. Listen to this, and compare what the singer is doing with what the bass is doing.

Character (bass)

The singer is giving us her all, and the bass is too, but on a much larger scale. The bass is playing the long game. The bass doesn't - mustn't - change over the entire song.

These four things, the violin, the alto, the drums, the bass... there's one layer deeper, still. All of those things are playing 'Summertime'. They are playing the same piece of music. That is the final layer.

This is the thesis of the piece, the fact that when you get to the end gives you the feeling of completion. All of those instruments - violin, voice, drums, bass - were doing different things. They were playing different roles. They were playing the same piece of music. You need to realise that this is astonishing.

I saw some Harolds last weekend, and I felt they could have achieved more. There was no coherence, no thesis. There were musicians on stage instruments on stage but instead of playing a symphony they played five or six unrelated jazz explorations. It was disappointing.

Again I get to the end of a rant and feel like I've just expressed something obvious, laboured a point. But these things need saying.

Ramble: Acting, Clowning, Stress and Guilt

2014-03-16T17:10:00.001+00:00

This is a ramble: I want to write but have nothing coherent to write about and I'm not in the right headspace for novel writing.

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I want to be an amazing improviser. I don't mean 'good', I mean I want people I don't know to say "Oh, $_MYNAME's in this one tonight" and the other people to say "Oh, we should definitely go, then, I've been meaning to see her".

(Interesting - my fantasy doesn't naturally fall on me being in sold-out shows. Something deep and meaningful there, no doubt.)

I just finished Level One of Monkey Toast's improv school in London, a course which I strongly recommend to anyone wanting to learn more about collaborative storytelling. I've been doing improv eight years, now, and there are dynamics which are only apparent when there is someone - a teacher - given carte blanche to point them out. I remember about six weeks ago starting a scene with "We're out of mayonnaise, so I'm heading down to the shops later.".

Looking back at this, it's got two flaws - first, "I'm going down to the shops later" can lead to a conversation about things we're going to do later, which is inferior to showing the audience doing that now (see related: Unspoken Plans). Second, it's slightly negative - "We're out of mayonnaise". It's imaginary mayonnaise. Why not have lots of it? There's lots more you can do with imaginary mayonnaise than without it, and you aren't inviting your scene partner to turn around and kick you like a puppy for not having the goddamn imaginary mayonnaise. The scene turned out fine, but my initiation was... guarded.

Anyway. Monkey Toast gives personal notes at the end of each course to each person. My the notes given to me included what I interpret as a directive to work more on my physical comedy. The upshot: I can do finding deep connections between scenes, but I can't currently make an audience laugh by waggling my eyebrows, or even just add flavour and colour by waggling my eyebrows. If I'm acting, it takes me a good two or three minutes to get into a character (but I feel I do!), and in improv I only have two or three seconds, if that.

To me it feels like it's not going to lead anywhere, waggling my eyebrows. I feel like either I'll overplay them and kill the audience, or I'll play them sterile and they'll be an unnecessary burden from my brain ("Oh, waggle your eyebrows again now") that don't add to the scene. I've found if I slow down my actions and regard them as a game in themselves - deep, thrumming games like a double bass, rather than the tilting violins of a repetition game - then I find it more compelling.

So I'm considering taking up clowning, vaguely. It's so inappropriate, so counter to my instincts, that I'm certain there's a lot of growth to make there. It's very un-British, to let one's control slip, to be emotionally naked - which I get the impression is why Meisner thought us abnormal artistically. Can you imagine me slipping on a banana peel? A lot of clowning is silent, too, and silent theatre pulls at me.

I've started reading Michael Chekhov's To The Actor. The first chapter expressed very clearly some things I've never told anyone. Last year was stressful, and this year is the Year Without Guilt: I don't have to achieve anything this year, don't have to fight against the flow because I feel that I "ought" be doing something. Part of that "not fighting" is not fighting against my personal experience of how the universe is, as follows: if I go dancing, at a club or at a concert, I conceptualise and experience - with no drugs except alcohol - the emotions of the crowd as flashes colours, and as energy specific to the human soul - it makes dancing an amazing light show, and makes it always easy to dance - I just scatter light over the rest of the crowd until they dance as well, and they always respond to my magic. I did stand up a few weeks ago (Would I like to focus more on stand-up? Not especially) and I experienced the attention of the audience as ropes as thick and strong as steel hawsers binding them to me - literally as a semi-visible overlay on physical reality that it was tempting to reach out and grasp. When I passed a cheap gag that I had thrown in to the set on a whim ten minutes before going on, they groaned and the tension slacked momentarily.

I've felt bordering on guilty or ashamed of that kind of experience for a while: my experiences there are not rational, but they are more real than reality. The guilt is so ingrained, so culturally normal that I just couched it above in the most rational, reasonable terms I could, in the sense of "I experience this, I am aware no-one else does (I am aware everyone pretends they do not experience this and I do not believe them), and I have rational reasons for being happy with these experiences".

Well, screw guilt and shame and our sterile reductive culture. The entire first chapter of To The Actor spoke of things entirely consistent with what I just described. Some of the exercises at the end of the first chapter are about projecting power, and about radiating one's physical motions before one does them. Those are both intuitive concepts to me. That's how I make friends!

I will not be rational.

I am human, and I glory in that.

I shall waggle my eyebrows.

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That went unexpected places.

Improv: The Game of the Scene II

2014-03-08T10:30:00.001+00:00

Last post I wrote a bit about the 'game of the scene', the repeated pattern that occurs in some scenes, often initially coming from a mistake. I said that calling out the game of the scene within the scene itself will kill it stone dead. I think I was incorrect.

Some games, when called out, would break the fourth wall. If someone makes a mistake, (last night I stuttered very slightly when I said 'blues' and said 'buh-blues', and we could have kept that up throughout the scene as a very simple game) then that should not be called out. No-one should say "why are you calling it buh-blues?", since we all live in the same universe and in this universe that style of music is just called "buh-blues". "That's weird" should not be in the verbal vocabulary of an improviser (whilst being always in the mental vocabulary). Games like "people answer the door when the phone rings" should never be called out.

In contrast, I would say character games should be called out explicitly. Last night one of my characters, Jason the firefighter, snapped at KD "Don't tell me things I already know", which KD immediately picked up on and turned into a game. The scene was super-easy to play because the game we were playing had been said aloud, and it wasn't weird for my character to want things not told to him* again and again. The scene tripped along and we actually found some heart at the end.

(*Feeling of unease at playing male roles still has not faded, but in a class where we outnumber the guys literally 3/1 it's unavoidable.)

I don't think I could have played that scene 8 weeks ago: the constant spacework, driving a fire engine/reading a map, whilst not allowing that spacework to dominate the scene which is about the relationship between the two characters, having the urgent task (getting to a burning house) not be false heightening that would destroy the scene, and having two characters in conflict whilst not escalating the conflict until that destroys the scene. I feel like I've appreciably grown, which is awesome. I'm very much looking forwards to Level 2 of Monkey Toast.

We can abstract this distinction: Games which are specific or character can and probably should be called out precisely once ("Pastrami makes her furious", "Anyone that reads this book says 'Bop!' at the end of all of their sentences"). Games which are general and arise spontaneously should never be called out ("you answer the door when the phone rings", "there are lots of dutch people in Surrey") because it breaks the fourth wall and is inferior to simply playing the game straight.

I'm not certain the above is quite right yet, but I think I've gotten closer to the truth.

Improv: Belief, faith, and "The Game Of The Scene"

2014-02-23T14:19:00.000+00:00

You're taught in improv to accept what someone else says as true. This blogpost describes two (related) situations where this was incorrect, which floored me.

I've been taking Level One of Monkey Toast's improv classes. I'm getting a lot out of them: I had a few bad habits and there were a few subtleties that they have elucidated nicely. It's so [emotion: world-is-correct] to know that once a week I can turn up to a place where everyone is there to take their own personal growth seriously.

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Example One:

Last lesson we hit something that happens very rarely: the scene required two of the four people on stage to say "no" repeatedly to the other two.

The scene: Antimony and Sodium were police officers, and Calcium and I were grieving parents (names have been replaced by chemical elements for fun). While we were offstage Antimony and Sodium had discussed how we thought our son was dead, but how they knew this was false and that they were going to have to convince us of that.

Calcium entered, drawing me with her, and we became the grieving parents (I had been considering coming on as the son much later in the scene, not really realising that this was impossible with only four people involved in the exercise. These classes have shown me just how out-of-my-head I get when doing improv, and how I can draw that back just a touch to serve the scene better). The scene proceeded slowly - I was focusing on keeping up my character, a weeping bereaved mother, and taking a relaxed view of my needing to give input; the police officers had the information, the mother just needed to be in pain, her husband was similarly in pain and feeling protective.

David Shore, the teacher, kept prodding the scene a bit whenever there was a lull. "Your son is dead." he would say to Calcium and I. I had been listening to the police officers in disbelief, confusion and pain as they went over the circumstances of my son's death again and trying to listen and accept what they were saying. The trouble was that what the characters were saying in the middle of the scene - "Please believe us" - was in direct contradiction to what the improvisors (and the characters, of course) had said at the start of the scene: "We have to convince them." i.e. "They will not believe us". This is something which is in some sense basic which I have never really spent conscious thought on before.

The game that David had seen was that the police officers could offer us stronger and stronger evidence that our son was alive and we could continue to disbelieve them. I had made a desultory move earlier in the scene towards a different game - leaving the room in the hope that my husband might be convinced so that when I came back I could be convinced and then say "But what about Uncle Henry?" and so on and so forth...

David was correct (though not to say exclusively correct - infinite possible good scenes). There was an extremely funny game there, and it had been clearly laid out in the exposition at the start of the scene. None of us in the scene, I think, had picked up on that possible game. I had not seen it because I had been focused on a character-level form of acceptance rather than an improviser-level form of acceptance.

The key word in the above paragraphs is "belief".

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Example Two:

Also from class. I wasn't in this scene so I am going to describe it as shortly as possible: "I've always believed you were innocent when you were accused of stabbing that person.".

Quickly it became clear to everyone, including the audience, that this belief was incorrect. Again, "belief".

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When someone says "I believe x" in a scene, they are giving you license to let their character be wrong about "x". It's much weaker than "x is true", "I know x" or even "I have faith that x". I hear the word 'faith' as much more emotive and primal than the word 'belief'. If A said "I have faith in you" to B in a longform, I would take that as an offer that B could nearly betray A over the course of the show then have a crisis of conscience and make the correct moral choice.

These are not difficult ideas for human interactions in reality. They are slippery ideas when you drag them into your conscious mind and apply them to human interactions that exist only in a shared fantasy.

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Identifying the game of the scene:

"The game of the scene" is the repeated pattern that occurs in some scenes. Often one improviser makes an out-there offer, sometimes from a simple verbal mistake, and other improvisers reinforce the mistake again and again until it becomes jazz. Mistakes are a perfect source of games because literally no-one onstage expected them - they take the scene in a direction unforseen.

I have never been pushed to identify the game of the scene. Sometimes it comes up and there's a tug towards "use that idea again", but I've never worked on working out a sentence which encapsulates the game. "I am lonelier than thou", "Fashion magazines are animal specific", "I keep inciting you to read out unpleasant things about my mother" have all been games from recent scenes, but if I'm in the scene I do not have those sentences in mind.

When such a sentence is pointed out the game becomes very easy to play. I do not know whether that is because having such a sentence in one's conscious mind is good, or whether that is because when such a sentence is said (e.g. by a teacher pausing the scene in class) it allows the improvisers to properly synchronise and makes the resulting scene trip along like anything. Pointing the game out from within the scene would kill it dead. This is something I need to be conscious of and work on.

NaNo 2013 Update: The Maze!

2014-02-16T23:27:00.002+00:00

(Stream of consciousness)

In November, or slightly before, I started writing a book called The Maze! as part of NaNoWriMo, mostly because I had never written a book before and I enjoy telling stories. Since it would be the first book I had ever attempted writing, I went for the easiest genre I could think of: 1970s paranoia science fiction a la Philip K. Dick.

PKD is well known for having absolutely awful prose. His stories always feature an Everyman who is defined by their job, and by their loveless marriage. All of the women in his stories are psychopaths, and there is usually only one per story. All of the doctors in his stories are psychopaths, or very calm robots if you have to believe what they say. The threats are apparently external but the real danger often turn out to be Authority. Fun tropes to play with.

I'm currently a shade under 23k words in to this novel, and will reach the conclusion in about three scenes time - perhaps 28k. NaNoWriMo suggests that 50k is the target. This dude, about whom I know nothing except that he was the first hit on Google when I asked "how long is a novel", suggests 100k for science fiction, and points out publishers will not always take the time to appreciate the beauty of your work but might simply look at the word count and toss it out. I am not worrying about publication, particularly.

Currently my prose is awful and there's a lot that I know that the reader would not. Several of the minor characters have turned out to be more alive than I intended them to be, and I started the book with the wrong ending in mind, so there is a lot I can write about.

I want to take a lesson from the longform improv that I've been learning and take the following steps:

Identify the thesis of the story. What moral or rule of human nature am I trying to impart?
Until it became emotionally impossible to write the main character any longer, I followed only the main character. I have only one thread and perspective. I can see at least four more possible threads to weave in, and a particular fifth thread (the point of view of the sole woman in the story) that must be made conspicuous by its absence.
I had previously been doing an exercise where each story must start with a 100-word description of the locale. This description became the first paragraph, and took about a third as long to write as whatever story I then told. I would like to firm this idea up by concentrating on the first three lines of an improv scene: CROW (Character, Relationship, Objective, Where) or WWW (Who, Where, What) must be established in each new section as quickly and as effectively as possible.

---

I want to think about NaNoWriMo a little bit here. I really like the fact that I sat down and have written - in a few very busy, very stressful months - enough words that they are more than 1/3 the length of my PhD thesis, which took four years to write. I like the philosophy that it is better to do something which might be bad than to not do something because it might be bad.

The bits that make me uncomfortable about NaNo are the tips on "plot twists" and "how to add conflict", or even the tip that you should give your main character three names (Palmer Edward Jones) and always refer to them by their full name. I tried to make two of my characters advance my plot for a fortnight. They refused. Eventually, I gave them a bottle of Scotch, a sunny road trip, some blankets, and some guns to shoot at an apple tree with in a backyard. It was what they wanted to do; it was as a result more True. It worries me that NaNo gives people advice ("Impose this narrative structure") that to me as I am today means I literally cannot write at all.

Advice about conflict in particular; recently I'm starting to see how much we've been mis-taught about conflict.

Maybe I'm being myopic. If 50,000 is a good goal (and it is a pleasing number) then perhaps any tricks that help people get there (if those tricks help those people) are good tricks - even if it means bloating a perfectly good 30k story to 50k by addition of a plot twist. And even with the bloat, the words you write will still have the story to want embedded with in them - the things the characters learn will still come out of you even if you don't realise what it is that you're doing. After you're done with the story perhaps you can look back over it and say "That's good, but the plot twist isn't working. I'll take it out.".

50k will remain my initial aim for my first draft.

Longform Improv: Games in a glass, darkly

2014-02-07T21:29:00.002+00:00

I love improv. I was a part of the Cambridge Impronauts for a good long while. We did an even mix of shortform and narrative - mostly compere-led narrative with a broad structure agreed beforehand. Since moving to London I've been taking the Monkey Toast improv course with Paul Foxcroft, overseen by David Shore. I was somewhat disappointed to not audition straight into Level 2, but am very happy to find that I'm getting a lot out of Level 1.

I have picked up some mildly bad habits through the years: I am not explicit enough verbally and (recently, at least) too many of my initial offers have been "conflict" offers that limit scenes. I think the negative offers is partly leftover stress from a 2013 that was unpleasant from start to finish. I'm feeling good about it: this week I have 4 nights of improv organised and was sorely tempted to go for a fifth tonight. I feel like I'm growing.

(Sliightly weirded out that if I Google 'In a mirror, darkly' I get Star Trek rather than the KJV Bible.)

This Thursday at Monkey Toast we started to move smoothly from scenes to scenes-in-longform. Paul started describing the exercise we were going to do: we had been in two lines doing three-line intro to scenes focusing on what-where-who (objective/activity, location, character/relationship) with him giving a stimulus for each scene. The next exercise was only incrementally more complicated: he wasn't going to give us a stimulus for each scene; rather, we were going to take an element from the previous scene. This silent inspiration is a core element of building thematically consistent longform. The two line format and short scenes looked familiar, though...

Suddenly I grokked Move On.

"Move On" is what the Impronauts call a specific short-form game. Two lines. Short scenes. A caller. As soon as the caller sees something worth calling about, the caller says "Move on but keep [element from that scene]!" and a new scene begins with new improvisers using only that element. The caller gets about half of the laughs in the game by picking out unusual elements ("Move on but keep taking inspiration from buoyancy!"), and there are several gags they can fall back on if need be ("Move on but keep every first date I've ever had!", "Move on but keep biting political satire!", or for stilted scenes "Move on but keep absolutely nothing"). I'd never considered it as anything but a game - a high energy opener or closer for a show. I felt I'd mastered it even if I felt slightly guilty about having gags as a backup.

The longform exercise has important differences from the shortform game: the connections made are silent, and so there's no rapid release of laughter and tension from the audience, and the shortness of the scenes are part of an exercise. Rather than a command of "Laugh!" we have a slow buildup of beauty as a group of minds acts as one.

There's a pleasure in making connections woven into improv, and last night I got to suddenly understand that one of my favourite games in shortform was in fact the basis of longform. How cool is that? How lucky am I?

---

(After longform-move-on we played Trigger Words - 4 people must enter and exit a scene whenever their word comes up - but with no trigger words. We were just paying attention to the ebb and flow of the scene. Here, given that I've never liked the short-form game, the difference between long- and short- versions was the difference between feeling warm seawater play and swell around you and being hit in the face by a boat.)

Improv and Economics: False Heightening

2014-01-31T21:23:00.000+00:00

(context: I'm drunk.)

The face of improv in the UK is changing.

Johnstone has taken some stick recently as US-style improv takes root in the UK. The difference is more or less that Johnstone's style is 'faster' - we learn less about each character, and if you realise that you're doing something 'normal', like painting a fence, you interrupt the the routine: suddenly a lion attacks! The US-style is slower: why are these two folks building a fence together? What's happening in their lives? Funny things can happen, but there's a base of humanity underneath.

But I'll always love Johnstone for the first time I read "Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre": I read in the introduction about a difficult young girl and the nurse that had been assigned to her.

"This flower is the most beautiful flower," said the girl, holding it out to the nurse.

"All the flowers are beautiful," said the nurse, blocking her.

The emphasis is mine. It was a long time ago, and it was the first time that I'd grasped that the tools we learn in improv are precisely those facets that lovable people have. The positivity, the openmindedness, the willingness to drop an idea you really, really liked. When I'm surrounded by improvisers I can't help but be buoyed up by a group of people whose whole schtick is that they are really happy to see you and that you are each and every one a genius, a poet and an artist. That passage made me stop, motionless, and think for several hours.

This blogpost is not about that. Look at the passage again.

"This flower is the most beautiful flower," said the girl, holding it out to the nurse.

"All the flowers are beautiful," said the nurse, blocking her.

This part of the story I only grasped this week. Think: What could be in a bottle? Lots of things! Wine! Poison wine! A note from a castaway! The elixir of life! A tiny ship! A BIG ship! A shrunken head! "Answers"!

What could be in two bottles? Wine and poisoned wine!

...What could be in a thousand? Wine? Beer? Who cares?

If you perform a scene you're not going to use all thousand bottles. You might use two. You would definitely explore the possibilities in one. The rarity of the bottle in the scene makes it more valuable, more interesting, and the way to increase the value of the bottle further is not to add more bottles, but rather to add detail to the bottle you have.

This isn't to say that you should make the bottle the only bottle in the world: it then just becomes "a rare object" rather than "a bottle", and there are lots and lots of rare objects in the world. Value from rarity, here, isn't monetary, but direct value to people. A soft toy you've had since childhood; a photograph in your drawer of a happy memory; a wedding ring. These are the irreplaceable things, and heightening comes from not panning out over a vista of stuff, but zooming in and showing the detail on a single person's face. It's obvious in retrospect.

(Cross reference: The noble sacrifice at the end of the action movie, so much more moving than the hundred people killed in the opening sequence.)

Poem for a stranger I pitied

2014-01-23T00:23:00.001+00:00

I'm new to this town
But you're newer:
You stand much too close, your fingers all clench'd
And I watch like a human reviewer.
A baby-moon face,
Honest nerves so sublime.
Tell me -- well...
...Are you just pretending
To ride, to ride the Central Line?
Now the crowd of blind poets
Hears the chant it abhors:
"Please do not block the doors.
Please do not. Block. The doors."

The wheels give rise to thunder
As the silence reigns above:
Are you the the only one there
With eyes that could show love?
I know that you are frightened
And you feel you're out of place;
Flat air that's only lightened
When you leave.
Now walk faster, now you stumble
As the clockwork wonder roars:
"Please do not. Block. The doors.
Please do not. Block. The doors."

Outside the street is grimy and
The Sun lights only grey,
In your footsteps there's a struggle and
We wonder "will she stay?"
In this joyful vibrant city we need
No-one with your flaws.
"Please do not. Block. The doors.
PLEASE DO NOT.
BLOCK.
THE DOORS."

A long week, and the Wild Rye are great

2014-01-18T22:23:00.000+00:00

This is going to be a ramble, simply because I feel like rambling, except for when I link to the Wild Rye and tell you to listen to them.

A long week! Last weekend I studiously did not drink cocktails, then travelled up to Birmingham and back for my father's birthday, saw two shows - the Chameleons and Austentatious - and altered some new trousers so that they are now indecent rather than obscene. The start of the week was mercifully quiet, since on Thursday I had a stressful appointment at CX to discuss some bloodwork (all normal! No more appointments! Yaaaay!).

Thursday night I went to a Level One class on improv from Monkey Toast. I've been doing improv for 8 years now, mostly continuously (two one-year breaks, one for stress a long time ago and one for thesis last year), and so I was a little downcast not to get into the Level Two class I auditioned for, but mostly I am just happy to be doing improv again after such a long horrible break. Like coming up for air. The teacher, Paul, had some very useful notes for me - I started a scene with a very conflict-driven offer, which is something that in retrospect I do do a lot - so it seems the beginner's class is a fine place to start. I've got time to grow and spread my wings.

On Friday I took the afternoon off to discuss the state of my sinuses. Turns out I have ridiculously huge sinuses, y'all. Might do something about that soon - I've never been able to breathe through my nose properly and that has caused me some painful dental problems throughout my life. Hate teeth.

Friday night I saw the excellent Wild Rye at Camden Barfly, with frontwoman Rachel Castell who was on the iO course I attended last year. Click that link and listen to all of the songs there, especially 'Knives Teeth'. Frontwoman is a little inaccurate - like all good bands, every instrument on stage was getting a good workout and there was impressive musical unity. If you can imagine if Suzanne Vega had written songs in the style of Yes for a Curved Air/Jethro Tull mashup group, that neatly and clearly describes their style. Good stuff. JA was there - also from the iO course - and we turned out to both be having a bit of a January detox and so danced with lemonade in our hands.

Today was the opticians twice - once for glasses, once for lenses, since my glasses snapped in two last week and I've been wearing lenses all week. This means I wasn't allowed to sleep through my ridiculous 90 minute commute, so today I've been happy to sleep intermittently through getting the house ready to receive visitors. Right now I'm resting my eyes since my new glasses won't be ready for a week and 12 hours is more-or-less the limit for wearing lenses after wearing them every day all week. But I'm looking forwards to getting my new glasses - my old ones were, well, so damaged they snapped in twain, and the new ones are nice-looking.

(I also cleaned the kitchen, washed some windows and did lots of laundry and tidying today, but those things are not worth blogging about.)

Tomorrow I am going to finish tidying the house, buy some provisions and then go off to discuss long-form improv with JR, HL and JH! Busy busy busy busy busy busy busy busy. Isn't this the year I rest?

It feels so good to be FREE of that thesis.

Brew 2: Witch's Hopes update 3 (also New Year!)

2014-01-01T16:55:00.000+00:00

(NB: Even though this is a 'problem' post, the beer is still nice enough to serve at a party - I'm happy with how this experiment has gone.)

My beer has been misbehaving over the last few weeks: there is a yeasty flavour. My barrel is also leaking again, possibly because I mislaid the cap with a pressure valve and was just releasing the pressure every day or two - happily I had anticipated this and had a big metal tray underneath to catch and dispose of any losses.

The overabundance of yeast stems, I think, from my original bad hydrometer readings that showed me an original gravity of 1.01 (i.e. almost pure water, no sugars available for fermentation); I let it have nine days in the primary fermenter then just moved it to the barrel without testing the gravity again (because what's the point if your hydrometer is obviously broken?). I think too much yeast has grown in the barrel, and that I should have let it have more time in primary (or bothered with a secondary).

So, time to fix the flavour. On tasting, even before the yeastyness became apparent, the coffee flavour was less strong than I had hoped, so last night I took around 200g of coffee grounds and cold-brewed about 3 pints of coffee concentrate for 15 hours in the fridge. On tasting I would guess it was about espresso strength - so 3 pints of espresso added to 40 pints of beer (the losses due to leakage over the last month being roughly four pints(!)) or a double espresso per pint. I reckon that should do something immediately - let's try...

Hmm, possibly, if you actively seek out the chocolatey flavours. The coffee will take some time to mix with the beer properly, I suppose. Whoo, blimey, I only had a shot and I can feel the effects - must be being tired after the New Years parties I went to. That, or I've brewed some insane brew that hits you between the eyes on the first sip.

Next, let's add more rosemary and yarrow, which has been standing in the fridge waiting patiently. Again because of the yeastyness I'm going to double the quantities as best I can given what I have to hand: 9g total of rosemary, 39g total of yarrow. Wrapped in muslin cloth, poured boiling water over it to release the flavours and try to kill any nasties, dumped in the barrel to sit for the next 24 days. Opening the barrel again a lot of pressure had built up in just 30 minutes - the carbonation in the beer was high enough to release a lot of carbon dioxide quite quickly (again because of fermentation in the barrel).

I've learned here that an anomalous hydrometer reading right at the start leads to a whole host of corrections needed. Good to know!

---

NYE was lovely - BR and JA really went all-out with homemade houmous, 12 days of Christmas cakes, and cocktails (first time I've dared to try a martini in about six years - found I can now happily drink martinis!). Curled up against a friend (MG) for what must have been at least an hour, which is basically my favourite thing to do, talking about sex and racism and postmodernism. Today has been a very, very lazy day where I recover from 3 straight days of heavy drinking.

The Doctor's Name: A better resolution than the BBC Christmas Special 2013

2013-12-26T00:11:00.000+00:00

So, BBC Christmas special was weaksauce. We've been building tension for about 40 years about what the Doctor's name could be, and today we got another ooh-this-is-just-like-bad-sex dodge from the BBC about how his name doesn't matter, cause "The Doctor" is all the name he needs.

YAWN.

Here is my much better train of thought:

*Gotta be something big.

*Can't be "the doctor", that would be awful.

*Other first thoughts are "please" and "thank you", seems plain we should engage higher brain functions... now.

OK. So the Doctor's name is a big secret. Knowing it unleashes something terrible. Let's keep it simple and say that terrible thing is just control over the Doctor (or even just understanding him, that would be enough for manipulation and blackmail).

Bin reading 'bout Nichiren Buddhists, who chant the title of the Lotus Sutra and believe that is equivalent to chanting the entire sutra. To them, the name of the thing is sometimes the thing itself. Let's take that idea; it's nice. Let's have the Doctor's name be a Cool Thing - not the *name* of the Cool Thing, but the Cool Thing itself. Let's also have the Doctor be that Cool Thing in some abstract sense.

Other Time Lords stay on Gallifrey and do sod all, and their names are not important particularly. Main difference between them and the Doctor yields lots of nice vague words, "Adventurer", etc. but let's be more specific. The Doctor hangs about on Earth, right?

I posit that the Doctor's name is therefore "Humanity". Not the word 'Humanity', but that he is LITERALLY ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY and EVERY PERSON and all of our hopes and dreams and flaws. He's all of our best things, and the fact that he is such a good person fits in perfectly with the tone of the series which is one of boundless hope and the idea that good will win.

(He also causes huge problems and fucks off, leaving them to someone else to sort out...)

There. Anyone interfering with Earth's past is now changing him. Wiping out humanity would remove half of who he is - loss of half his wisdom, ability to love, experiences around the galaxy etc. - so he protects Earth. But... it's not just self interest. He would have to embody self-sacrifice or his love for us wouldn't be genuine.

(NB: this flies close to specism if we make out humans are great and everyone else is awful. The Doctor says 'no, you are not better than any other species, just that I am you, so... you're like my family.' Companion: "so you're never alone? We're always with you?" Doctor: "You are always with me, and I am always so very alone. I wouldn't be human if I wasn't constantly alone.".)

OK, Better Episode has form:

Meet some characters, some soldiers. There is a Bad trying to find his name to control him. NOT THE DALEKS AGAIN, THANKS. In the battles, Nice Lady Soldier jumps in front of laser to save someone without even hesitating. This is commented upon. (THEMATIC). We (audience, Bad, one companion) find out the Doctor's name ('literally all of humanity'). He points out the answer was hidden in plain sight too - just someone without essential drive of humanity could never grasp how one could be that way.

Only way to stop Bad is for Doctor to sacrifice himself. He monologues about humanity for a few minutes, says goodbye, then steps into the death chamber, commenting that he does so "without even hesitating". (THEMATIC).

BAM. Suck it, BBC. Keep the Gallifrey stuff for next series - cause honestly, I have to make the bad sex comparison here again. That episode of Doctor Who was like bad sex. It finished, and I shrugged.

---

Edit: Thinking more about it, that episode made no sense at all. The Doctor locked the Gallifreyans away and nothing has changed since literally last episode. Why would he release them? The Daleks etc. keep trying to kill him, but as he points out if they ever land a blow he can say his name and release the Gallifreyans, so the Daleks can't kill him... so why are they trying to do so?

Why are either of these protagonists doing what they were doing?

---

Edit 2: Above, I mean that the Doctor is LITERALLY humanity. There's no distinction; not that he's a god or something, just that it's an oddity of the Universe that this species and that body happen to be different observations of the same thing.

Brew 2: Witch's Hopes, update

2013-12-12T00:40:00.000+00:00

Moved my second brew into the barrel today, 9 days after it started fermenting. I'd planned a secondary fermentation, but this is the year where I Do Not Feel Guilty and don't really feel it needs it. 50g of brown sugar for about 5 1/2 gallons of beer to help it condition. My last brew had some pressure problems and leaked through the tap, so this time I'm adding only half as much sugar and I've bought a nice metal tray for the barrel to stand on.

Tasting it whilst moving it into the barrel it's already developed into a pleasant bitter, the yeast having visibly dropped out since I checked it on Saturday. The sweetness of the wort is almost gone and the flavours of the yarrow, hops and rosemary are there. They aren't sharp, well defined flavours - I'm certainly going to tune things a little. It looks like this beer will be drunk towards the end of January, so I'm tempted to leave it until the end of December and then add the remaining rosemary and yarrow, plus possibly some more coffee (the original flavour not having come through very strongly).

Beer Man at the local market suggested orange peel. I think that would be a little harsh for my tastes, but it's an interesting thought - maybe in the final week.

Damnit, now I'm just sitting in my room staring at the 44 pints of beer mere feet away from me. Plus the alcoholic gunk in the fermenter. Guuuunk.

Games I Loathe

2013-12-07T09:39:00.001+00:00

[If you like Vasco da Gama you might not want to read this blogpost.]

There is a certain type of game that I have learned to recognise and shall not play. They are typified by Vasco da Gama (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/41002/vasco-da-gama), and their essential problem is this:

They gots no soul.

Think of a classic boardgame, then try to sum up the objective in one sentence. Chess: Kill the king. Backgammon: Get home first. Go: Surround the most territory. Bridge: Bid the right contract. Poker and Perudo: Outbluff your opponents. Diplomacy: Make the best alliances. Boggle: Find the most words.

Hell, Monopoly and Risk (WD) have the same goal: control everything. You can see their awfulness shining through in their awful summing-up phrase.

In all of these games you know your objective - no, that's too weak a phrasing. All of these games ARE their objective. The rules of play are simply this task.

Think of Cribbage and Canasta. They are ridiculous games that were obviously made up by drunk people with decks of cards - fun games, but ridiculous games. The rules change slighly each time you play because no-one really minds what the rules are for these games, no-one really remembers or can quite agree, because everyone accepts that they have no permanence. Their slightly shabby charm is what supports them.

Vasco da Gama, and the wave of emesis that are the games like it, also have some objective. I think for VdG it's something like "impress the king". But there are something like -

-I should say that this rant has been building for a while, so my memory of the game itself is almost gone-

-something like three mechanisms to impress the king. Let's say sailing, digging up gold, and building churches. OK. Then each of you has a player card, which gives you some special advantage and disadvantage.

If you're playing for the first time, those two variables alone are enough to ensure that you lose. "OK," you cry, "you shouldn't expect to win on your first time! And neither should you get hung up on winning." you add, primly.

Every game lasts two hours.

So the first time you play, after fifteen minutes you have one ship and a church, while your opponent, who has played before, has three gold mines. You've already lost. Then another hour-and-forty-five happens, and by the end of it you end up wishing you'd watched the Star Wars Christmas Special again whilst scooping out your eyes with a rusty razorblade.

Think of Bridge - not the most popular game! The bidding systems get arcane and confusing and difficult. But each hand takes ten minutes, and it is a fun game even if you absolutely suck, which I do. Go, with so much depth, you can play in 10 minutes (on a 9x9 board). The essential mechanism, the soul of the game, does not take more than three minutes to explain completely. Now go and read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caylus#Turns - which begins with the phrase "A turn in Caylus consists of 8 phases:" and goes downhill from there.

So when someone suggests these kind of games, the kind of games where the objective is explicitly "to gain points", or, Heaven help us, the redundancy that is "victory points", I have learned to politely decline, for fear of being trapped in a Frankenstein's Monster of a game that is really three awful games stitched together to make one big awful game. If you like these games, you are a bad person, that does bad things, and you probably don't pay tax and you probably hurt kittens.

----
I have to mention Dominion. Each hand of Dominion lasts about ten minutes, but I would sum the soul of the game up as "optimise your strategy", which is so vague as to be meaningless. The cards change each time to disguise the fact that the game is missing a depth to explore. It's a fun game - I would just put it firmly in the same category as Crib or Canasta.
----
In case you think I just hate everything, I really like Flash Point: Fire Rescue (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/100901/flash-point-fire-rescue) a co-operative game where you go into a burning building to find trapped people and carry them back outside. I was impressed that co-operative games are a thing, and actually a fun thing. I also very much enjoyed Eldritch Horror, a streamlined variant of Arkham Horror, again co-operative. And finally Ticket To Ride has 'victory points' but has a soul: Build more railways.

Brew 2: Witch's Hopes

2013-12-04T01:04:00.000+00:00

Hokay.

So I tried the woodeforde's wherry, and it turned out nice and drinkable, if a bit lively. Let's knock it up a notch with a brew of my own. Thank you to Brian Wessel, erstwhile Space Lawyer, for guidance on what ingredients would create a reasonable beer - for folks who know I've been waiting to do this for a while, he convinced me to drop the chillis. Thanks also to housemate Matt for company in this process.

The idea here is that hops, the plant that give beer its bitterness, are a relatively recent addition to beer that have blotted out a wonderfully wide landscape. Today I shall try to brew a low-hop beer, replacing as much beer with yarrow (a traditional ingredient) as I can, as well as boiling the crystal malt with coffee, and "dry hopping" with more yarrow and rosemary.

Let's have a soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=682pneYoP0c and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGsQ5n9Qu0A

I have on hand:
60g crystal malt,
2kg dark malt extract, 2 kg medium malt extract
275g yarrow (dried)
1 rosemary plant
227g M&S espresso ground coffee dark roast
West yorkshire liquid yeast,
1kg east Kent golding hops, vacuum packed,
Aaall of the dried Admiral and phoenix

which is obviously too much to make 5 gallons of beer.

I shall be using:
2kg medium malt extract, 1kg dark malt extract
50 desert spoons of coffee (reference: https://byo.com/recipes-tag/item/315-brewing-with-coffee) - this is a lot, but I'd rather fail and be like "Ah, too much coffee" than "Huh, coffee is boring".
5 gallons of water (obviously)

To estimate the yarrow required, I have taken 5g of yarrow, and 5g of east Kent golding hops, and made tisanes, letting them steep for a full five minutes. The rosemary is also quite bitter, and it's fresh, so I'm going to estimate that the rosemary actually counts for a 1:1 with the yarrow - that is, rosemary counts just as much for bittering as yarrow.

OK, let's eat a Japanese kitkat, taste the yarrow, eat a Japanese kitkat, and taste the hops.

Mmm. Bleeaahh. Mmm. Bleahh!

Interesting. The hops are in fact only *slightly* bitterer than the yarrow - say about 1.2 bitterer. This is all *totally* scientific, folks. So, let's see how much of the yarrow I will need to 'dry yarrow' afterwards. The internet suggests 25g will be ample - perhaps even slightly too much, but then this yarrow is dry. OK. Let's reduce that to 20 and stick in another 5 of rosemary, and put that to one side. Now I have 500g of yarrow to play with.

Hm, I'm finding it hard to find how much hops to add and when. I'm getting bored, and that means SCIENCE has to happen. Let's start making up the wort and worry about the hops in a minute.

I'm going to use 60g crystal malt and 150g espresso grounds, and gently boil and stir them together with 1l of water for ten minutes. That should give me something with a kick.

http://realbeer.com/spencer/Belgian/white-brewing.html suggests 1 ounce (30g) of east kent goldings for an hour, then another half-ounce (15g) for the last 15 minutes, to make a low-hop beer. Let's increase those ingredients... twofold. So, 60g for an hour, then 30g for 15 minutes. BUT we're going to use as much yarrow as I think is wise - I'm going to say 1/3 hops, and a ratio of yarrow to rosemary of 3:1. That means 20g hops, 30g yarrow, 10g rosemary for an hour, then 10g hops, 15g yarrow, 5g rosemary for 15 minutes.

Hmm! The coffee grounds are much, much finer than I thought - I'm going to be careful when I remove them from the wort (which I'm going to do before I add the hops). It's also past time to start sterilising things. OK, sterilising happily. This coffee looks insane. Filtering through kitchen roll and a sieve and the stuff just... doesn't flow.

Right, lost track a bit of my ingredients, but I *think* I've added 2kg dark malt extract, 1kg medium malt extract. Let's get that malt in ASAP.

OK, 33 minutes in. One boil over so far - turns out watching My Little Pony S4 is fairly distracting. Smells like BEER.

OK, after the boil over my hops looked a little thin, so I added another 10g of yarrow at 37 minutes. 50 minutes in and the hob is thick and syrupy - I wonder how much malt I lost? Oh well, I can add sugar to do a secondary fermentation. The more alcohol is there, the less the flavour matters, right? Like grappe?

57 minutes in. What does wort taste like, I wonder? ...Hm. That tasted really, really weird. Kinda bitter but syrupy. Guess that makes sense. Can't really taste the coffee. Ah! 1 hour, added the final hops, yarrow and rosemary, lovely rush of foam in response. Filling the sink with cold water now. Because I'm filtering all of my water to reduce the chlorine I've been filling up my fermenter with cold water slowly throughout the boil, so now it's at the 3 gallon mark: my plan is to strain my wort through a sieve straight into the cold water. I'm sure there's some excellent reason why that's a bad idea, but I don't see it and I don't have another container in which to cool the wort, so that's how it's going to be.

1h11m in. Maybe I lost too much malt extract in those boil-overs. There's not really enough time to add more though - I'll stick to my plan of secondary-fermentation fun. This beer is for a housewarming which looks like it's going to be in early January, so there's no rush to get this beer out of the barrel. It's certainly true that I could use a MUCH bigger pot for this.

BAM. The chillin' of the eeeeevenin'! Hm, fermenter has some coffee grounds floating in it. Whatever.

Ah. I now see why you do not pour wort straight into your fermenter. The sieve just fell in. Guess I AM dry hopping in the fermenter whether I want to or not. Wasn't sterilised, either. Bum.

It smells a little hoppy, but when I pour in the last few jugs the right amount of bubbles form - I think the malt levels are ok. Will check the gravity in a sec. Fuck, proto-beer all over the floor, housemate not home yet. Aaaand west yorkshire yeast. OG is... seriously? OG is 1.01? Fuck that, more malt. One more kilogram of medium malt goes in, warm.

...Ooooh. Now THAT is a flavour. What is that flavour (yes, I am drinking the protobeer that was in the hydrometer, no, this is not a good idea). That's like a delicate elderflower! Cat compares it to iced tea. Cats are yowling outside. No, the chrysanthemum tea I used to drink when I was 11! Cats. It's getting late; I'll check the original gravity tomorrow.

We stared into the fermenter for a little while, mesmerised by the way the layers flowed so independently - mere millimetres apart in a thick fluid little flecks of yarrow sped different ways, and accelerated and coiled and twisted. It looked already alive.

Oh, crap, laundry was supposed to happen tonight.

Story: Not us, not us

2013-10-19T12:26:00.002+01:00

(Of anything I've ever written, this is the thing for which I have most wanted feedback.)
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Hoskote town is damp in the late summer air; condensation runs down red stone and white paint alike. The air carries a steady low hum of moving steel from the factories, and an equally steady smell of peppery pumpkin broth. Over this a mossy green breeze whispers from the southeast and the streets are cut by sharp tongues of lime and colocasia. It is Sunday, the day of men with toothy joyful smiles selling every sort of thing one might ever want. The crowds stream past them, and bright painted trucks and the buses from Bangalore rumble on nearby streets.

Jiya is a 32 year old packrat who has filled her flat with bric-a-brac - several chipped teapots, a rescued neon pink shisha pipe, and creased film posters that cover the walls. Her clothes are bright and worn with years of wear, and her plump, quick smile flaps her cheeks like clean sheets in the wind. She is crying angry tears.
Her newest toy over the last few months has been a smartphone, a phone that can display maps and connect to the Internet. She boasted about the freedom it gave her from the cafe down the street, and each week downloaded a new app to play with. Like everyone her age, she used BitCoin to buy coffee and beer now, as well as weed deliveries from the Sheep Marketplace; in the evenings she would speculate, buying more if she thought the price was low and selling if she thought the price was high, and some days most of her ready cash was virtual. Today, her BitCoin app had updated with a cute feature that displayed how many BitCoins she had in her wallet compared to the average user of the app, and what percentile she came in the rankings of BitCoin wealth.

Her phone was still displaying 0%, on the other side of the room where she had thrown it against the wall. Too many Europeans, too many Japanese, too many Americans, their petty cash twenty times as much as everything bitter Jiya had. Her boyfriend, Pranit, is stuttering like an old car with a new owner, his kind face creased by confusion.

``I d-don't und-erstand, Jiya,'' he says, sitting before her with his hands gently on her arms. ``What's wrong?''

Jiya shakes her head, her red eyes opening only briefly to glare at the wooden floor. Everything is wrong, she wants to scream, when I work hard and you work harder and all I have doesn't even count, you and I don't count, you'll never be a politician and I'll never be a scientist and no-one will even notice that we failed. She swallowed painfully, and asked a hard question.

``Pranit... are - are we poor?''

If they had made love, then, things would have been better in the long run. Instead Pranit just frowned, disappointed by the question, and shook his head.

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So, this story is a big departure for me. First, privilege: I'm not Indian, and I'm not in a precarious financial position. Do I have the right or ability to write stories about Indians in precarious financial positions? I think the ability to get it right means the right to write it, and I don't think I have that ability. I also think the only way I will be able to ever gain that ability is to write and, if I make mistakes, learn from my mistakes. If I've been racist or snobbish above, please, please, tell me. I think I can write a story about suddenly feeling inadequate; that's within my ken. I don't want to be the kind of person that can't write a story about someone different from herself.

The non-personal idea for this story came to me a few years ago at a conference in Sheffield when I realised that money - strictly speaking money in circulation - only makes relative sense, and so it makes sense to normalise money-in-circulation so that there are more-or-less as many dollars in the world as there are people. Then everyone would know if they were ahead or behind.

I was going to write a series of paragraphs, each next paragraph describing a typical person with two orders of magnitude less money. At the top might be Bill Gates, then a rich US senator, then a US doctor, then... etc., all the way down to someone for whom daily fluctuations in food prices is a big problem. I don't think such a system could be stable at all if the fact of the difference in power was made easy to understand, boiled down to a single number: You have 0.01% of the wealth you might have in a "fair" world.

I still like this idea and might develop it in a purer form later, but on starting to write it it became obvious there needed to be a reason for such a system to be adopted. There's no easy reason for a universal currency not-under-state-control to be introduced, and so I turned to BitCoin, and decided it was used to pay for inexpensive luxuries. Jiya came from that; her physicality, and that of Pranit's, was me consciously trying to mimic Dickens.

Drabble: Repo World

2013-10-12T17:35:00.001+01:00

(Server move delayed again. Moving house and starting a new job is stressful, folks. This story inspired by my finally having to learn to use Git, the version control software.)

Angels exist outside of Time, the great branching artwork that splits and splits again. There is a branch where you chose differently, and one where the Axis powers won. It is a garden of forking paths, and the angels sculpt Time's bleeding edge. When each day is beautiful they add it to the branch.

Today was made in several parts, and Raphael is healing the conflicts. Uriel flutters his strawberry-blond wings and speaks.

"Samyaza is lacking. He creates, but never adds his days to the branch. He dances through the past, neglecting the future."

Raphael nods.

"Commitment issues."