Author: John Hanus

That was one hell of an interesting experiment in improv comedy last night ladies and gentlemen.  First, I was excited to get around 50 people to come out and see us on a 4th of July weekend with beautiful Anchorage whether.  When you expect to perform for 10, the sky is the limit!  Second, everything which could fail with our tech aspects of our show last night…did.  A blown fuse left us with only 4 stage lights (primary out) and cable connection issues in the booth left us with no sound.  Therefore our pre-show/intermission music and video had to be cut.  Tech is a work in progress as Urban Yeti explores its relationship with AET and comes up to speed on their equipment and we’ll be back to 100% for our upcoming shows.  This obstacle shows how important tech is to a performance and how it can help bring an audience into your performance mind set.  However, I am going to say something radical here:  I think this was a good time for this to happen and it actually helps our performance in the long run.  You’re CRAZY John!  I know, I know, but step back and look at it from a different angle.  Without all the tech what is the only thing you have?  The improv with no safety net.  Every laugh our performers worked for last night started deep in their own end zone.  No sound, house lights up and a warm theater on an 80 deg Anchorage day.  The Urban Yeti performers were given a challenge that is going to make the troupe stronger in the long run.  

I’m excited to say the troupe stepped up and performed well in this experiment.  Although we still have things to work out in our long form sets, I was particularly impressed with the creativity of our performers in the show.  From solid character interactions in Building Blocks to Evelyn and Janosz in the produce section, our performers came up with some very interesting objectives and were able to sustain great character dialogue in several of their scenes.  It was also nice to see an infusion of energy in several places when needed.  Although one could argue the breast feeding Wickedness scene was a lot of two characters yelling at each other, I would counter and say they stayed true to the situation, brought in some good detail (empty theater, 9:45 pm showing of the Notebook) and the energy was much needed.  I was also particularly impressed with our short form, especially Slide Show.  I will throw some props to Erik, who really made that game with a solid narration.  The funniest thing I have seen in a long time is his constant reference to that ‘ass hole’ Bob who judges.  Why is this funny?  Because going through a Las Vegas slide show is one thing, but building out complex relationships with the characters in the pictures strengthens the improv immensely.

Enough of this positive crap Hanus, get to the juice!  As a reminder to those new to the blog, we have been working in rehearsals on putting a structure to our longer form work.  Build a strong base reality with good characters, environment work and detail, then throw in an oddity identified by the team and elevate that oddity by asking questions about how it changes the world around them.  We didn’t do a great job of finding this structure in our performance last night.  It was not as easy for me to write down a series of oddities like our last shows and the strength of the performance last night was more found in interesting character interactions and objectives.  Two examples of the challenge were our Promiscuity and Indecency sets.  We continue to struggle through our Promiscuity set.  It is not because three suggestions are hard to juggle, it is because at it’s core it is the closest thing a lot of us have ever done to long form, it is our first true experiment of taking an empty palette and building a 15 minute scene with sustaining content.  In both last night’s show and previous performances we are finding situational quick sand.  We have an unhealthy attachment to resolving situations instead of exploring the world created.  There was way too much time spent on a basketball court in the set last night and way too much time spent on dwarf jabs.  When in doubt, we need to fall back on the world we created to find something better.  We created outs, but didn’t use them.  Some questions we could have asked to get to a better place:

• What is the link between Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to the initial world created?  It is kind of strange a back story to a seemingly normal environment included fairy tale characters, let’s explore.
• What does basketball have to do with the initial offer which was really solid: Girls changing boys in relationships?

Overall, our Promiscuity set has yet again showed us we need a lot more play time in the long form arena.  It is also important to talk about our indecency set.  A solid story, some fun details (Russian occupation, torture, aging love), but if you step back you’ll realize the scene fell into crazy town.  The strong objective floated us for the amount of time needed in the set, but after the produce affair was over, we wouldn’t have had many places to go.  Why?  No one challenged an oddity which was there waiting to be taken:  All of this was over a simple recipe.  The humor of the indecency set could have been elevated much more if we had a straight character challenging the element of Russian conspiracy over a simple home made recipe.   

If you go back through my last couple of blog posts you’ll see similar elements being discussed about our long form.  It’s time to start asking myself what I need to do as director to help get us through a transition to solid long form quicker.  I’m going to focus on three areas in the future:

1. Better play time.  Summer can get intense in Alaska, especially when you layer individual schedules on administrative prep for our third season.  We are going to bring more focus to the improv arena in the coming months.  In addition, I’ll be joining the troupe in playing some of these sets over the next couple of rehearsals to get fresh perspective on the challenges faced.  Rather than focus on our sets, we are going to focus on 10 – 15 minute longer form scenes based on single words.  More play will always equal a better product.
2. Don’t just make it about a challenge.  Hey, if you are reading this, I’m rewarding you by giving you one of our big announcements now instead of making you wait!  We will be starting an Urban Yeti After Dark short form show in October.  The focus will be high energy, uncensored short form games.  The performers in Urban Yeti are amazing and I have no doubt in my mind they are going to kill these sets.  By allowing Urban Yeti to offer different formats and letting our team mix it up, it is going to strengthen all of our performance offerings. 
3. Play AND watch.  It is no secret Urban Yeti shares performers with other troupes in town.  As a result, they put in a lot of time performing.  I would like to find more ways for our performers to watch improv as well so they can sit back and identify/assess just like this blog does.  This could include getting the troupe together to watch our own shows or finding some good internet/video content to offer a fresh perspective.

This blog focused a lot on improvements and potential change in the future, but I don’t want that to detract from the talents our troupe has and continually shows each performance.  I am very proud of the product we are putting up and the evolution of our improv.  A start-up company is allowed to find themselves over the first 12 months of their existence.  Another incredible aspect of this experiment is I am having some really great conversations with audience members and supporters about improv.  I really think we are elevating the understanding of the art form and starting to bring in folks who don’t just want to drink and hurl dick references on stage, they want to explore with us.  Thank you to the performers who are bringing it set after set and thank you to our fans who are continuing to come out and support.  We are truly creating change folks, can you feel it? 

Look to our social forums this week, we are about to make announcements which are going to change the game completely…

Doing shows in Anchorage during the notoriously beautiful Alaskan summer stresses me out.  Sure, there is a healthy tourist market, but you never know when that perfectly beautiful day is going to hit and you are left shit out of luck.  I highlight this to boost my excitement for how well ticket sales went last night.  Yet again, even with the summer card in play, we came close to a fully packed house.  My thanks, as always, goes out to family and friends who continue to support our art and those who take a chance to come see something they know nothing about.  After the show we got some genuine enthusiasm from the audience and I am ecstatic we are putting up a show that continues to fill the seats.  

Let’s talk about the artistic aspects of our show last night, let’s talk about the improv.  It is again important to re-iterate the troupe is working on a structure consisting of setting up a strong base reality, introducing an oddity into this world and then elevating this oddity by asking ‘If this is true, then what else is true about the world we just created?’  This last month, with-in these efforts we focused on everyman characters and really challenging the oddity because it is in the challenge detail arises.  It is in this detail where humor is often found.  We also worked starting our scenes ‘in the action’.  Rather than the first positions and lines of dialogue of our scenes being character introductions or ‘talking heads’ heavy, we wanted to spice things up by starting in the middle of strong, physical situations.

We are doing a fantastic job of setting up oddities in both rehearsal and our shows.  These oddities are strong, they are fun and most importantly, they have the ability to establish games to play off of throughout the scene. Let me provide a list of a couple from last night’s show to demonstrate my point:

• Base Reality = Fast Food establishment, Oddity = Souls of the animals killed to make the nuggets drive customer’s to avenge their death
• Base Reality = Manufacturing facility where animals are harvested for food, Oddity = New hire employee has WAY too much passion for her work and comes up with inventive ways to harvest animals
• Base Reality = Fast Food Drive-Through, Oddity = Massive employee communication and mistakes are backed by confidence the customer is the idiot
• Base Reality = Waitress training to be a bartender, Oddity = Waitress has a lifetime of using awful ingredients in anything she makes that is dangerous to the human body, yet this goes uncorrected
• Base Reality = Female character growing up and going to high school, Oddity = Entire society is misogynist to the point female learning has to go underground

  In addition we had some strong commitment to characters, good pantomime and environment work and solid scene transitions.  A good example was a transition of a characters out of a beach while others were strolling on for some relaxation as well as transitioning into a vehicle with minimal confusion.  I also enjoyed the drive through staging with added roller skate benefits.  
Where we need to continue improving is getting every single performer to identify similar oddities and work together to elevate with-in the context of the scene.  Last night we a hard time reaching high notes throughout our scene work, finding those moments of high audience engagement.  This was because of confusion introduced that couldn’t be overcome with strong listening.  An example of this was old librarian grandma in the misogynist society.  Although a fun character, some performers confused this for the oddity while others were trying to stick with fun scenarios in a misogynist world.  The scene lingered far too long on the aspect of libraries and librarians when the real gold was portrayed in scenes that asked questions like ‘If this society is clearly different from our own in views of females, then what would a first date be like?’ of ‘If this character is not encouraged to learn at home, then what lengths does she have to go through to become an intelligent female?’.  Another example was in our promiscuity set.  The further into the scene we got, the further away we got from the original theme of odd ingredients.  We got so far away the scene become a mixture of performers trying to stay true to it and those trying to drive plot points to conclusion.  We need to continue working the ‘If, then’ questions of the worlds we are creating throughout the rehearsal process.   I’m not worried about this, in fact, after the show last night I was quite relaxed.  Even with these missed opportunities it was a solid show with good audience enjoyment.  When it comes to theater, a single performance can never be the full resume of the ensemble.  What I’m seeing in rehearsals and shows is worthy of an audience and improving.  When performers start discussing things like audience energy, disagreement with show/game formats, I remind them it is all on us to make any environment or suggestion work, this is the nature of a truly professional improviser.  Let’s take golf for example.  Going to the driving range is important, but actually playing full rounds of golf is more important to work things out.  So it goes with most things.  We are making the most out of one show a month, but it just takes time at this rate to get everything right.   It is also important to note smaller, more administrative things we can work on.  Overall, I wanted more ‘in the action’ from our scene work and to start during the middle of strong scenarios rather than at the beginning of conversations.  I’ve also noticed a trend over the past few rehearsals we are starting to get more physical when there are opposing characters.  Dude bros for example, or fast food employee getting the wrath of the animal spirits.  Although a solid dude bro punch from Mary Jo, most of the time our staging in these situations seems a bit awkward and amateur.  I’m a big fan of physical conflict rarely being necessary in improv and I’d like to stick to this mentality, but if opportunities arise to work this physicality, we should also rehearse some good practices.  Finally, we need to ensure guessers continue to guess throughout the scene in interrogation and we manhandle that audience member in slideshow to introduce a moving bodies aspect into the game.       

I love what we are doing and I am proud we are coming together as a team to try different ways of playing improv, ways I can honestly say have never been seen in Alaska.  Everyone in Urban Yeti Improv started out with short form and loves it.  Short form is a high energy and fun art which really sucks an audience in.  In fact, I would like to do more of it with Urban Yeti in the future.  Scenes average 3 – 5 minutes and the games are structured.  You are placed in a sandbox with a playground that has slides, monkey bars, swings, even a weird dome jungle gym thing people are constantly getting hurt on.  Some of us have done this for over a decade.  But those of us in Urban Yeti all stepped to the edge of the sand box, looked at each other and asked what is outside of this playground.  When we all took that step together we took on a very challenging art form.  What happens after the five minutes?  What happens when plot, funny character traits and big movements can no longer sustain the scene?  What happens with less structure and more unknown?  I’m confident what is starting to emerge and will continue to emerge more often will be comedy where the players can look back and be proud they literally made a whole play out of a single suggestion and in the process created a world that could be viewed for hours with excitement.  Why try this?  Simple, we are no longer just going to play on this playground, we are going to build it from scratch in front of an audience.   As always, in my opinion, the future is looking bright for Urban Yeti Improv.  Thanks for exploring with us.

Last night we debuted Urban Yeti Improv’s second season, which included a new show format entitled Debauchery.  The basis of the show was exploring the themes around the word Debauchery, including what makes people angry, what are elements of their fantasies, what do they consider as indecent.  We then took these suggestions and applied the creative process to build characters, stories and worlds around them.  For those of you who are dropping by but unable to travel all the way to Anchorage to see our show, a detailed breakdown of the format is as follows:  

• Audience Warm-Up:  Human Symphony
• Player Warm-Up:  Short form game of Building Blocks.
• Debauchery is…Wickedness:  As audience members arrived to the show they were asked to fill in slips of paper containing the line “It really pisses me of when ___________”.  A random one of these lines was chosen and the players did a montage of scenes all culminating in the same line being spoken with a scene wipe as transition.
• Debauchery is…Corruption:  Short form game of Interrogation.
• Debauchery is…Promiscuity:  As audience members arrived to the show they were asked to fill in slips of paper containing the line “My fantasies typically consist of ____ , ____ and ___”.  A random one of these lines was chosen and the players performed a 15 minute scene incorporating all three elements into the story as direct / subtle as they so chose.
• Debauchery is…Craziness:  Short form game of Slideshow.
• Debauchery is…Murder:  Short form game of Chain Murder.
• Debauchery is…Indecency:  As audience members arrived to the show they were asked to fill in slips of paper containing the line “I was once kicked out of ____ for ____”.  A random one of these lines was chosen and the players did a scene where the only restriction was the end had to culminate in the suggestion provided.
• Will we survive this Debauchery:  Short form game of Survivor was played to close out the show.

  The Wickedness / Promiscuity / Indecency portions were the longer form foundations of the show while the rest was opportunity for intermittent short form and fun with the audience.  After closing Frigid Affair in April, we built this format around two principles of more audience interaction and applying improv creatively in a themed environment.  Thus, Debauchery was born.

I was very pleased with the product.  The numbers are still pending, but I’m fairly sure we sold out the show with an audience who had an outstanding time.  The reception both I and the players received after the show was genuine and loaded with positive comments.  We even got some unexpected t-shirt sells and fan mail sign-ups, which we are particularly happy to see given there were a lot of new/unknown faces in the audience.  The foundation of a business is a great product the community will support and the last four shows have reinforced Urban Yeti Improv as legit.  We still have some administrative things like space flow, ticketing system improvements and getting the color red into the projector to work on, but we will get there.  A lot of effort is going on behind the scenes to fine tune Urban Yeti as we want the customer to have the best experience possible.  But we are in the game, folks, and we are hungry for more.  My thanks goes out to all the wonderful fans who had fun with us last night in addition to Alaska Experience Theater who continues to support our art in Anchorage.

Let’s talk about the improv!!!  If you could have been in my brain from 7:00 pm – 8:10 pm you would have experienced a lot of nervousness.  I don’t really get nervous about hosting, the nerves come from having to balance box office, customer happiness, seating, tech, warm-ups and high energy introductions at the same time.  In addition, we want creative improv fueling Debauchery, not scenes based on dick and fart humor culminating in quick, easy to achieve laughs.  When the first suggestion I had to pull from the audience during warm-ups was bathroom stall, I literally died a little inside.  What have I done?  What will Debauchery become?

But guess what, the performers came in and rocked it.  They played at a highly intelligent level and as a result, the audience followed suit with great suggestions and engaged in an experience of watching stories built for them.  Even more impressive, the troupe was able to do this at a premiere event and first run of a new format.  If you asked me today what I am most proud of in regard to Urban Yeti, it wouldn’t be the show sell outs or audience laughter.  It is watching performers who want to perform better improv rehearse diligently and produce better improv as a team.  We are getting the best out of our players and they deserve a lot of accolades.

I want to focus on two highlights from the show last night:  Solid oddities being introduced to enrich scenes and audience connection moments.  If you have been keeping up with my blog, you know we are trying to work long form through establishing strong scene foundations, dropping an oddity everyone can pick up on and elevating the oddity to build a strong story.  If you focus on the Promiscuity and Indecency segments, you’ll see very strong oddities that make for compelling theater.  The first was a scene inspired by seduction, where a girl was going over the ways she typically tries to seduce her man with a friend.  As the character describes a variety of feminine techniques that guys typically wouldn’t be into (roses, bath salts, lavender, etc), the friend starts questioning where she picked up this knowledge (several backstory transitions were fun here).  But then our performers dropped the oddity that was easy to pick up on:  The men of the scene loved these feminine techniques.  This creates compelling scene work.  The second was inspired by an audience suggestion requiring the scene to culminate with sex in the back of a movie theater.  The scene started with two teens going on a date to a movie, very anxious to get in the theater for this supposed debaucherous affair.  But as the scene built, through the efforts of the teen and parent characters, the oddity was introduced that this was not about sex at all, it was about candy addiction.  This was elevated by parents finding ‘awful’ things under the teen’s bed (candy wrappers) and an anxious concession counter scene.  Combining this oddity with still needing to end the scene with someone getting kicked out of a theater for having sex in the back culminated in the parents, not the teens, being caught and thrown out by the manager.  This was an awesome moment.  If the parents treat candy addiction with as much worry as their kids having sex, then how do they actually treat the topic of sex?  A slam dunk for our performers and a smiling director given it was in the context of oddity and elevation.

The performers did excellent in engaging the audience through different methods as well.  The example standing out to me was the layering of the popcorn in the indecency set.  It is a subtle nuance, but one which pulls the audience into the environment.  It brings them into the scene because you know what, I watch them layer my popcorn with intensity too when I go to the movies.  Another example includes strong characters in the back story of our promiscuity scene.  I enjoyed the french character in this set of scenes, in particular because it showed a lot of commitment.  I will also take this opportunity to welcome Mary Jo to our troupe, new for the upcoming season.  She always does an excellent job with her character and detail work, which were on display last night.   On to opportunities for improvement!  We need to hammer out some logistical issues prior to our next show.  We have emphasized playing to the front of the space over several rehearsals, but we have developed a recurring problem with scenes sinking back into the curtain.  Sorry players, but we might have to throw some tape down during the next couple of rehearsals to retrain ourselves.  Folks can sometimes see this as minor but if there is a good scene, it is made so much more powerful when played closer to the audience.  There is also some work needed on the short form game of Slideshow.  We need the performers to take more control of the audience volunteer and the narrator needs to guide a story through several pictures.  I am still confident this game doesn’t need explanation to the audience member because half of the beauty is watching their reaction in a fast paced freeze frame environment.  For the narrator position, we need to remember the pictures/poses set the context of the scene, not the narrator prior to switching.  I’ll take responsibilities for this given I underestimated the need for strong rehearsal of this game.  We all need to continue working the mantra that no short form game is a throw-away.

The real push, however, is still needed with our straight characters.  Given a hectic rehearsal schedule and needing to learn the Debauchery format, we didn’t get a lot of time to work skill building exercises, but I suspect we will hit on this topic during the next two now that we are settled.  Oddities and scene elevation are only strong when there are characters in the environment who are not pulled into the craziness and continue to question the reality they are a part of.  Wait, we aren’t going to this movie to make out in the back?  The men actually like the rose pedals?  Why is this family so in to cats?  The normal is used to establish the abnormal and although they don’t typically get the laughs, they are the foundation of the scene.  We still have several instances of losing the straight characters into the abnormalities and over the next couple of rehearsals we will work on standing our ground and contributing through strong detail as well as creative oddities.

I would also like to continue adding discipline as a layer on top of our performances.  The performers did this well through focus on the stage wings and smoother transitions.  I still, however, want to emphasize player focus during transitions and make sure we apply it as a philosophy.  People are already leaving the theater recognizing our performer’s talent.  I want them to also leave astonished by access to professional improv in Anchorage, Alaska.   As always, awesome stand outs and room for improvement, but the big take away is the team is getting more intelligent and consistent in their scene work.  I’m excited to see our future work.  Continue on this journey with us friends!  There is more to come and big things in the future for Urban Yeti Improv.