Comments on: Longform is not long, shortform is not short

By: Alexis Gallagher

Alexis Gallagher — Tue, 03 Jun 2014 03:57:00 +0000

Hi all,
Thanks to everyone for these various comments — the longer replies, the quick reactions, and the brickbats.
I’ve been busy with non-improv stuff over the last week but I’m certainly looking forward to following up on this hopefully today or tomorrow.
Alexis
p.s. I think it’s great we all care.

By: Jessica

Jessica — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 22:11:00 +0000

I work in the area of Creative Drama. Studied at the University of the Texas at Austin. In my focus, we have a term called ‘process drama’ where instead if teaching the usual 30 min or hour lesson plan, an objective is covered over several days. Usually capping off at three.
Maybe having clearer objective when discussing long form and short form would refine your purpose as an artist. Meaning I understand your need to define the two to establish history and provide foundations for your profession.
Also working in a field I have to ‘defend’ in the general public, I can relate to you instictful urgentcy to stir discussion among your colleages.
As a student of the theatre, I hear the words ‘long form’ and ‘short form’ and can assume all your conclusions from the get go.
For a seasoned improvisor, it could be dangerous however to specifically define these terms as everyone has a certain style and (hopefully) a developed way in which they work.
Perphaps it would be clear and more useful to discuss the manipulation of time in your work, and how that defines your profession as a whole. That is was sets it apart from all the others after all. Time is what makes your work unique. Everything like action and space is constant with any other branch within the theatre. But the use of time when improvising is could make or break that iching new idea waiting to be placed on a stage.
Thank you for your time.
Best and happy living,
Jessica
travisheights2@gmail.com

By: Jessica

Jessica — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 22:11:00 +0000

By: Roderick Millar

Roderick Millar — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 18:28:00 +0000

Dylan, I utterly agree with you.
Kaci, how well you have almost completely soaked up my own responses!
Alexis, you have inspired a very beautiful debate. What I would like you to nail, however, is what longform is in your view. It sounds as though longform and shortform improvisers could be sharing stages everywhere without either of them realising.

By: Marc

Marc — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 12:53:00 +0000

Amen, Kaci.

By: Kaci Beeler

Kaci Beeler — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 12:44:00 +0000

I got cut off!
To continue…
4) Great forms have so much more to them than a couple of people throwing out some ideas at a bar. Great forms are workshopped and continually tweaked and changed to evolve as the performers evolve. I don’t know why you throw form out with the bath water, but I think perhaps you must not have developed many of your own and taken them through a creative process to find the beauty and power in them.
5) At the end of the day, it’s a blank stage up there. We have the power to fill it with whatever we want. I’m going to continue to work on what excites me, to look for more and to draw deeper. I’m not going to try to imitate anyone else, because that’s not authentic work. I’m going to learn from others and adapt.
You are not from Chicago. You have your own point of view and ability to create. To ignore that, to ignore your own abilities to discover, just like some of the people in Chicago once did to come up with what you saw and liked, is to ignore the whole beauty and magic of creation. You’re not seeing the ROOTS, you’re only seeing the TREE, here.
Improv is a young artform. We have so much further to go with it. It’s time we stopped being blinded by terms and comparisons, and start looking to ourselves, our partners, and our audiences to develop the work that will be our Life.

By: Kaci Beeler

Kaci Beeler — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 12:40:00 +0000

Hi, I’m an improviser from Austin. Texas. I’ve been studying improv for over 8 years and I’ve traveled to over 25 cities around the world to teach, perform, learn, watch and generally continue to absorb as much improv as possible. You may think, “Improv from Austin? They must be working in a vaccuum??” There are 5 full-time improv theaters here. Over 30 different shows happen here every single week. We don’t take our work lightly, and we’re certainly never going to stop.
I was in Edinburgh last August, where I met some of the May Days and possibly even you while my group performed mostly 45-min long narratives or improvised plays or genre plays or whatever the fuck you want to call it at the Fringe for 3 weeks. We call what we do Narrative Improv to improvisers and Improvised Plays to audience members. It’s much, much deeper than all of that to *us*, the ones doing it, but that’s for us and our students and interested others to know if we have time for a good, long chat.
Okay. Here are my thoughts after trying to parse through your thoughts.
1) It’s not about “terms”. Terminology doesn’t make the work what it is or isn’t. It’s almost pointless to get in so deep with it. 95% of the non-improviser audiences who come to see improv don’t care to even know whether the work is shortform or longform, Johnstone-based, Del-based, UCB-based, Seattle-based, or Chicago-based.
And with good reason. It doesn’t actually matter.
Bad improv is bad in a lot of the same ways (people not listening to each other, being making weak choices and stopping themselves from committing to what they’re doing, etc, etc). Good improv is great in a lot of the same ways (very connected, rich and detailed, great ensemble work, etc, etc).
To break it out and say that any one style or form is intrinsicly better than another…is just…unfair and it feels like a very ignorant position to take – even though you cite places you’ve been, work you’ve seen, and styles you’ve tried to copy with varying degrees of success – I don’t buy it.
2) It’s about the work we do. Bottom line. It’s about how YOU find it best to connect with your stage partners. It’s about what YOU find compelling in your own work and the work of others you see. Just like the same paintings or films or plays or books don’t tickle the same people (opinions!), improv styles are rich and varied enough at this point where different people feel differently about them.
I don’t like sketch comedy all that much, so improv that is trying to be like sketch (like a lot of the work out of UCB in New York) doesn’t tickle me as much as improv that looks more like theatre. But I love great scripted theatre, so this makes sense to me. Can I still enjoy a UCB-style show? Yes! Can I still absolutely hate an unscripted improvised theatre piece? Yes!
Have I loved sketch comedy shows? Yes! Have I hated scripted plays I’ve seen? Fuck yes.
I have my own quirks into what I like, we all do.
As a creator of artistic work, I go for what I like, and then I finesse the shit out of it to see what works and what doesn’t. Just because I saw a few good shows from one place doesn’t mean that way of performing is The One True Way To Good Work. To believe that would be to ignore my own tastes, background, and ability to adapt and create. What’s good for other people, what works for other people, doesn’t always work for me.
3) You said, “Among other things, longform teaches a discipline of deep listening and identifying and developing implicit patterns in scenes, a discipline which allow you to create deep, funny, and interesting work that (as far as I know) cannot be improvised with other methods.”
Well, there’s no reason for me to get too riled up. Because I KNOW those same delightful traits can be improvised with other methods. I’ve seen amazingly connected short form. Impro Melbourne does some of the most beautiful and connected short form game work I’ve ever seen. If you’ve never seen Patti Stiles or Timothy Redmond in action, you’re missing out. They bring it hard, to whatever form they do. I’ve seen Narratives (improvised plays) built in the moment, take the audience on a journey where they laughed so hard they almost fell out of their seats in one portion of the show, and then the same characters and patterns shifted to put the audience on the verge of tears by the end. Amazing work, influenced by so many different theories, methods, and approaches that to NAIL it to one style would be a shame—because it was something all its own. Completely ephemeral and fleeting, like all that work we do. It was improvised. by those people. in that moment.
4) Great forms have so much more to them than a couple of people throwing out some ideas at a bar. Great forms are workshopped and continually tweaked and changed to evolve as the performers evolve. I don’t know why you throw form out with the bath water, but I think perhaps you must not have developed many of your own and taken them through a creative

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 11:43:00 +0000

For any improvisers who haven’t had the opportunity to see or be trained in longform improv, the definition is actually quite simple. Shortform is basically Who’s Line Is It Anyway type games. Longform is anything that is more than that. That includes narrative. Longform in its simplest form is a basic loose montage, up to its more complex forms such as the Deconstruction. Improvisers who assert that only some formats of longform improv are “real” longform (and inevitably they’re talking about the kind they prefer to perform) are just stroking their own ego or slighting improvisers who do formats that they don’t happen to care for, often by trivializing them with condescension: “It can be great fun!” They also might do this out of an unstated bias, such as having a bias toward game-of-the-scene type improv. Some improv conservatories teach game of the scene improv exclusively, with the result that their students can tend to have the limited view that only that kind of improv qualifies as longform improv. More experienced improvisers will tend to have a broader perspective of what longform improv is.