At tonight's Improvised Improv Show, I had two improvisers; one primarily a stand-up who had compered the previous show (Laughing Horse Pick of the Fringe), and the other was a guy who might possibly have been on drugs... Unfortunately there was only one audience member and the other two felt like it was a waste of time and left!
My one audience member was Susanna (probably spelt differently) from the Netherlands, and I asked her what she would like for this very special one to one show, her choices were:
Teach her some improv
Do one man improv just for her
Try out some of my stand up that needed work
Do some of my slick polished stand up
Play some of my songs (I had my mandolin and uke with me)
Ditch the formalities and just have a chat.
During the course of the show we covered pretty much all of that list. I started off by giving her a copy of my album for being a good sport and deciding the show muss go on, and then said she could pick any song and I'd play it. She chose a track of mine called "I'm going to kill you", which she really seemed to enjoy and then asked me the inspiration behind it.
The inspiration is actually a set of sketches I wrote whilst at school, so I then proceeded to act out as much of them as I could remember, playing all the parts, mostly of terrible Italian stereotypes (which is okay as I'm a quarter Italian)!
After that I taught her some improv, starting with "Yes and" as an exercise:
We're in a swimming pool
Yes and it's a Turkish swimming pool
Yes and there's lots of Turkish people in the pool
Yes and there's one Albanian person
Yes and everybody's staring at him
Yes and that's because he's wearing an unusual bathing suit
Yes and it's got a union jack on it…
Then we played a few three line scenes where I showed her how to accept the reality of a scene, and finally I taught her Alphabet as it was pretty much the only simple game I could think of that doesn't require at least one other person in the room to play!
That brought us to the end of the show with just time to finish on a song (She chose Your Mother's Vagina - a crowd favourite), then I thanked her for coming, she thanked me for the show and then went back to her hostel ready to go back to London tomorrow for her last few days in the country.
I felt I gave areaway special performance tonight that Susanna will hopefully remember and maybe even be inspired by to seek out new shows and new improvisations. I certainly felt that I had passed the test I've always slightly feared doing The Improvised Improv Show - What do I do if I have an audience and no improvisers? The answer - I improvise!
Tonight I did it and it made me feel awesome...
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