Posted on Fri, Apr. 26, 2002
The fun of thinking on your feet
Improv classes are a chance to break from your identity and act
out
By Alan Lopez
STAFF WRITER
ALBANY - Though it was located in the same building as the Albany Library, a group of residents at the Albany Community Center Tuesday night were not really studying and were far from quiet.
They were practicing the finer points of comedic improvisational acting -- improv for short -- much of which apparently required mugging, hamming it up, yelling, a lot of laughing and other tomfoolery.
At one point, the 20 or so class members stood up and began to circle around the room, waving their arms and yelling -- all at the direction of the teacher and matriarch, Linda Patterson. She wouldn't have it any other way.
"People have more energy," Patterson said of the participants. "They come tired after work and leave high as a kite. It's just a lot of fun."
The Albany Recreation and Community Services department offers the class and it is taught by members of the East Bay Improv, a group of performers headed by Patterson.
Patterson got into improvisational acting at Laney College in Oakland while she was a graphic design artist 30 years ago.
She went on to study it at Hayward State and Stanford universities. From there, she studied with Paul Sills, creator of Chicago's famed Second City group as well as Calgary's International Improvisation School in Canada.
She brought the classes to Albany in 1994 and they were a hit. Albany leisure services offers beginning and intermediate and performance-level classes, with more in the works, including singing, a children's class and an on-stage combat class.
"All the good improv was going on in San Francisco, and I wanted something on our side of the Bay," said Patterson, "and I wanted something to create that I wish existed when I was learning improv."
The teachers and students say the classes are a fun way to relieve stress, and even build social skills.
"We work on learning the sort of rules of thumb of improv that help people make up these stories and scenes as they do them," said Dave Patterson, a teacher and Linda's son. "I think part of the reason students come back a lot is that some skills they learn with improv scenes help with public presentations and help with interactions and with changes at work and life," he said. "It lets you roll with the punches a little bit more and helps you think on your feet."
A key idea in improvisational scenes, playing one's status against others -- for example, a movie star versus a janitor -- has helped him in job interviews, he added.
"In my own experience, I've seen that in general what you want to do is play your status a hair below the person interviewing you," he said, adding that the class has helped people make friends, as well as help actors perform on the spot in auditions.
At the intermediate class Monday night, the students went through various improv games and exercise the likes of which people may have seen on the television show "Whose Line is It Anyway," a British import that airs on Comedy Central with an American version on ABC.
"'Whose Line' has been good to us ... before people thought we were in some weird drama cult," said Dave Patterson.
In one game, three actors made up a scene in which the same lines were read in different settings, for example, in an opera, sit-com, romance or gangster movie.
In another game, lines were traded between two people who started every line with a subsequent letter of the alphabet, from A to Z.
Before nearly every game, the students shouted a countdown from five to one, like a rocket was about to blast off. Applause and laughter often followed.
"It's a pretty scary concept initially if you're not used to getting in front of people," Lisa Key, a 28-year-old Oakland resident. "It's scary in concept to do it, but once you get up there, it's not difficult and it's personally very rewarding."
Students have a variety of reasons for joining the class, from having an itch to act, to just wanting to do something new, different and fun.
Rob Skinea, a 36-year-old computer animator, was sent to an improv class in Los Angeles by his job and found he loved it.
"I guess it gives me the opportunity to say and do stupid stuff I do all day except in an environment where it's socially acceptable to do that," said Skinea. "It's kind of a release because I pretty much go there and say anything, do anything, and nothing is wrong.
"I'm pretty introverted in general and it's really made me bring out my extrovert," added Key, who gained an interest in improv after seeing it done live and on television.
Though improv might seem unstructured, Dave Patterson said beginners have to learn a toolbox of improv techniques, genres and characters, before they can perform at an intermediate level.
"The beginning emphasizes the basics of improv like agreeing to the story other people are telling and being positive," he said. "When you're on-stage and people are looking at you, people tend to get kind of defensive and people deny what others are presenting."
Linda Patterson teaches the students how to create an environment as well as how to create a focus for the characters, what their hidden needs are, their emotional state and whether characters have particular quirks like an accent or a limp.
"A good improviser's job is to make everyone else look good on stage," said Linda Patterson. "If they do that, everything flies. No one improviser should be directing where the scene goes, it should happen layer by layer."
People who really get it may be invited to join the East Bay Improv performing group, which among other things, does one performance at 8 p.m. the first Saturday of the month at Albany's Cafe Eclectica, at 1309 Solano Avenue.
The classes and the performances will continue indefinitely, as long as it stays fun, which the Tuesday night class seems to be.
"Grown-ups don't get a lot of opportunities to play and it lets you play with different people and different backgrounds," said Dave Patterson. "It's kind of therapeutic to go out there to be a knight, a cowboy and a villain -- different characters in one night, it's kind of cathartic."
Reach Alan Lopez at 510-243-3578 or at alopez1@cctimes.com.
IMPROV CLASSES
WHAT: Improv classes offered by Albany Recreation and Community Services
WHEN: Various times and days
WHERE: The Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin Ave.
HOW MUCH: $80 to $115 for six sessions
INFORMATION: Call 510-524-9283