Free Improvisation is Free for a Reason
There is a reason why Free Improvisation is free. Because there is no way I will ever pay money to see free improvisation again. I'd never seen any before and I managed to finally catch some last night.
Free improvisation is well, free. No rules. Dance, dialogue, happening, it's all there and it's all very serious. Se--Ri-Ous.
I now understood why there are divisions in art. There are dancers, and singers, and actors, script writers, and comedians. Some people can dance well, some can write well, some can improvise well. But it is impossible to do all these things well at the same time. I saw a man and a woman, clearly on the other side of 40, frollicking around the stage like two 5 year olds, making blubbering nonsense noises, throwing bodies around in big motions, tell a pointless story, and destroy a microphone. Frankly, I would have preferred to watch 5 year olds do the same things. At least they would have done it with joyous childful abandon.
You know that a piece of theater is bad when the artist halfway through his "routine" stops to tell the audience that this is, in fact, an improvisation. Duh! As if we couldn't tell that from the half-arsed unstructured mess that we had just witnessed.
1 comment:
That piece of theatre you saw souds less than wonderful, though I think it would be rash to write of all forms of improvisation because of it.
We saw that improv comedy show, Centralia, in NYC a while back and I remember both of us laughing our assess off. It seems like the problem with the one you saw is its seriousness.
Mind you, I later saw another piece of improv theatre in NYC because I was so impressed with Centralia. Unfortunately, it was crap. Really crap. Even though it was trying to be funny. So maybe on the whole, your conclusion holds: libre improvisation should be gratis.
-- Mark
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