For just over a year now I've been performing with an improv comedy group at community theatres up and down the west side of the Puget Sound. I've been playing and teaching improv games longer than that but not by much.
Last Saturday I did my first bit that had me interpret a charade using song. There I stood under the stage lights, I could hear a pin drop before I began belting-out what ever came to me, rhyming where I could. I heard in my head, "wow you're loud, that's good" and I noticed I couldn't stop moving my body to the melodic words pouring forth from my mouth. It was if they were attached--the movement to the song and the song to the movement. I sang and I danced and became a showtune just like that.
When the game was first introduced in rehearsal it was said the charades wouldn't be able to be gotten. But I got it. It was incredible.
After the show it's customary for troupe members to line-up in the theatre lobby to see the audience members out. It is here someone inevitably stops to ask me about my background, but I haven't any. This time one person attempted to lead me, "You must have been in drama classes and theatre and all of that in school..." I try to let them down easy with a smiling head shake no. Invariably they try to save the conversation by saying they can't wait for the next show--even if it's going to be in a town as hour a way--that they are going to be there. Their eyes say so even.
It's weird, I'm an entertainer sometimes now. But how could I be with no degree or significant time training? How dare me. I guess I'm daring sometimes now...
The essay I wanted to write was about quitting. I had planned to quit after this very show, to tell my fellow troupe members at the dinner afterward that we usually go to together post-show that I was leaving the group, that I never liked performing, that what I liked was playing the games, with that group in particular, and creating things, but that the performance piece I didn't in fact, love.
The rest of the troupe members love performing. Not me. I could attend rehearsal my whole life and never set foot on stage and be as happy as a clam. What might be hard to understand is how could I not love something I'm good at? I have no idea how these things work.
As the universe would have it, there was no after-show dinner. Our show went late, there weren't any restaurants open, and several of us weren't in the mood to contend with a noisy bar.
But before that, in the greenroom during the show, I looked around at the lot of us and discovered what I did in fact love: these people. I felt such a tenderness for them as we stood around in that standard greenroom circle offering things up and poking at the cheese-meat-cracker-cookie tray in between. I adore this odd lot more than myself, and this realization came to me in the form of such an experience of letting them into me in that moment, it was as if the thought of leaving the troupe, never happened at all. I was warm with affinity and admiration for all of us then, even me, and I vowed to not forget again.
Update: in taking a closer look at how I show up on stage, not embodied but disassociated, while I "look great' I have determined that it is not in fact good for me to continue. That little still small voice that says stop ever so carefully is always the one to listen to and besides, the show goes on.
-mp