Nice Weekend

So, pretty fun weekend. I got to spend a lot of time with the wife and The Boy, which is always a delight. Everything after that is just gravy. I did get to see, and more importantly, play in, some sweet improv. On Thursday night, I was able to see the new Pgraph show, Grimm, which is improvised fairy tales. This show was intriguing to me for a number of reasons. I'm always a sucker for Pgraph. They're easily one of my favorite troupes because of their mix of funny, smart and highly theatrical improv. Besides being technically superior performers who clearly delight in each other's company, they always seem to come up with great concepts, and the whole improvised fairy tale is a pretty good shtick. In fact, one of my classmates had suggested that as a genre for my class' performance work, but since it was already in play, we decided to go to a different direction. Class was another one of my pleasures, even though it was hard hard work. This week was our first class of Improv 601, long form narrative improv.

The genre we decided to work on during this class was "mistaken identity" themes in stories. We've definitely got some work ahead of us. I certainly felt myself struggling for strong choices in my scenes. I feel like I'm getting stuck on another plateau in my learning. While I'm a little worried about how long this plateau will last, I was encouraged to take the "Get Out of Your Head" workshop at Coldtowne on Sunday. A big part of the work was about getting rid of that inner judge ("did that opening just suck? do my scene partners think I'm a moron? why wasn't that funny?") in your mind that makes it really hard to get better at this stuff. The class was pretty fun and inspired me to take some classes at Coldtowne soon. Besides, they're New Orleans folks.

I also got to see Improv for Evil's Cochise retrospective and a Girls Girls Girls show. As always, those folks at Improv for Evil are super talented and delightful to watch. I do get the sense that they're pretty much ready to retire Cochise and move onto something new. GGG was solid too. I'm always in awe of the double whammy of narrative improv plus improvised singing. Those ladies are badasses.