Photographs by Melissago
Tonight is the final Rawhide Presents: The Raw Harold at UCB and instead of again giving my break down of last weeks’ show (which was hilarious) and urging you not to miss it (there is nothing more I can do), I thought I would look at a few facets of the show I have not mentioned up until now, these are the performers and the director Chris Gethard.
Are you really sure that a floor can’t also be a ceiling?
– MC Escher
One of the reasons I feel so passionately about the Raw Harold is partly because, as a performer, seeing an experimental form such as the Raw Harold inspires me to experiment with my own improvisation and partly because most of the performers on stage are my contemporaries. I have worked with most of these performers, I have seen what they were capable of, and I have seen them fail in the past. This makes watching them excel that much more impressive. These are all talented performers, no doubt, but I have never seen them be so confident on stage.
Read on…
Getting on in my improv age, as well as my actual age, I have become less and less impressed in the cookie-cutter Harold. Del, from what I have read, never intended the Harold to be the end all be all in improv forms. It was a blueprint and it was up to the improvisers to build their Harold as they saw fit. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Harolds I see, day-to-day, class-to-class, Harold night-to-Harold night, are 8 semi-terrified performers performing someone else’s form without a sense of their ownership.
One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.
–Anton Chekhov
Then I took Chris Gethard’s 501 at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade last year and near the end of the class he threw us the keys to the Harold, telling us in no uncertain terms to make it our own. The result was a performance which we, in the class, termed the “Pink Harold”. It was ours, it was passionate, it was inventive, it was unwatchable. But it was during the Pink Harold that our class realized that with enough support, inevitable listening, and a heaping of group mind — you could do just about anything to a Harold or improv and have it work.
Chris Gethard’s Explosion class, performing under the name ‘The Raw Harold’, has perfected the explosion into something which is truly stage worthy. The class, split into two non-permanent teams by Gethard, opens with something which most closely resembles an organic opening. The group then slides into scenes. The scenes themselves look to loosely follow the Harold structure, but they also seem to follow the focus of the whole piece, rather than stay wed to scene centric themes.
Read on…
My current Improv 501 class at UCBNY, taught by Chris Gethard, has been busily working through keeping scenes real and our reactions truthful. Gethard is a huge proponent of keeping scenes as truthful as possible and the more I follow his direction, the more I find my scenes go beyond my abilities as an improviser into something much more profound. Playing my scenes as realistically as possible has given me a lot more confidence in taking the stage because while I may not always/ever have something funny to say, I will always be able to react truthfully to a situation.
Let’s not get caught trying to be funny.
Chris Gethard
However, the impulse to be “funny” in a scene is also very tempting. As any improviser can attest, a minute on stage without a laugh can feel like an eternity. I’ve been in class shows where we have “funnied” it up for an audience’s enjoyment at the detriment to our scenes. Unfortunately a lot of this “if you’re not getting laughs, you’re failing” comes from my own insecurities as a performer. We are performing improv comedy right? Comedy is about laughs? Laughs are about jokes? Without laughs you’re just two people in a big black box standing in front of an audience right?
Read on…