Fold it In

The Heart of Improv, Part V

This article is part of a series about improv. Start at the beginning here

Fold It In

Another aspect of Improv that holds wisdom for us all is the practice of folding it in.

Whatever enters our scene, we do our best to find a way to fold it in. This is inherently inclusive. Everyone, every idea is invited to the creative party. Inherently this mindset is: what an interesting surprise! How can I make this part of the scene? Arms wide open to all ideas.

That’s part of the mechanism of improv - divergent, initially unrelated ideas collide together in a joyful explosion of finding out, through the now moment revelations and emergences of the scene, how they’re connected.

It’s like some version of 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon. Different, totally unrelated ideas appear in early scenes, and then over the course of the set, many different facets of the connection between these concepts and all its implications is delightfully explored.

Fold Them In

This goes for people too. Even if we think wholeheartedly that someone on our team is a problem, we question this profoundly.

It is normal and natural to think various people are a problem at different stages, especially the newer we are to improv - nevertheless we aim to always ask ourselves what's going on for me, that that person is somehow "causing" me to have to experience. Then take responsibility for my own improv and learn how to be immune to that type of challenge. Take the homeopathic dose of an antidote to your own style’s limitations, learn from polarities.

We choose to take the opportunity to refine our own skills by embracing and diving in extra enthusiastically to work with "that guy". (Sometimes we're "that guy"). We make him/her/them into so not a problem, by playing with them in a way that we turn their perceived weakness into a strength.

We fold them in. We embrace who they are so hard that we turn it into a good thing, somehow, some way. We take it as our personal mission to work them into the dough, blend them into the sauce.

If you like this line of thought, no one says it better than Will Hines, so read this if you don’t know it yet: https://improvnonsense.tumblr.com/thatguy

Read the next post in this Improv series here. Start from the beginning here.

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Thumbnail image respectfully borrowed from The Wonderful Things You Will Be, by Emily Winfield Martin.