Ah, it's been a while! So much has happened since my last posts. Blogging for me is something that happens when I REALLY WANT IT to happen. I have to wake up in a certain mood, wanting to do everything all at once.
I'm gonna let you in on a secret: the format for the blog editing has changed so I have no idea how to change any of the stuff on the side bar, but soon I'll figure it out. So for now, please realize the dates on the side are not actual upcoming shows, or they have passed.
Anyway, like I said, a SHITLOAD has happened since my last blog post. It's been almost exactly one year since I left GirlProv officially. I would like you to know that the group is now defunct, at least as far as I know.
My leaving the group had a lot to do with working through my anxiety and depression. I realized it wasn't the place for me. To me it became more about trying to herd cats than about improvising. And I say that meaning that's how I personally felt, not that anyone was a cat (and I love cats). Everyone else was enjoying themselves and cruising along but I was in a different headspace in terms of how the group should work and how we should move forward. As far as I could tell, I was the only one in it for advancement in improv; everyone else was doing it just for kicks. And there's nothing wrong with that. So, I resigned and took a long break from improv.
If my improv life were a book, these few months would have read like the pages after Edward left Bella in New Moon. So we'll skip ahead.
My improv career ramped back up in September/October. I auditioned for a group called EmuProv. The group was a new show idea coming out of Emu Theatre, a local and long-lived theatre company in Lawrence KS. I was selected to be part of a cast of 5 players and we performed one show. I had a fantastic time working with that group. The format was a bit tricky for me. We played short-form, but it was formatted exactly like Whose Line. By that I mean the characters, situations and sometimes emotions were given before we started a scene. For me, that was something new and old. I had seen it on Whose Line (obviously), but i had never done it before. It had no less entertainment value than any other improv format. I however was used to, and preferred, other improv formats I had done. For me performing like Whose Line took a lot of the exploration and discovery out of my hands. To be fair however, our director and much of the cast had very little improv experience so we did the best we could with what we had. All in all, it was lots of fun and I even made a few friends out of it. Yes!
A little while later, the first EmuProv director left town and decided to leave improv to the rest of Emu. I answered an email calling for directors, and I ended up as the director of EmuProv 2.0. Much of the original cast could not commit to another round, so I held auditions. During that process, I learned quite a few things. One of which is how important your personality is. You can be the most talented person in the room but if you have an ego or intentionally disrespect the director or the process, you're not likely to be cast. That I think though is a piece for another entry altogether. At any rate, I went on to direct and appear in two more successful shows, one of which happened the night before I left for New Zealand. I miss EmuProv a ton and I wish they could have all come to NZ with me and we'd hang out and drink American beer and perform some improv without jumping through hoops. Because we're cool.
So that brings me to now. I'm in New Zealand and I'm getting my feet wet in the improv scene here. More to come on that, lemme tell ya.
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