Breaking Tradition
I recently read The Second City Unscripted: Revolution and Revelation at the World-Famous Comedy Theater. It was a compilation of quotes from alumni of the theater, and it was an interesting read. One quote really struck me. Kelly Leonard, a former producer and vice president of The Second City said, “Tradition is about breaking up tradition.”
I love that sentiment. To me, the purest form of improv is taking the stage with no idea what’s about to happen. There are helpful guidelines that you can learn to have more success onstage. There are improv forms you can learn to get your troupe on the same page. But the biggest source of excitement and the thrill of improv is the danger of being surprised. In fact, the goal of improv is being surprised. If we as improvisers merely satisfy an audience’s expectations, we’ve failed. The goal is to subvert the audience’s expectations.
Improv is about pushing up against the walls and breaking convention. I love to innovate and create something that’s never been seen before and will never be seen again. When we first opened The Bit, we wanted to be a different kind of theater, but we found ourselves initially doing the same things that we’d seen before because we were used to them. It took a while to figure out that the reason we were struggling to grow toward the vision for our theater was because we were thinking traditionally instead of innovatively.
Once we decided to shuck tradition and create the way we wanted to create instead of the way we’d seen other people create, our path to growing the theater and nurturing our community became much clearer. The reason we didn’t initially see our path was because we hadn’t created it yet.
It’s not easy to break tradition. The familiar is comfortable. The familiar path is well-worn and much easier to walk down. But familiarity is the enemy of innovation, and improv demands innovation.
