Welcome to the home of Musical Improvised Comedy
We are Heather Urquhart and Joe Samuel and we have been teaching and performing musical improvised comedy for 10 years. This site contains some of our stories, blogs, pictures and podcasts relating to our experiences with musical improv comedy. We hope you enjoy the site. We would be delighted to hear any feedback or questions you might have. Please email us at openyourmouthandsing@gmail.com if you want to find out more. To subscribe to our podcasts, click here. Rss Feed
Shows
Making up songs in the moment can add that unique personal touch to your event. Whether it is breaking the ice when people are first meeting, or providing that unforgettable end of conference show, we can make sure people are talking about your event for years to come.
We regularly perform with The Maydays and can put on a full show for you. See their website for more details.
We regularly perform with The Maydays and can put on a full show for you. See their website for more details.
Training
We offer musical improvised comedy workshops to people of any age or ability. Taking people up to their own line of fear, and then allowing them to gently step over it is our main aim. We try to provide a supportive, joyous and safe environment for anyone to explore their own creativity and skills, but also to be aware of working as a group, listening and responding to other people’s offers and supporting other people on their own journey.
We believe that musical improvised comedy provides a springboard for people to improve their self confidence, communication skills, leadership and teamwork skills.
We have facilitated many workshops for business and corporate teams to help them work together more effectively and learn to trust and support each other in a business environment.
We offer 10 week courses, weekend workshops and single sessions and are happy to tailor our workshop to your needs. If you are interested in finding out more, please get in touch using any of the contact details below.
We would love to hear your feedback or answer any questions you may haven about musical improvised comedy so do please get in touch.
openyourmouthandsing@gmail.com
www.musicalimprovcomedy.co.uk
www.joesamuel.co.uk
www.themaydays.co.uk
We believe that musical improvised comedy provides a springboard for people to improve their self confidence, communication skills, leadership and teamwork skills.
We have facilitated many workshops for business and corporate teams to help them work together more effectively and learn to trust and support each other in a business environment.
We offer 10 week courses, weekend workshops and single sessions and are happy to tailor our workshop to your needs. If you are interested in finding out more, please get in touch using any of the contact details below.
We would love to hear your feedback or answer any questions you may haven about musical improvised comedy so do please get in touch.
openyourmouthandsing@gmail.com
www.musicalimprovcomedy.co.uk
www.joesamuel.co.uk
www.themaydays.co.uk
Joe Samuel
Joe Samuel is a classically trained pianist and violinist having studied music at Royal Holloway University of London. He has been a professional musician for 15 years, playing in a variety of successful bands on both his electric violin and on keyboard. He teaches piano, theory, harmony, composition and music technology ‘A’ level as well as teaching musical improvisation and comedy. Joe Samuel has been the musical director of the long running sketch comedy show, ‘The Treason Show’ in Brighton for 6 years. He is also the musical director of ‘The Maydays’ improvisation group as well as being guest musical director for a number of other improvisation projects in Brighton and London. Joe’s interest in harmony and analysis has also led him to discovering a new way of teaching and understanding chords and harmony, and he now runs a project called SeeChord which helps students, teachers and songwriters hone their skills. SeeChord.com is the hub of this project.
Heather Urquhart
Heather trained in physical theatre and has worked in touring theatre for the past several years including an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Agent” and “Soutterain” a site specific adaptation of Orpheus of the Underworld plus a range of TIE and street theatre work. For the last three years Heather has been a member of the team on the Treason show, a BAFTA nominated sketch show. Her first brush with Improv was 10 years ago working with “Kepow” and Kevin Tomlinson and for the last three years has been a performer and Director with the Maydays. The Maydays were winners of the award for best comedy show in the Brighton festival in 2007 and have performed for audiences, and trained improvisers all over the country, even going to Chicago to train at the IO theatre in 2008.
Joe’s Improv Trip
I trained as a classical musician on the piano and violin. I am also blessed with perfect pitch which is the ability to recognise notes by ear. The huge advantage this gives is that if there is a tune I know, I can immediately play it, without having to work anything out. So as a child, improvisation was normal, natural and unsurprising to me.
However, improvisation was not seen as normal and natural when I was first taught to play. Great emphasis was put on reading music, and playing the music of the masters as perfectly as possible, a skill that I derive huge joy from, but nonetheless one that is governed by objective judgements and unrealistic expectations. Nobody can play these pieces perfectly, nor should they. All of these great masterpieces were originally composed by someone sitting down and improvising. Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Liszt and numerous other piano giants were renowned for their improvisation skills, and the pieces that we have today, meticulously preserved and worshipped are a snapshot of their evolution. Many pieces were returned to and amended, entire sections left open for individual interpretation and passages cut and swapped around. So why then are musicians often so scared of playing without music?
The same can be said for actors. It struck me recently that we all improvise continuously in our everyday lives. We are natural, fluent, funny and tragic without the slightest conscious effort as we interact with others throughout the day. However, take two people and ask them to improvise a naturalistic scene, and all kinds of conscious processes suddenly interrupt the flow of dialogue and suddenly a scene can become stilted and unrealistic. If only we could be as uninhibited with singing as we are when we are using our voice normally. Imagine the sound of a piercing laugh, swooping through very high and loud registers with great ease. Now ask that same person to sing in a loud high voice, and they will often produce a nervous, self-conscious sound instead.
* * *
I don’t remember a time when I was not playing the piano. I have recollections of learning, which are echoed to me now by my son learning. As for performance, my history is chequered. I remember performing ‘Memory’ from Cats on my violin in a church hall, but I must have been 9 by then. The first time I remember improvising was at a residential adventure week when I must have been 10 or so. There was a piano there and all the boys wanted to hear me play the theme from Star Wars. I remember playing the basic theme and then playing around with it a little. This was probably also the first time I realised that I could do things that other people could not, and this could be useful. I remember their amazement that I could summon tunes from seemingly nowhere and play them.
Although improvisation was still a part of my playing through school, I did not consider its importance until I was at University. Here I met other musicians who were interested in finding out what happened if you got together and just played. The results were usually akin to much ‘modern’ jazz to the untrained ear, a lot of notes and not much sense of cohesion. However, on a few occasions we did manage to hit the same groove and when that happened, the improvisation bug started to bite for real. We quickly realised that totally free improvisation was generally not satisfying, and that imposing a structure would give the music a chance to develop. We would then come up with a simple chord sequence or feel for our piece and improvise within that. It seems a little strange to me and somewhat profound that the most satisfying improvisation comes from a predetermined structure. Does this mean that freedom is more gratifying when you know your limitations?
Performance to an audience is a huge and integral part of being a performer. Performing in public is a source of great fear for many performers, and this fear can ebb and flow throughout a performer’s career, sometimes recurring at the most unlikely moments. At university I was part of a piano quintet (string quartet plus piano). I was playing 1st violin and it was part of our course to perform. We chose ensemble performance, although we had to resurrect the unit from the syllabus as no one had attempted it for many years. The end of year performance was the most nerve wracking performance of my life. We played Shostakovich’s string Quintet in a serene picture gallery to a small but very important group of people including family, friends and examiners. The performance went very well but the nerves nearly got the better of me before we went on. I felt sick and faint and would have done anything to get out of there. I have often thought it unfair that athletes or sportspersons can do what is most natural at times of nervousness-fight or flight. I yearn to be able to release nerves in a mad competitive sprint over 100 metres. Alas for the musical or stage performer, this is not (usually) an option. We must learn to control nerves to such an extent that we are able to perform very delicate and dextrous manoeuvres.
Teaching Teaching was something I always claimed I would never do. When I was at school, the idea of being a teacher was hideous to me. My stock phrase was ‘I won’t be any good at it’. I started teaching piano reluctantly as a way of earning money. I only had one pupil to begin with, but things quickly picked up until I was snowed under with piano and keyboard lessons. I was shocked at how much teaching taught me. Having to explain processes and techniques that were second nature to me taught me to deconstruct many habits and preconceptions. I also found out that my knowledge of jazz technique and harmony was nowhere near the level it needed to be. It was teaching that made me study harmony at a deeper level, and ultimately lead me to the discovery of harmony through SeeChord. I use improvisation as a core part of my piano teaching. Learning to read music is the same as learning a new language. It is important when trying to find your way round Paris to be able to understand the signs on the Metro, but reading ability is useless when trying to order a coffee. I find that often, this aural aspect of music is ignored, or at best squeezed into the aural test section of exams. I find that students learn how melody and harmony work when improvising. They have to really listen to the music they are making and so discover what works and what doesn’t. We explore different chord patterns, scales and melodies without the difficulty of interpreting written music. The blues is often a great place to explore all of these things, with the added bonus that with little skill, you can make an authentic blues sound.
My teaching has now extended to improvisation. One of the most important themes of improvisation is commitment and when teaching improv, this theme comes back time and time again. If you are stuck in a scene or a song that does not seem to be working, then massive over-commitment will often mean you can fly out of trouble. Student shows or showcases inevitably have some moments when things are not going so well, and the times I have been most impressed are when someone steps up to the plate and wallops an improv home run by over-selling a song. I do remember in one performance there was a ‘Hoedown’. A brave move for any improv troupe, but for a first performance this was an act of sheer madness. However, it came off brilliantly, especially when one of the students froze on their line and so sung, ‘Blah blah blah blah’ very loudly. This admission of failure, accompanied by total unashamed commitment was one of the highlights of the evening for me and the audience.
The Maydays
Improvisation was never something I anticipated doing professionally. I was not aware that there was a comedy improv scene in Brighton until Heather and Katy Schutte performed in ‘The Treason Show’, a long running comedy sketch show that I am the musical director for. After a few months working together, Heather and Katy sidled up to me at my keyboard and asked if I would be interested in coming to a Maydays rehearsal. I admit I had not heard of The Maydays, but it sounded intriguing and so I said yes. I remember walking into the room and seeing 10 people sitting in a circle on chairs, and just thinking to myself, ‘Let’s just go for it’. I had no real idea of what previous musicians had done, and had no experience myself, but it all seemed to come pretty naturally, and before I knew it (and after the painful and embarrassing initiation ceremony), I was enrolled. Finally here was a constructive outlet for all the years of closet improvisation. From that moment I have begun to appreciate the real power of improvising. There is no time to be critical of yourself, no time to worry about wrong notes or bad songs. They all come and go relentlessly, and I am learning not to judge them individually.
At the start I was concerned that I would not be able to come up with enough ‘songs’, or that I would not be able to think of a good chord sequence at the right time. In fact, for my first few gigs I had a sheet of paper with some pre-prepared chord patterns to fall back on in the event of a blank. I soon realised that this was a huge distraction from watching and listening to the action on stage. Now I prefer to rely on myself for inspiration. Many of the songs and tunes I play are similar to each other. How could they not be? After all, most of the tonal music we hear is based on a few simple rules, and there are only so many chords and progressions that we can use when performing songs, without going totally ‘off piste’ (which I also enjoy!).
I find it far more satisfying to leave the conscious musical part of my brain behind, and just play when the moment comes. A single note is enough to lead into a song. One chord is all that is needed to set a mood. One rhythm enough to set a tempo. Many of my songs have very repetitive motifs or patterns and I find that this helps to pin down the ‘feel’ of a piece of music. A good exercise in improvisation is to take just one set of notes, not even a full scale, just two or three notes, and to explore how they interact with each other. Simplicity provides the framework around which more complex patterns can be added.
Perfect pitch is an essential part of the way I improvise. I can only marvel at performers who can play without perfect pitch, as I have no idea how they find their way round harmonies and melodies without it. There have been times when my perfect pitch has been rendered useless; for example when playing a keyboard that has been transposed. In this instance, what I am playing is different to what I am expecting to hear, and so I instinctively try to compensate by playing the notes I want to hear next. As those notes are also transposed, I end up travelling through different keys, without ever finding home. It is very disorientating. I can only liken it to trying to write on a keyboard where all the letters have been moved one to the left. In trying to catch up with what is appearing on screen, the letters move again. Typing becomes impossible.
However, I can obviously analyse what I play as a result of the way I improvise and gain insight into the chord patterns I like and use. Much of this is explained by my method of harmony analysis called SeeChord, which enables you to see the chords represented on a chart. Find out more at seechord.co.uk.
There are many times as an improviser that you find yourself in a strange gig in a strange place with some strange people. There are too many examples of this to recount here, but there are a couple that I remember with fond embarrassment. We did a short-form improv slot as part of a stand up night in London. It was only 15 minutes, but it seemed to go on forever. There were only a handful of people in the audience, and they had already endured some very mediocre comedy. We came on and tried a couple of games, but the audience was not really on our side. A few poor scenes later and things were beginning to look really bad. Next up was ‘World’s worst’. I settled back into my chair behind my keyboard to watch. Then, horror of all horrors, one of the group announced that for this game, I was going to join in, and invited the audience to loudly welcome me to the stage. I had no choice, so found myself in the firing line for world’s worst (aptly named on this occasion). Thankfully I do not recall what I did, but I do remember thinking that I should commit, and remember writhing around on the floor for some of it. Suffice to say it was not our greatest night, but I do now know what it is like to have a room full of people waiting to hear your comedy gold, and having nothing to say.
Since starting to work with improvisers, actors and comedians there has been a sense that improvisation will have its day in the not too distant future. There are many persuasive arguments for this such as its popularity in America, the power of improv in business and improv as therapy. However, the dream of having improvisation centres, weekly shows and bulging audiences still seems a long way off. Improvisation still sits enviously behind stand-up and sketch comedy, waiting for the spotlight. I have no doubt that there is a growing tide of improvisation, and there are now a few shows that are touring and making careers outside of the comfortable world of Whose Line is it Anyway. Whatever the future, and whenever the tidal wave of improv hits the shores of comedy, I want to make sure that I am there. I hope you are too.
Heather’s Improv Trip
A couple of years ago, I took a teaching job teaching Drama for ‘young people’. It happened to be in the exact same hall that I had taken my first out of school drama classes almost twenty years ago. When I stepped into the room and took the class for the kids who were probably the same age as I had been, I looked at their faces and saw me looking back. I was right back there and I remembered everything I had felt when I first started doing this kind of work and the excitement and inspiration it gave me. I knew I was totally hooked when I got my first major role in the school play as Agathe, the blind girl who befriends the Monster in Frankenstein. I had been playing the role with my eyes closed, but the director encouraged me to keep my eyes open and just ‘be blind.’ I was amazed to discover that I could actually do this, and it was the first time I realised the powerful nature of transforming yourself as performer, finding a way to be in another person’s skin and convey that to an audience.
My life as an actor has been made up of an extremely random collection of jobs that have mostly tended towards the comedic side. However, a few years ago I was touring a play which was an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s ‘The secret agent.’ It’s a very dense and political piece and I was playing the only female role. I had been cast opposite a now very good friend of mine Dave Mountfield. He was playing my husband, but it was a long time since either of us had played a serious role. Despite the serious nature of the material - I won’t give away the end for you – we had an absolute blast on that tour. On drives up we would quite often run the lines with stupid accents or as if we drunk etc etc. I do believe that the skills I had developed from improvisation fed into my performance and made it more rich and real than anything I had done before. A major part of the story takes place at the Greenwich observatory and the tour took us to the Greenwich theatre just around the corner. That was the first time I managed to cry real tears onstage with no onions or tearsticks!
When I was training to be an actress I opted to study physical theatre as a Higher National Diploma. One day an outside teacher came in to take a workshop in something called improvisation. I had done lots of devised theatre by that point but this was the first time that I had been introduced to the idea that just ‘making stuff up’ could be used as a performance piece in itself. I remember vividly playing the game ‘what happens next’ with me as the puppet. It involved me being pimped* to eat a hot dog which kept growing larger and larger which I dutifully did, not realising that it also appeared that I was engaged in a sex act. The whole class were in stitches (I totally accept that they may have been laughing at me rather than with me!) but I had suddenly found my true calling. I was put on this earth to play. The teacher was the very talented Kevin Tomlinson, who is a gifted improviser and has worked Keith Johnstone and many others all over the world. After class, Kevin had been so impressed by my inability to be embarrassed and downright love for making myself look stupid that he invited me to come and work with him at Kepow! Theatre (a theatre sports based improv group).
My first improv show was with Kepow at the Edinburgh festival. We were doing a show called ‘The game of love’ at the Pleasance. The format of the show was that each of us (it was a three hander) were competing to win the love of the audience. We’d get love hearts if we did well and forfeits if we did ‘badly’. The victor would win a Polaroid photo of them with the audience and sleep with it under the pillow that night. We tried to make the forfeits fresh and very real. Once I had to call my dad up during the show from the stage on speakerphone and apologise for being a bad improviser and failing him as a daughter. That was a great moment, everyone in the audience said hello to my dad over the phone and even though I was phoning to confess how rubbish I was, I could tell he was really proud. That’s when I learned the lesson of embracing your mistakes and finding the joy in failure.
The first time The Maydays performed as part of the Paramount comedy festival will always hold a special place in my heart. At that time we were doing a show called ‘Mayday the Musical!’ This involved taking the title of a fictional musical from a member of the audience and running with that idea, totally freeform for an hour. The title we got was ‘Oceanic Sci-fi’ and by all accounts it was a (technically) terrible show. There were plot holes, things that didn’t make sense, ridiculous choreography and, I’d imagine, awful singing, but it was also packed with joy. That show happened before we went to Chicago, when we were running longform shows blindly without really knowing anything about what we were doing, but I always take from it the fact that charm and stupidity can get you a long way.
After many years I have seen and done lots of different types of Improv. In my mind the most fun I have ever had watching improv, is watching ‘Baby wants candy’. I first saw them at the Apollo in Chicago doing the show that we had based ‘Mayday the musical!’ on. The title, suggested by our very own George Birtwell of the maydays was ‘The way you Einstein me’ and what followed was a jaw-droppingly perfect musical set in Transylvania complete with singing bats, love stories and immaculate comedy timing. I had similar experiences every time I saw a new troupe in Chicago and suddenly realised just what was possible in improv and how imaginative you can be. For music though, nothing beats ‘Baby wants Candy’ for inspiration.
When I first started teaching drama it was a way for me to make money when I wasn’t acting. Enjoyable, but a substitute for what I really wanted to be doing. Teaching improv however has never left me feeling like this. I am totally addicted to making people fall in love with improvisation. You heard it here first – I am a pusher of improvisation and I don’t feel guilty. It feels like selling pure happiness. I love working with skilled singers and experienced improvisers, but nothing is more satisfying that watching someone sing badly and brilliantly with total commitment. That is somewhere between terror, excitement and disbelief. Lots of people I teach who previously thought that they couldn’t sing are so liberated by the experience that they go on to do all kinds of things they thought they’d never be able to do. One of my ex students, the brilliant Lynne Thomas was tricked into doing a beginners improv course by her then lodger who also neglected to tell her that there was a show at the of the course. 5 ten week courses later, Lynne is in an improv troupe of her own and last year sang at a local street party in front of loads of people, something she said she’d never do. I cried that time too!
The Maydays are really lucky to have helped nurture an improv community in Brighton, where we are from and we’re always trying to encourage people to just get out there and do it. One of the troupes we spawned, the Heehas, regularly put on shows for people in their own homes – ‘Dial a comedy’ – look them up and get them round to yours! The countless end of course showcases that happen and the atmosphere at those shows is total magic. The Maydays have taught music weekends for some time now but when Joe and I were lucky enough to teach the first 10 week music course that resulted in a show, I thought the roof might actually come off the theatre. At one point, the whole audience, daughters, sons, partners, even grannies were singing along to the chorus of the improvised hit ‘let’s fist again like we did last summer.’
I’d also like to mention the unsung heroes of The Maydays Thursday night drop in class. At the time of writing, the class has been going for seven years. Every week is a combination of people who may be there for the first time and are dipping their toe with trepidation into the improv water, and veterans of the class who have been attending on and off (sometimes with long gaps) for seven years. Some of these guys have never done a public show and have no interest in showing off to the wider world but if you want to see a great show, go to the drop in class, take part and you’ll see some of the best improv there is to see.
I talked before about my time studying in Chicago. A few of us went to do the summer intensive at the ‘IO’ theatre there run by Charna Halpern, author of a brilliant book called truth in comedy and the partner of the late great Del Close whose ashes sit in the IO theatre itself. There I was lucky to see the best improv in the world and work with some fantastic teachers. I was blown away by the long running Armando Diaz experience, and the incredible skill of the improvised Shakespeare. Like I said before, these improvisers made me realise the breadth of what was possible. So many styles and so many forms and I hope I’ll keep pushing boundaries and help to invent stuff myself. Since then we’ve tried to get some of the teachers over to the UK to work with both us and our students over here. We’ve had Bill Arnett the master of the pinch-ouch, Jay Rhoderick ‘Put your hands on it’ and of course Nancy Howland-Walker and Marshall C. Stern who inspired this book’s existence in the first place. My biggest influences though are the Maydays themselves who I am lucky enough to work closely with all the time. We are all passionate about learning and being the best we can be at what we do. It’s always good to take the opportunity of working with people you feel slightly in awe of and whenever I am at a rehearsal I feel really lucky to work with such and wonderfully weird and talented bunch.
Improv is still such a relatively unknown art form in this country that I and the Maydays often find ourselves doing the most random gigs in the most bizarre of places. Top three in ascending order so far were:
3. The centenary celebration of the Weald Horticultural Society, a packed marquee with lots of songs involving vegetables.
2. A show in a nightclub organised by the banking company that sponsor the England rugby team performed to the sports press. The twist being that we were onstage WITH members of the rugby team. Nick Easter was hilarious and I was paired with a player by the name of Doddie Weir. Doddie is about 6’8’. I am 5’1’. That’s just funny.
1. We did a show for the Norfolk Diocese – about 500 vicars. It was during that show that I had my proudest rhyming moment, rhyming holy with guacamole during a love song we improvised for two vicars who had met over a church buffet.
More recently, I had my strangest and most rewarding teaching experience. I had been in email contact about doing a workshop in a mental health facility. The brief was very open, I was to focus on team building and confidence and there would be support workers there to help me. Normally I teach with other people but this time I would be alone – I was a little apprehensive but I said yes and committed. When I was picked up, the contact started telling me how grateful she was for agreeing to the workshop. ‘Most people are too scared to come here and do this kind of thing’ she said. Moments later, we were driven through several security gates, I was body searched for sharp objects and ushered into a room with the participants, their support workers and their radio alarms in case anyone became violent. It was a high security prison containing individuals who have been diagnosed as too unwell to go through the normal prison system. During most of the workshop the thought going through my head was, ‘I wonder how many of these people have killed someone?’, but what I saw was warmth and humour from a room of people who all seemed quite timid at first. When we played the game ‘Hello as if’ one of their suggestions was to say hello as if they were being discharged from the hospital that day. I wasn’t sure at the time if I should take the suggestion as I saw the support workers looking at each other nervously but I did and moments later everyone was bouncing around the room joyfully sing-songing the word hello. I was extremely moved that day and realised just how freeing improv can really be.
As for the future?
More, more, more I say.
I trained as a classical musician on the piano and violin. I am also blessed with perfect pitch which is the ability to recognise notes by ear. The huge advantage this gives is that if there is a tune I know, I can immediately play it, without having to work anything out. So as a child, improvisation was normal, natural and unsurprising to me.
However, improvisation was not seen as normal and natural when I was first taught to play. Great emphasis was put on reading music, and playing the music of the masters as perfectly as possible, a skill that I derive huge joy from, but nonetheless one that is governed by objective judgements and unrealistic expectations. Nobody can play these pieces perfectly, nor should they. All of these great masterpieces were originally composed by someone sitting down and improvising. Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Liszt and numerous other piano giants were renowned for their improvisation skills, and the pieces that we have today, meticulously preserved and worshipped are a snapshot of their evolution. Many pieces were returned to and amended, entire sections left open for individual interpretation and passages cut and swapped around. So why then are musicians often so scared of playing without music?
The same can be said for actors. It struck me recently that we all improvise continuously in our everyday lives. We are natural, fluent, funny and tragic without the slightest conscious effort as we interact with others throughout the day. However, take two people and ask them to improvise a naturalistic scene, and all kinds of conscious processes suddenly interrupt the flow of dialogue and suddenly a scene can become stilted and unrealistic. If only we could be as uninhibited with singing as we are when we are using our voice normally. Imagine the sound of a piercing laugh, swooping through very high and loud registers with great ease. Now ask that same person to sing in a loud high voice, and they will often produce a nervous, self-conscious sound instead.
* * *
I don’t remember a time when I was not playing the piano. I have recollections of learning, which are echoed to me now by my son learning. As for performance, my history is chequered. I remember performing ‘Memory’ from Cats on my violin in a church hall, but I must have been 9 by then. The first time I remember improvising was at a residential adventure week when I must have been 10 or so. There was a piano there and all the boys wanted to hear me play the theme from Star Wars. I remember playing the basic theme and then playing around with it a little. This was probably also the first time I realised that I could do things that other people could not, and this could be useful. I remember their amazement that I could summon tunes from seemingly nowhere and play them.
Although improvisation was still a part of my playing through school, I did not consider its importance until I was at University. Here I met other musicians who were interested in finding out what happened if you got together and just played. The results were usually akin to much ‘modern’ jazz to the untrained ear, a lot of notes and not much sense of cohesion. However, on a few occasions we did manage to hit the same groove and when that happened, the improvisation bug started to bite for real. We quickly realised that totally free improvisation was generally not satisfying, and that imposing a structure would give the music a chance to develop. We would then come up with a simple chord sequence or feel for our piece and improvise within that. It seems a little strange to me and somewhat profound that the most satisfying improvisation comes from a predetermined structure. Does this mean that freedom is more gratifying when you know your limitations?
Performance to an audience is a huge and integral part of being a performer. Performing in public is a source of great fear for many performers, and this fear can ebb and flow throughout a performer’s career, sometimes recurring at the most unlikely moments. At university I was part of a piano quintet (string quartet plus piano). I was playing 1st violin and it was part of our course to perform. We chose ensemble performance, although we had to resurrect the unit from the syllabus as no one had attempted it for many years. The end of year performance was the most nerve wracking performance of my life. We played Shostakovich’s string Quintet in a serene picture gallery to a small but very important group of people including family, friends and examiners. The performance went very well but the nerves nearly got the better of me before we went on. I felt sick and faint and would have done anything to get out of there. I have often thought it unfair that athletes or sportspersons can do what is most natural at times of nervousness-fight or flight. I yearn to be able to release nerves in a mad competitive sprint over 100 metres. Alas for the musical or stage performer, this is not (usually) an option. We must learn to control nerves to such an extent that we are able to perform very delicate and dextrous manoeuvres.
Teaching Teaching was something I always claimed I would never do. When I was at school, the idea of being a teacher was hideous to me. My stock phrase was ‘I won’t be any good at it’. I started teaching piano reluctantly as a way of earning money. I only had one pupil to begin with, but things quickly picked up until I was snowed under with piano and keyboard lessons. I was shocked at how much teaching taught me. Having to explain processes and techniques that were second nature to me taught me to deconstruct many habits and preconceptions. I also found out that my knowledge of jazz technique and harmony was nowhere near the level it needed to be. It was teaching that made me study harmony at a deeper level, and ultimately lead me to the discovery of harmony through SeeChord. I use improvisation as a core part of my piano teaching. Learning to read music is the same as learning a new language. It is important when trying to find your way round Paris to be able to understand the signs on the Metro, but reading ability is useless when trying to order a coffee. I find that often, this aural aspect of music is ignored, or at best squeezed into the aural test section of exams. I find that students learn how melody and harmony work when improvising. They have to really listen to the music they are making and so discover what works and what doesn’t. We explore different chord patterns, scales and melodies without the difficulty of interpreting written music. The blues is often a great place to explore all of these things, with the added bonus that with little skill, you can make an authentic blues sound.
My teaching has now extended to improvisation. One of the most important themes of improvisation is commitment and when teaching improv, this theme comes back time and time again. If you are stuck in a scene or a song that does not seem to be working, then massive over-commitment will often mean you can fly out of trouble. Student shows or showcases inevitably have some moments when things are not going so well, and the times I have been most impressed are when someone steps up to the plate and wallops an improv home run by over-selling a song. I do remember in one performance there was a ‘Hoedown’. A brave move for any improv troupe, but for a first performance this was an act of sheer madness. However, it came off brilliantly, especially when one of the students froze on their line and so sung, ‘Blah blah blah blah’ very loudly. This admission of failure, accompanied by total unashamed commitment was one of the highlights of the evening for me and the audience.
The Maydays
Improvisation was never something I anticipated doing professionally. I was not aware that there was a comedy improv scene in Brighton until Heather and Katy Schutte performed in ‘The Treason Show’, a long running comedy sketch show that I am the musical director for. After a few months working together, Heather and Katy sidled up to me at my keyboard and asked if I would be interested in coming to a Maydays rehearsal. I admit I had not heard of The Maydays, but it sounded intriguing and so I said yes. I remember walking into the room and seeing 10 people sitting in a circle on chairs, and just thinking to myself, ‘Let’s just go for it’. I had no real idea of what previous musicians had done, and had no experience myself, but it all seemed to come pretty naturally, and before I knew it (and after the painful and embarrassing initiation ceremony), I was enrolled. Finally here was a constructive outlet for all the years of closet improvisation. From that moment I have begun to appreciate the real power of improvising. There is no time to be critical of yourself, no time to worry about wrong notes or bad songs. They all come and go relentlessly, and I am learning not to judge them individually.
At the start I was concerned that I would not be able to come up with enough ‘songs’, or that I would not be able to think of a good chord sequence at the right time. In fact, for my first few gigs I had a sheet of paper with some pre-prepared chord patterns to fall back on in the event of a blank. I soon realised that this was a huge distraction from watching and listening to the action on stage. Now I prefer to rely on myself for inspiration. Many of the songs and tunes I play are similar to each other. How could they not be? After all, most of the tonal music we hear is based on a few simple rules, and there are only so many chords and progressions that we can use when performing songs, without going totally ‘off piste’ (which I also enjoy!).
I find it far more satisfying to leave the conscious musical part of my brain behind, and just play when the moment comes. A single note is enough to lead into a song. One chord is all that is needed to set a mood. One rhythm enough to set a tempo. Many of my songs have very repetitive motifs or patterns and I find that this helps to pin down the ‘feel’ of a piece of music. A good exercise in improvisation is to take just one set of notes, not even a full scale, just two or three notes, and to explore how they interact with each other. Simplicity provides the framework around which more complex patterns can be added.
Perfect pitch is an essential part of the way I improvise. I can only marvel at performers who can play without perfect pitch, as I have no idea how they find their way round harmonies and melodies without it. There have been times when my perfect pitch has been rendered useless; for example when playing a keyboard that has been transposed. In this instance, what I am playing is different to what I am expecting to hear, and so I instinctively try to compensate by playing the notes I want to hear next. As those notes are also transposed, I end up travelling through different keys, without ever finding home. It is very disorientating. I can only liken it to trying to write on a keyboard where all the letters have been moved one to the left. In trying to catch up with what is appearing on screen, the letters move again. Typing becomes impossible.
However, I can obviously analyse what I play as a result of the way I improvise and gain insight into the chord patterns I like and use. Much of this is explained by my method of harmony analysis called SeeChord, which enables you to see the chords represented on a chart. Find out more at seechord.co.uk.
There are many times as an improviser that you find yourself in a strange gig in a strange place with some strange people. There are too many examples of this to recount here, but there are a couple that I remember with fond embarrassment. We did a short-form improv slot as part of a stand up night in London. It was only 15 minutes, but it seemed to go on forever. There were only a handful of people in the audience, and they had already endured some very mediocre comedy. We came on and tried a couple of games, but the audience was not really on our side. A few poor scenes later and things were beginning to look really bad. Next up was ‘World’s worst’. I settled back into my chair behind my keyboard to watch. Then, horror of all horrors, one of the group announced that for this game, I was going to join in, and invited the audience to loudly welcome me to the stage. I had no choice, so found myself in the firing line for world’s worst (aptly named on this occasion). Thankfully I do not recall what I did, but I do remember thinking that I should commit, and remember writhing around on the floor for some of it. Suffice to say it was not our greatest night, but I do now know what it is like to have a room full of people waiting to hear your comedy gold, and having nothing to say.
Since starting to work with improvisers, actors and comedians there has been a sense that improvisation will have its day in the not too distant future. There are many persuasive arguments for this such as its popularity in America, the power of improv in business and improv as therapy. However, the dream of having improvisation centres, weekly shows and bulging audiences still seems a long way off. Improvisation still sits enviously behind stand-up and sketch comedy, waiting for the spotlight. I have no doubt that there is a growing tide of improvisation, and there are now a few shows that are touring and making careers outside of the comfortable world of Whose Line is it Anyway. Whatever the future, and whenever the tidal wave of improv hits the shores of comedy, I want to make sure that I am there. I hope you are too.
Heather’s Improv Trip
A couple of years ago, I took a teaching job teaching Drama for ‘young people’. It happened to be in the exact same hall that I had taken my first out of school drama classes almost twenty years ago. When I stepped into the room and took the class for the kids who were probably the same age as I had been, I looked at their faces and saw me looking back. I was right back there and I remembered everything I had felt when I first started doing this kind of work and the excitement and inspiration it gave me. I knew I was totally hooked when I got my first major role in the school play as Agathe, the blind girl who befriends the Monster in Frankenstein. I had been playing the role with my eyes closed, but the director encouraged me to keep my eyes open and just ‘be blind.’ I was amazed to discover that I could actually do this, and it was the first time I realised the powerful nature of transforming yourself as performer, finding a way to be in another person’s skin and convey that to an audience.
My life as an actor has been made up of an extremely random collection of jobs that have mostly tended towards the comedic side. However, a few years ago I was touring a play which was an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s ‘The secret agent.’ It’s a very dense and political piece and I was playing the only female role. I had been cast opposite a now very good friend of mine Dave Mountfield. He was playing my husband, but it was a long time since either of us had played a serious role. Despite the serious nature of the material - I won’t give away the end for you – we had an absolute blast on that tour. On drives up we would quite often run the lines with stupid accents or as if we drunk etc etc. I do believe that the skills I had developed from improvisation fed into my performance and made it more rich and real than anything I had done before. A major part of the story takes place at the Greenwich observatory and the tour took us to the Greenwich theatre just around the corner. That was the first time I managed to cry real tears onstage with no onions or tearsticks!
When I was training to be an actress I opted to study physical theatre as a Higher National Diploma. One day an outside teacher came in to take a workshop in something called improvisation. I had done lots of devised theatre by that point but this was the first time that I had been introduced to the idea that just ‘making stuff up’ could be used as a performance piece in itself. I remember vividly playing the game ‘what happens next’ with me as the puppet. It involved me being pimped* to eat a hot dog which kept growing larger and larger which I dutifully did, not realising that it also appeared that I was engaged in a sex act. The whole class were in stitches (I totally accept that they may have been laughing at me rather than with me!) but I had suddenly found my true calling. I was put on this earth to play. The teacher was the very talented Kevin Tomlinson, who is a gifted improviser and has worked Keith Johnstone and many others all over the world. After class, Kevin had been so impressed by my inability to be embarrassed and downright love for making myself look stupid that he invited me to come and work with him at Kepow! Theatre (a theatre sports based improv group).
My first improv show was with Kepow at the Edinburgh festival. We were doing a show called ‘The game of love’ at the Pleasance. The format of the show was that each of us (it was a three hander) were competing to win the love of the audience. We’d get love hearts if we did well and forfeits if we did ‘badly’. The victor would win a Polaroid photo of them with the audience and sleep with it under the pillow that night. We tried to make the forfeits fresh and very real. Once I had to call my dad up during the show from the stage on speakerphone and apologise for being a bad improviser and failing him as a daughter. That was a great moment, everyone in the audience said hello to my dad over the phone and even though I was phoning to confess how rubbish I was, I could tell he was really proud. That’s when I learned the lesson of embracing your mistakes and finding the joy in failure.
The first time The Maydays performed as part of the Paramount comedy festival will always hold a special place in my heart. At that time we were doing a show called ‘Mayday the Musical!’ This involved taking the title of a fictional musical from a member of the audience and running with that idea, totally freeform for an hour. The title we got was ‘Oceanic Sci-fi’ and by all accounts it was a (technically) terrible show. There were plot holes, things that didn’t make sense, ridiculous choreography and, I’d imagine, awful singing, but it was also packed with joy. That show happened before we went to Chicago, when we were running longform shows blindly without really knowing anything about what we were doing, but I always take from it the fact that charm and stupidity can get you a long way.
After many years I have seen and done lots of different types of Improv. In my mind the most fun I have ever had watching improv, is watching ‘Baby wants candy’. I first saw them at the Apollo in Chicago doing the show that we had based ‘Mayday the musical!’ on. The title, suggested by our very own George Birtwell of the maydays was ‘The way you Einstein me’ and what followed was a jaw-droppingly perfect musical set in Transylvania complete with singing bats, love stories and immaculate comedy timing. I had similar experiences every time I saw a new troupe in Chicago and suddenly realised just what was possible in improv and how imaginative you can be. For music though, nothing beats ‘Baby wants Candy’ for inspiration.
When I first started teaching drama it was a way for me to make money when I wasn’t acting. Enjoyable, but a substitute for what I really wanted to be doing. Teaching improv however has never left me feeling like this. I am totally addicted to making people fall in love with improvisation. You heard it here first – I am a pusher of improvisation and I don’t feel guilty. It feels like selling pure happiness. I love working with skilled singers and experienced improvisers, but nothing is more satisfying that watching someone sing badly and brilliantly with total commitment. That is somewhere between terror, excitement and disbelief. Lots of people I teach who previously thought that they couldn’t sing are so liberated by the experience that they go on to do all kinds of things they thought they’d never be able to do. One of my ex students, the brilliant Lynne Thomas was tricked into doing a beginners improv course by her then lodger who also neglected to tell her that there was a show at the of the course. 5 ten week courses later, Lynne is in an improv troupe of her own and last year sang at a local street party in front of loads of people, something she said she’d never do. I cried that time too!
The Maydays are really lucky to have helped nurture an improv community in Brighton, where we are from and we’re always trying to encourage people to just get out there and do it. One of the troupes we spawned, the Heehas, regularly put on shows for people in their own homes – ‘Dial a comedy’ – look them up and get them round to yours! The countless end of course showcases that happen and the atmosphere at those shows is total magic. The Maydays have taught music weekends for some time now but when Joe and I were lucky enough to teach the first 10 week music course that resulted in a show, I thought the roof might actually come off the theatre. At one point, the whole audience, daughters, sons, partners, even grannies were singing along to the chorus of the improvised hit ‘let’s fist again like we did last summer.’
I’d also like to mention the unsung heroes of The Maydays Thursday night drop in class. At the time of writing, the class has been going for seven years. Every week is a combination of people who may be there for the first time and are dipping their toe with trepidation into the improv water, and veterans of the class who have been attending on and off (sometimes with long gaps) for seven years. Some of these guys have never done a public show and have no interest in showing off to the wider world but if you want to see a great show, go to the drop in class, take part and you’ll see some of the best improv there is to see.
I talked before about my time studying in Chicago. A few of us went to do the summer intensive at the ‘IO’ theatre there run by Charna Halpern, author of a brilliant book called truth in comedy and the partner of the late great Del Close whose ashes sit in the IO theatre itself. There I was lucky to see the best improv in the world and work with some fantastic teachers. I was blown away by the long running Armando Diaz experience, and the incredible skill of the improvised Shakespeare. Like I said before, these improvisers made me realise the breadth of what was possible. So many styles and so many forms and I hope I’ll keep pushing boundaries and help to invent stuff myself. Since then we’ve tried to get some of the teachers over to the UK to work with both us and our students over here. We’ve had Bill Arnett the master of the pinch-ouch, Jay Rhoderick ‘Put your hands on it’ and of course Nancy Howland-Walker and Marshall C. Stern who inspired this book’s existence in the first place. My biggest influences though are the Maydays themselves who I am lucky enough to work closely with all the time. We are all passionate about learning and being the best we can be at what we do. It’s always good to take the opportunity of working with people you feel slightly in awe of and whenever I am at a rehearsal I feel really lucky to work with such and wonderfully weird and talented bunch.
Improv is still such a relatively unknown art form in this country that I and the Maydays often find ourselves doing the most random gigs in the most bizarre of places. Top three in ascending order so far were:
3. The centenary celebration of the Weald Horticultural Society, a packed marquee with lots of songs involving vegetables.
2. A show in a nightclub organised by the banking company that sponsor the England rugby team performed to the sports press. The twist being that we were onstage WITH members of the rugby team. Nick Easter was hilarious and I was paired with a player by the name of Doddie Weir. Doddie is about 6’8’. I am 5’1’. That’s just funny.
1. We did a show for the Norfolk Diocese – about 500 vicars. It was during that show that I had my proudest rhyming moment, rhyming holy with guacamole during a love song we improvised for two vicars who had met over a church buffet.
More recently, I had my strangest and most rewarding teaching experience. I had been in email contact about doing a workshop in a mental health facility. The brief was very open, I was to focus on team building and confidence and there would be support workers there to help me. Normally I teach with other people but this time I would be alone – I was a little apprehensive but I said yes and committed. When I was picked up, the contact started telling me how grateful she was for agreeing to the workshop. ‘Most people are too scared to come here and do this kind of thing’ she said. Moments later, we were driven through several security gates, I was body searched for sharp objects and ushered into a room with the participants, their support workers and their radio alarms in case anyone became violent. It was a high security prison containing individuals who have been diagnosed as too unwell to go through the normal prison system. During most of the workshop the thought going through my head was, ‘I wonder how many of these people have killed someone?’, but what I saw was warmth and humour from a room of people who all seemed quite timid at first. When we played the game ‘Hello as if’ one of their suggestions was to say hello as if they were being discharged from the hospital that day. I wasn’t sure at the time if I should take the suggestion as I saw the support workers looking at each other nervously but I did and moments later everyone was bouncing around the room joyfully sing-songing the word hello. I was extremely moved that day and realised just how freeing improv can really be.
As for the future?
More, more, more I say.
