Make-Believe Made It Better
Photos/Aurora Boles.
By Aurora Boles
Improv comedy has been the center of my social and artistic life for the past 10 years. I fell in love with improv instantly at my first drop-in class in 2011 — it was thrilling to find other grown-ups who still liked to play make-believe. Improv filled a need for community and connection that I had been missing.
In 2015, I helped launch Reno Improv with a small but dedicated group of improv enthusiasts. For years, we struggled to gain traction and performed plenty of shows for three people (sometimes fewer), but the last few years before the pandemic were good to us. We opened our own theater space at the corner of Wells Avenue and Willow Street in Reno. Our Level I classes would often sell out, and we offered workshops on specialty topics throughout the year. We also held a beginner-friendly drop-in class called “The Playground” and had a performance every Saturday. Our community was stronger than ever, and we had finally gained the momentum we had always hoped to achieve. Everything hinged entirely on people gathering together at the same time and place to play; however, the pandemic took that away overnight.
When we closed our doors at the start of the pandemic, all we knew was that our lives had just changed abruptly and for an unknowable amount of time. Right away, we started meeting over Zoom like other organizations. Our early attempts at virtual improv were awkward. We weren’t sure whether we should talk about the pandemic in scenes or play characters from an alternate reality with no pandemic. If we talked about the virus, the scenes weren’t funny. If we avoided talking about the virus, the scenes didn’t feel truthful. We use comedy to either escape pain or indulge in its agonizing absurdity until its power dissipates, but for many months, the magic stopped working for me. Nothing felt funny.
As we continued trying to figure out how to adapt improv to Zoom, a lot of what we were doing felt more like work than play. We struggled to connect with each other when we could no longer be on stage together. For successful improv, improvisers have to pay close attention to verbal and non-verbal signals from teammates and react to those signals in real time. The same tech problems that annoy remote workers — laggy connections, bad lighting, and sound — create obstacles in improv. We longed for the ease and fluidity of shared physical space. The pandemic forced us to get creative and revise our idea of what improv could be.
My team at Reno Improv, Sensitive People, took a few months off before deciding to start practicing over Zoom. Before the pandemic, we performed a style of longform improv called “The Living Room.” In this format, the cast sat down together onstage three times throughout each performance to share personal, real-life stories inspired by an audience suggestion or scenes from the show. The goal was to make it feel like we were casually sitting together in one of our living rooms swapping stories from our lives. In between these chats, we performed improvised scenes inspired by the stories — often the scenes were funny, but sometimes they were dramatic, dark, or sad. After some finessing, the format ended up translating well to the digital stage. Even though the world had not returned to normal, I was relieved to be able to spend time with my improv friends, albeit virtually, and feel the comfort of practicing regularly with my team again.
An unexpected byproduct of the pandemic was getting to improvise with people who normally don’t share a stage with me. For the most part, only established teams would practice and perform together, but in the last year, we started playing more with shorter runs of experimental virtual formats that combine people who aren’t necessarily on the same performing team. At the end of last year, I joined a holiday-themed, romantic-comedy that ran for three weeks. Earlier this year, I was part of a narrative show that took place in a fictional small town where the only thing that was known at the start of the performance was that one of the characters would die at the end. In these impromptu groupings, I’ve had the pleasure of performing with amazing improvisers from other teams that I don’t often get to work with, including some of my former improv students who have blossomed into incredibly skillful improvisers.
The move toward virtual meetings also made it possible (and easy) to join online classes from talented teachers in other cities. Late last year, I started taking a virtual clowning workshop from an L.A.-based instructor. Not only are these classes a blast, the exercises have improved my virtual improv skills and given me lots of great new tools. In these workshops, students are encouraged to incorporate objects from their surroundings in artistic ways and play with their camera and lighting to create interesting and creative effects. I also recently took a great social satire improv class from a Baltimore-based theater that focuses on inclusion and social consciousness in comedy. The instruction was incredibly thoughtful, and the exercises pushed boundaries and comfort zones in ways I had never been pushed. If it weren’t for the pandemic, I likely wouldn’t have had the opportunity to study with these amazing instructors or meet other students who join these classes from around the world.
The pandemic has been rough on us all. It permanently changed our reality, our sense of safety, and our relationship to one another. I’m glad we have virtual conferencing abilities to stay in touch, but I definitely miss performing live at our theater space. Now that we have effective vaccines widely available in the United States, I feel hopeful for better days. Even though the last year has handed us plenty of challenges, I’m happy that creativity has continued to thrive. And I’m grateful for the strength and emotional nourishment I still get from playing make-believe.
Aurora Boles works as a graphic designer for Renown Health in Reno, Nevada. She loves improv comedy and is a co-founder of Reno Improv. Aurora also enjoys hiking, taking pictures of plants and bugs, and doing art experiments in her spare time.
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