Kevin Patrick Robbins Improviser, Writer, Designer, Person

This past Sunday evening I had my first rehearsal as the coach of ITC’s newest Incubator team, Dirty Little Secret. It’s good to be coach­ing again and work­ing with a group of tal­ent up and com­ing impro­vis­ers who are eager to improve and get bet­ter and bet­ter. I love coach­ing, I love teach­ing and I’m excited to help these guys along with their growth — which I could already see within the three-hour span of that rehearsal.

One of the sub­jects I’ve been asked a lot about over the years is coach­ing improv. Over the last three years — since we estab­lished a three-tier sys­tem to our teams (Incubator, Harold and House teams) — that ques­tion has been asked more and more. What is the role of an improv coach? To answer that, I first want to address the nomen­cla­ture of improv “teams” and why those teams have “coaches.”

The idea of improv teams, as it relates to long­form improv, came out of the iO Theater in Chicago at a time when it was known as ImprovOlympic. The improv Olympics per­formed at that the­atre con­sisted of dif­fer­ent teams com­pet­ing in dif­fer­ent scene events. (The Canadian Improv Games are actu­ally built on this old IO show for­mat.) Charna Halpern has talked about how she cre­ated the idea of coaches to help facil­i­tate an envi­ron­ment in which expe­ri­enced and new impro­vis­ers inter­act with other and build a sup­port sys­tem for young teams. When the games at ImprovOlympic stopped and Del Close came on board as artis­tic direc­tor, short-form teams became Harold teams.

At the Impatient Theatre Co. we used to just have Harold teams. Even though it was clear which teams had more expe­ri­ence and were work­ing bet­ter as teams, there was only one level. We cre­ated the hier­ar­chy to pro­vide a dis­tinc­tion in the level of expe­ri­ence that a team — and/or its play­ers — has. Some peo­ple don’t like this, but it actu­ally has sig­nif­i­cant devel­op­men­tal ben­e­fits for the teams, which is an entirely dif­fer­ent post.

Allow me to quickly out­line our team structure...

Incubator Teams: At the ITC we take the term incu­ba­tor fairly lit­er­ally and use it to sug­gest that teams at this level are still young and going through a more rigidly defined process of devel­op­ment and learn­ing to per­form Harold well.

Harold Teams: These teams (and/or their play­ers) have expe­ri­ence per­form­ing Harold from the ITC approach. Often Harold teams are incu­ba­tor teams that have been ele­vated to Harold sta­tus through hard work and prac­tice. Sometimes this can take a year or more of per­form­ing at the incu­ba­tor level.

House Teams: A house team is a fea­tured team at the ITC and per­forms reg­u­larly and might even have their own weekly show. Big In Japan and DHARMA are ITC’s two cur­rent house teams. Each team head­lines one of our two weekly Harold Night shows (both of which cur­rently take place on Tuesday nights). Big In Japan per­forms Harold; DHARMA per­forms some­thing akin to 4 Square, very organic and highly transformational.

As you can imag­ine, since the qual­ity of expe­ri­ence, devel­op­ment and skill of the teams and its play­ers varies from team level to team level, so does the role of the coach vary from level to level.

Coaching at the Incubator Level

When coach­ing an incu­ba­tor team, it is the coach’s job, role, respon­si­bil­ity to ham­mer into the incu­ba­tor team the ITC approach to per­form­ing Harold. For this rea­son, the coach’s role is more akin to that of a direc­tor, where the team mem­bers have lit­tle say with regard to their objectives.

Teams at this level are typ­i­cally fresh out of our train­ing cen­tre and, while they may have spent a lot of time com­ing up through classes with each other, they haven’t had a sig­nif­i­cant amount of expe­ri­ence per­form­ing Harold — four months at best sub­se­quent to their IMPROV 401 classes. Since Harold isn’t some­thing that can be taught in only eight weeks of class, there are two more lev­els of inter­me­di­ate and advanced organic and con­cep­tual approaches to the work.

The team will likely spend an inor­di­nate amount of time run­ning scene drills and prac­tic­ing organic open­ings until they want to die. The incu­ba­tor team is not focused on find­ing its own voice or style or unique dif­fer­ence that sep­a­rates it from the rest of the teams. In fact, the goal should be just the oppo­site. The coach works to — for lack of a bet­ter term — beat the con­cepts of long­form improv and Harold into the team until they become intu­itive and instinc­tual, when they can stop think­ing and start play­ing. It’s not until the team can break away from the shack­les of the train­ing wheels Harold’s under­ly­ing frame­work and become more organic with it that they’ll truly start to become a team unto themselves.

This whole process for incu­ba­tor teams can take a long period of time, fre­quently upwards of a year. In the mean­time, incu­ba­tor teams are being coached at least once a week and per­form­ing on a reg­u­lar basis — cur­rently incu­ba­tor teams per­form two out of every three weeks. This process has sig­nif­i­cant advan­tages for the devel­op­ment of teams and play­ers as both are able to relax and focus on their growth in a struc­tured non-competitive envi­ron­ment for extended peri­ods of time where they are held to lit­tle in the way of per­for­mance expec­ta­tions. It is not imper­a­tive that incu­ba­tor teams con­sis­tently per­form good shows, only that they are work­ing steadily and that growth can be seen in their work over an extended period of time.

Coaching at the Harold Level

When work­ing with a Harold team, the coach becomes much more sym­bi­otic with the team. It is com­mon for teams to change coaches once they reach this level to get a fresh pair of eyes on their work. Harold teams have proven that they under­stand and can imple­ment the con­cepts of long­form impro­vi­sa­tion, but more impor­tantly that the group has become a uni­fied and cohe­sive team.

At this level, teams are encour­aged to start find­ing and devel­op­ing their own unique team voice. The coach helps them do that but still retains a great degree of influ­ence over their work by bring­ing new ideas and approaches to the team for exper­i­men­ta­tion and by pro­vid­ing the “out­side eye” POV on the work that every team needs.

The coach is not there to rule or dic­tate, but to chal­lenge and push the team to dis­cover the best they can be and to stage the best per­for­mances they can rally. When I coached Big In Japan, I spent six months with the team work­ing almost exclu­sively on organic open­ings. We ran open­ings many dif­fer­ent ways, highly nar­ra­tive one month, highly phys­i­cal the next, and switched it up from month to month to month until they were able to take all of those approaches and use them as weapons in their open­ings and through­out their show from a level that was instinc­tual, intu­itive and often awe-inspiring.

Coaching at the House Level

This is the purest role of the coach at the Impatient Theatre Co. The coach of a house team is there to serve the needs and desires of the team. Kind of like the nav­i­ga­tor on a ship. The team deter­mines the des­ti­na­tion, the coach fig­ures out the best route to get them there.

While house teams con­sist of some of the best play­ers in the com­pany, the coach is still ever push­ing the team for­ward. The coach may develop exer­cises that push play­ers out of their com­fort zones or focus on areas of weak­ness or areas in which the team or its play­ers have let slide while they spent time focus­ing on other skills. Still hav­ing some influ­ence over the direc­tion of the team, the coach’s pri­mary task is to gain under­stand­ing of what the team wants and how to guide them down that path.

So, that’s a cur­sory glance at the role of the coach at each improv team level at ITC. I could go in-depth on each one of these lev­els but that would be a topic for another post some day.

I’m excited to be work­ing with this young team and pro­vid­ing them with the tools they need to suc­ceed at this won­der­ful art form they’ve all cho­sen to take part in. Keep push­ing for­ward. Keeping work­ing at the craft and chal­lenge your­self always. Quo vadimus?