Optimum edibility of an avocado
-Marisa B
In improv that "luck" between the time of it's too early to edit and "oh F the edit point is gone and everyone just saw me rock on my heels on the sidelines so now it looks like I'm judging my teammates and I'm an @$$hole" is entirely determined by you, not nature's most whimsical fruit, the avocado.
Depending on the type of edits your team chooses to use, you generally have anywhere from ten seconds to half a nanosecond to edit. Some of the scarier examples:
LINE IN HAND: You come off the sidelines* having already started saying your lines with the intention of starting your scene downstage of the previous scene. Line in Hand is the most theatrical edit imo because it leaves open the audience's interpretation of why you edited... IT WORKS AMAZINGLY WELL WHEN YOU WANT TO EDIT BUT NO ONE IS LAUGHING. It makes you look like a David Mamet jumped into you soul and told you "we are starting a new scene because that is what the UNIVERSE, i.e., THE SHOW, wants!" Whatever line you say though, you have to mean it even though you have a good ten seconds to do it. Keith Huang, the Artistic Director at the PIT taught me this.
PUSH: You initiate by turning your back to the current scene and walking backwards slowly while speaking to a teammate on your same sideline as if you're already in your scene. Your new scene gently pushes the old scene off stage. The previous scene gently fades to the opposite sideline, and it looks like a movie edit that's used to show what's happening in a simultaneous time frame in a disparate location.
SWEEP: YOU HAVE ZERO NANOSECONDS TO SWEEP. In fact, as soon as you've thought about sweeping, you're too late to sweep. The only team I've ever seen sweep correctly (and by correctly I mean, it builds the show as opposed to tears down the previous scene) is The Boss. The best way to sweep is to sweep into a new scene. The "easiest" edit is also by far the hardest to get right.
Love,
Cole
*If you're trying to edit from the backline as opposed to the sideline, you're already dead. There's no eye contact with your teammates on the backline, and backlines make everything but Harold Night at UCB look like amateur hour.
