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Improvise As Yourself (Base Reality)
In this exercise you will play into your own honest reality. So in the scene the focus is to react honestly and to give the honest answer that you would say in your day to day life if in said scenario. Trying to be funny is not important as we are looking to build our base realities to be honest and find truthfulness and uniqueness in our own honest realities.
We’ve learned that at least one American plutocrat (almost certainly Elon Musk, who believes the odds are a billion to one against us living in "base reality") has hired a pair of coders to try to hack the simulation. This is an extraordinarily rude thing to do! I'm using it!
Maciej Cegłowski, ‘The Idea That Eats Smart People’
For a base reality to be useful, we must be able to ask and answer the question, "What is weird or unusual for this base reality?"
When I introduce the term base reality to my students, I often begin by saying that it’s similar to having a who, a what and a where. Often, this is how improv is taught to beginners. You use agreement and yes-anding to establish who you are, where you are, and what you’re doing.
As far as I know, the term base reality was coined by either the UCB or one of their teachers to describe what I have often called the situation. It’s more specific than just any old who, what and where, because they need to feel like they belong together. It may be a situation that you have experienced in real life. It may be one that you’ve only seen on TV, in a film or in a book. Perhaps it’s a situation that you’ve never encountered before. But whatever the case, the base reality probably shouldn’t be funny or weird or absurd. If it is, then it’s more than a base reality.
Let’s look at some examples. Let’s say your ‘where’ is a cruise ship. Your ‘who’ is a psychiatrist and a lion tamer. And your ‘what’ is that you are playing Russian roulette. In many improv classes, this would be a fine example of a who, what and where. But it’s not a base reality. It’s too weird to be a base reality.
For a base reality to be useful, we must be able to ask and answer the question, “What is weird or unusual for this base reality?” If it’s too weird to begin with, it may be hard to answer that question. The base reality is like the greens of the salad. It’s the bricks of the house, or the hull of the ship. It’s not the exciting part, but it’s the part we need to make sense of the scene.
A better example of a base reality would be a couple (who) celebrating their anniversary (what) at a tiki lounge on a cruise ship (where). This is a situation where the pieces fit together. It’s specific and interesting. But most important is that it’s familiar enough for us to ask the question, “What is weird, unusual or inappropriate for this situation?”
Beyond the Who, What and Where: Purpose and Procedure
After I became familiar with the term base reality, I spent a lot of time thinking about what makes a good base reality. And I realized that a who, what and where didn’t quite describe all the pieces that make a base reality useful. The kind of ‘what’ you establish matters. If you’re ‘what’ has purpose and a procedure, it’s much easier to answer the question, “What do we do now?” later in the scene.
For instance, take this base reality: two roommates, in their living room, hanging out. It’s not terrible. I’m sure I’ve seen at least one scene like this work… maybe. But the what has no purpose and there’s no implied procedure. Some tweaks to the what could help. For instance, maybe the roommates are pregaming before a Halloween party, or one of them is helping the other get ready for a date, or maybe they are cleaning up the morning after a big party. Now the characters have a purpose. It’s more than just an activity. And there is a procedure that’s easy to imagine. You can always ask the question, “What’s next?” and find an answer.
This will become much more important, once you have discovered and framed the game of the scene. Because if you have a purpose and procedure, whenever you are unsure of your next move, you can just do whatever you would do next in this situation. If there is no purpose or procedure. If you are just doing an activity or no activity at all, it’s easier to get stuck. And I don’t what you to get stuck. So make sure your scene’s ‘what’ is more than an empty activity.
If this post was helpful to you, please share it. If you have questions or comments, leave one below. And if you live in Chicago and would like to study the Game of the Scene with me, check out the link to the Core Improv Program at the Improv Resource Center.
Are We Living in a 2,000-Year-Old Computer Program?
Ancient Code and Digital Gnosis: Architects of the Matrix Gnosticism and modern Simulation Theory are essentially the same “conspiracy theory,” separated only by a few millennia of jargon. One uses the mystical incense of the 2nd century; the other uses the sleek, neon-lit vocabulary of Silicon Valley. Both whisper the same unsettling secret: The world you see is a fake, and you are being held…
the right ones pt.1
Base Reality
Where are we and what’s the reality of the situation. If we are in space, aliens are not weird. If we are on a farm, chickens are not weird. How do we act on a farm oppose to the DMV, how do we act at a party oppose to a church. We need to fulfill the obligations of the normal (base reality) before we distort reality. If we skip over offers the offer becomes base reality immediately, so if I have a peg leg and it’s not identified as unusual what else might be true, maybe we are on a pirate ship, maybe I have a parrot, maybe we find out I want to marry my parrot, but if out of nowhere I bring up remixing the new Skrillex album it might be funny and might become the playable thing, but it does not easily fit in our base reality. If we don’t know what the normal is it’s hard to decide what is weird. As stated by Mark Twain: “First get your facts rights then distort them at your leisure”.
Grounded
Being grounded means that we are trying to make our scene and our characters look authentic, realistic, and believable. We do this by committing to the environment and the reality of what is happing and who we are and what our emotion is.
When thinking about being grounded, we can have grounded characters, grounded emotions, grounded situations, grounded realities, etc. Whatever the scene is, being grounded is in essence being believable.
Gandalf in Lord of the Rings is a magical wizard, but the character is grounded in reality and the things Gandalf says and does are believable based on who Gandalf is, where Gandalf is, and what/why Gandalf is doing (it). The grounded reality of Gandalf is different then the reality of Bugs Bunny, or the reality of a character that is playing a chicken, or really the reality of any other character an improviser may play. Having belief and commitment within your characters reality can keep us grounded.
Grounded is also the reality of where we are. The reality of outer space is different than the reality of the kitchen breakfast table. If we are in the old west grounded might be opening western doors, spitting in a spittoon, having a cowboy hat, etc. But if we are in this western scene and we go and ask for a Monster Energy Drink that is not grounded in our reality. Yes it might be funny, yes it might be playable, yes it is an unusual thing and might spin into a game, but it is not grounded. Grounded is treating the situation as if it is real. If we are in the old west and I am a cowboy I want to play the reality of a cowboy in the old west, maybe I’m a cowboy who is mad at my partner because they keep trading our goods for chickens, which might be unusual, but I’m still a cowboy, will respond as a cowboy, and play the grounded reality of a cowboy who is mad at my partner for trading our goods for chickens. If I start talking about radio active toxic chickens out of no where this is not grounded, if my partner trades 10 more items for chickens and I change my character to now be happy about the chickens my characters emotion isn’t grounded. If our grounded base reality is fear, grounded is keeping in line with our fear, we might build an arc and make a fearless decision later in the scene, but if we are afraid, we need to play the reality of our fear.
