Eliminating Error
There’s a reason I talk about sports a lot in this blog. Besides for a belief that it’s an incredibly helpful and apt metaphor for improv, I grew up playing sports. Primarily softball. I even played ball in college (DIII, baby!) So imagine my delight when I picked up Chad Harbauch’s The Art of Fielding to discover that it’s not only about baseball (which I already knew, and which, if I didn’t, the title should have given away), but about college baseball…Division III college baseball…in the Midwest. The man was speaking my language.
So I shouldn’t have been surprised when in my reading the other day I came across this passage describing what Harbauch calls “the paradox at the heart of baseball” (or, he allows, any other sport):
You loved it because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude which…somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about The Human Condition. The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.
Be still my heart.
I’ve talked about this sentiment before—the driving vitality of improvisation, the urgency and therefore beauty of it, and that Harbauch relates this to sport is telling and apropos and gratifying. But he goes on to talk about another aspect of the fleeting nature of sport, one which is significantly less romantic but equally important, perhaps more important if we are ever to actually grow as athletes or artists rather than simply bask in the glorious fleetingness of it all. He says about baseball, that, in contrast to other arts:
You weren’t a painter or a writer—you didn’t work in private and discard your mistakes, and it wasn’t just your masterpieces that counted. What mattered, as for any machine, was repeatability. Moments of inspiration were nothing compared to elimination of error.
Well that certainly dampens the mood.
Except that Harbauch’s 100% right. On both accounts. To make great art, especially of the transient kind, it is necessary to merge one’s lofty romantic humanism with the pragmatic machinery of competency. And while no single play or scene or choice is actually repeatable (here I think of Heraclitus’s claim that one never steps in the same river twice), what Harbauch is talking about here is consistent execution. “The elimination of error”, he calls it. Getting it right, at least enough to get the job done.
But how can we talk about “elimination of error” when there are no mistakes in improv, Rachel?! Okay well first of all yes there are, but I’m not talking about that today. What I’m talking about when I’m talking about the elimination of error is a move, done in good faith, that has the potential to throw off your show, your team, your scene. In terms of improv, I call these moments of potential error “wobble.” I do that because, as a director, I can actually see the show start to fall from its equilibrium—it wobbles. Rather than overt mistakes, wobbles are imperfect reactions to suboptimal conditions, the moment before the error. Maybe I actually call them wobbles because of my time doing gymnastics—it’s that observable moment of lack of steadiness before the possible fall, or, to return to baseball, the “bad hop” before the execution of the play. Will the athlete overcome this unforeseen glitch? Will they use their training to right their course, to hit the target, or will they let the wobble get the better of them and lose control of the moment?
To give you a more practical sense of the distinction I make between “mistake” and “wobble”, here are some prime examples of “wobbly” moments in improv:
• Two distinct scene initiations are introduced overlappingly and end up slightly contradicting each other. • The performers perceive that they have different understandings of (or haven’t clearly established and therefore don’t know) some primary aspect of the premise of the scene: who they are to each other, where they are, what they are doing. • A performer mishears or misunderstands the other performer regarding some key detail of the scene and thereby accidentally denies something the other performer (and the audience) understands to be true.
Again, none of these have been done in bad faith, and none are full errors in and of themselves…yet. In fact, how one handles a wobble, I’ve been thinking more and more recently, may be the biggest factor separating okay improv from good and even great improv. And I’m not talking about just a passable recovery (a joke at the expense of the error or a justification that gets a laugh but kills the reality of the scene), but a lean into the wobble itself that makes it seem like a welcome surprise that moves the scene in a new and delightful direction. In fact, when one leans into the wobble, one can actually trick the audience into retroactively perceiving it as a purposeful and meaningful shift.
Examples of how to deftly field a wobble can be hard to provide in writing, since part of righting a wobble is responding intuitively to all the facts on the ground (not just the words said but they emotional content, the context, your position, your knowledge of the other performer’s understanding of the scene, etc.) and it’s not always a purely verbal response, but here are some general steps that are key to navigating the moment after a wobble:
Don’t telegraph that a “mistake” has been made—not with your body, not with your face, not with your voice. If you telegraph a sense of error, none of the rest of the steps work. And it’s hard not to. The desire to prove that you weren’t the one that screwed up will make you naturally want to commiserate with the audience against the person who you think did. But, ironically that’s the fastest way to make the audience nervous and cause you to lose the reality of the scene. So stay cool.
Give yourself a calm second to take in the content of the move(s) that just happened and consider how it/they could be true for the scene before you react. So many performers panic in a wobbly moment and do just the opposite—look for a quick fix, a patch to slap on the leaking tire (”That’s my middle name!” Eye roll.). Instead, pause, think, maybe get a pretend beer out of a fake fridge (that’s always my go-to stall for time on stage) and feel the truth underneath the seeming conflict, then respond. It won’t read as a stall if you stay physically and emotionally engaged in the scene. After all, we give ourselves time to figure out how to respond in life, so why not on stage? (A nice thing about this step is the longer you practice it the less time it takes to do it, thereby making the pause shorter and shorter until it often blends seamlessly into the rhythm of the scene.)
Make a choice that is clear, strong and includes your scene partner and all the choices you’ve both made until now. Often during a moment of wobble performers make the mistake of either selling their scene partner out, or, ironically, being too “polite” (read “vague”) with their next offer for fear that that if they put too clear a stake in the ground at this point it will just be thrown off by a subsequent choice. The former makes you look like an asshole, but the latter has the effect of maintaining the wobble longer rather than resolving the issue. As long as you’re not denying the reality, your scene partner is ready and willing to accept your next move, and will be grateful for the added clarity.
Above all, have the confidence to trust that by moving in the direction of the wobble, not by “fixing” it but by adapting to it, a new and surprising truth will emerge (You actually are siblings but your parents have kept you apart all these years to spite each other; the submarine hasn’t left port yet because one of you keeps failing the mandatory swimming test, etc.) The steps above give you and the audience confidence in your ability to move gracefully through the inherent imperfection of an improvised performance and reminds you and them that you are ultimately in control of the show.
And while control could also seem counter-intuitive to improv (Isn’t this art all about giving up control?), I’m talking not about an individual controlling the scene as much as about showing the audience that you, the performers, collectively, are in control of your craft, that you will not make errors of the type that will throw off the performance—that the ball will not soar over the first baseman’s head, that you will not fall from the high bar, that you will right the dive midair and enter the water with barely a splash. And that’s what you want to show them. Because while performance mistakes, in sports and improv, might be exciting or thrilling to watch once or twice as an act of Schadenfreude, it’s stressful and exhausting to be subjected to as a regular occurrence. This is, I believe, one of the major reasons people who “don’t like improv”, well, don’t like improv. And when they say, “I’ve just seen some really bad improv shows,” I think, even more than them not having been “funny” (which I’m sure was also a problem), what these people are (rightly and probably subconsciously) feeling is the anxiety of watching improv where errors are both abundant and overtly telegraphed.
The bad news for your ego is that, unlike the sports highlight reel, if you lean into the wobble particularly well, the audience will likely not even perceive that there was wobble in the first place, so natural and delightful will the adjustment to the shift in the premise/relationship/focus of the scene seem. Which means you won’t get the “credit” for the “save.” The good news is that the discoveries made post-wobble are often the most delightfully surprising of them all. So while the audience may not know to applaud your specific show of virtuosity in the moment, they’ll know that they saw something great, and you’ll get credit for that.
In the end, truly ungenerous or offensive choices aside, there really are no moves that can’t be fielded well by people who are trained to do so and who trust each other on stage. Because errors are only errors when they result in an unfavorable outcome for your team. And whereas in sports there’s a pretty easy measure of that, in improv the primary measure is the affective experience of the performers and the audience. It’s an error if you say it is—if you call out the other performer, or get flustered and lose the scene, or throw the whole thing under the bus like a kid having a tantrum. It’s not an error if you lean into it, if you stretch for it, if you telegraph not “Uh oh” but “No problem.” Because “eliminating error” doesn’t mean being “perfect,” it means responding to the imperfect serendipity of life with grace and poise. It means remembering that while we are alive we have access to beauty, with all its imperfections. Because of its imperfections. We got this, guys.












