Best Exercise For Pulling Premise
improve your improv communication
Only Half the Group Hears The Opening
Here’s an exercise to practice initiating full premises off of the opening.
Get 6-16 people up.
Send half of them OUT OF THE ROOM.
The half who remains do an opening — they tell a monologue, they do a living room, they do a pattern game, whatever.
Bring the other half back.
The half who did the opening initiate to the people who did not hear the opening.
That’s it!
It’s amazing to watch how clearly the initiators spell out when they’re thinking.
It’s also amazing how well the responders listen to the initiation.
No one is thinking ahead. No one is trying to guess what’s coming — they can’t guess what’s coming. They can only depend on each other.
The worlds of these improv scenes tends to be very real.
Starting Moments
“Pulling premise” is a concept developed and championed at the UCB Theatre. You get an opening and start a scene with a “full idea.”
But what is a “full idea?”
My training at UCB would focus on the comedic idea. “What’s the unusual thing?”
But I think it’s more practical to focus, at least at first, on having a full starting moment. That means when you initiate:
You have an idea of who is talking to who in what situation.
You don’t really know where it’s gonna go from there.
It’s better if there’s an unusual thing afoot, but not essential for a strong scene. What is essential is having a full starting moment.
Having a full starting moment when you initiate feels like heresy to some improvisers. “You’re writing the scene!” they complain.
No, you’re merely writing the starting moment. Who is talking to who, where.
Teaching Pulling Premise
When teaching people to pull premises from an opening, you want to ask them “what’s your starting moment?”
I like to have a group do an opening, and then I’ll ask the group “what are some ideas for scenes?”
Maybe you have an opening and someone describes going to a museum and coming upon a room with a gold coffin and no plaque, no description. The audience laughs at how creepy this sounds.
If you ask a class “what are your ideas for scenes off of this?” you might get someone who is just describing what they liked about the idea “It’s funny how creepy that is —- what if there’s a ghost, or a curse in this coffin, like in a movie?”
That’s a decent start, but not enough. You need a full starting moment. Like this:
A curator warns a patron to not touch the coffin.
Someone is touching a coffin and wondering out loud why they are alone in the room
A ghost is confronting a museum patron
The easiest starting moments are when someone is talking to someone else. As opposed to a person alone interacting with the environment. It’s not required to start by talking to someone, but those are the easiest to do in a premise show.
Paid Vs Free Subscriptions
Here’s how the “paid” versus “free” tier of this substack is gonna work from here on out (or, for a while at least). “Free” will have ALL the essays going forward.
“Paid” will have exclusive “Q&A” columns at least once a month. where the paid subscribers send in questions and I answer them. These will be quick answers dashed off, more like a conversation than fully fleshed out essays.
I won’t be publishing abridged versions of this, it’s just for the paid subscribers. I’m personally a little tired of running into essays that stop 2 paragraphs in with a plea to subscribe. I can’t do that to you people (for right now — cut to me in a year begging everyone to subscribe).
We did a Q&A last week and it was fun. Stuff like frustrating improv partners, imposter syndrome, online tirades against improv theaters. etc.
If there’s some Q&A in there that really feels meaty to me, I might flesh it out and publish it as an essay on the free side.
Meaning: free subscribers get all the essays. Paid subscribers will get their Qs answers on the regular.
If you want to support this newsletter and get access to these Q&As, then subscribe. But if you don’t subscribe you will still get an essay every week. Thanks!