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Matt K's avatar

I feel compelled to comment but it’s one of those bad comments where it’s just a story about me and not a clarification or a critique. I don’t think Will intended this but unfortunately his post is a spell and, when uttered, it reawakens the damned spirit of a terrible UCB NY Harold team, my first Harold team, Deckard.

We started in like 2010 and were full of cocky veteran indy improvisors with lots of shitty opinions. Noteably we thought openings had gotten lame and were making weak, premise obsessed improv with no magic. No soul. So we started doing Harolds with no openings just as Will deacribes. We really thought we were gonna revolutionize the theater or something. Our first beats would be patient. We’d really look in each others eyes to find connection and we’d listen so good we’d find game no matter what.

That’s not really what happened. Instead we were all such scared little harold team noobs we freaked out every show. Sometimes it worked but often it didn’t. Premise improv, though it can be stiff, does, sadly, give you more consistency. Without it, 1 or 2 if your first beats wont work and I felt it was hard to do the little cheat Will talks about where you do it again but better/clearer this time. Sometimes that would just lead to an even more confused 2nd beat that just felt like another bad 1st beat.

This was all compunded by us getting pressure immediately from “higher ups” to stop what we were doing because we were too new a team to try to do something like this and that pressure put us even more in our heads. I think we thought we wanted to piss everyone off but then when we actually did we just got scared and mad at each other.

Anyway after like 2 months we got put on notice and got forced to do pattern games until we got broken up.

There is no real lesson here because it sounds like a cautionary tale but I don’t want that. I actually really still believe the headless harold can work. I think we were just the wrong people in the wrong situation to try. So maybe I’m not a harold team ghost with a warning, I’m a ghost saying if someone wants to go down this road I want you to know I personally really believe in what you are doing and I hope everyone else really supports it.

Maybe my constructive idea is to feel ok dropping one of the 2nd beats if a first one didn’t work at all. Who cares, harolds should be shorter, right?

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Broni's avatar

Love this man. You've almost described a Melbourne Harold. We still teach openings, but I've long been allergic to premise first beats. We do organic first beats derived from the themes of the opening, so you might come on with a POV at most, and let the game arrive naturally. Then second beats, as you've mentioned, we use premise to have games return/recontextualised efficiently.. so the whole harold feels like it increases in pace across the 20-25 minutes.

I've always preferred grounded discovery in first beats so that audiences get a chance to care about the characters and what happens to them as a result of their inevitable flaws.

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