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Before I tell you about the new syllabus we are creating, let me share some of the most wonderful improv scenes I have witnessed. In no particular order: ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’, ‘Chris fails to go back in time’, ‘Pick up the letter!’, ‘the Death of the Queen’s Consort’, ‘Two Other Bears’, ‘a Method Director’, ‘Tene mi Brache’, ‘Lots and lots of moxy and a twelve inch dick’, and ‘Proust improvised by those who haven’t read him’. Just a few without thinking much about it. Now, unless you were there for any of them, that list probably didn’t make much sense. It almost certainly wasn’t very fun. Because improv is a very wasteful artform. However beautiful, hilarious, spine-tingling or just plain satisfying these scenes were, they have now passed into the ether, reduced to a memory fragment I struggle to explain the joy of, a story that can (at best) be nodded along to. It’s one of the reasons cooperation in improv can be so challenging. Unless you were there, you weren’t there (man). The most enthusiastic description can only communicate so much.

But what does this have to do with the new syllabus?

Our aim in rewriting the syllabus is not to define the best form of improv, but create a set of habits and ideas that a community can form around. Just because a restaurant specilises in sushi, doesn’t mean the chef hates roasts or thinks fried rice is morally suspect. But you can’t git gud if you keep changing everything. Of course there are many other ways to make things up, but like the rifle in ‘Full Metal Jacket’, this is ours.

So what will the AndAlso style be? Well, we’re working that out, piece by piece. It’s not an instant process and it wouldn’t be interesting if it were. Our influences are the connectedness and group work of iO, the physical boldness of Carpe Haute and Teatribu, the unselfish selfishness of the Annoyance, the rigour of Razowsky, the sheer infectious delight of Jill Bernard. Oh, and the professionalism of the Showstoppers, the relentless open-eyed curiosity of PGraph (and the Hideout Theatre in general), and the freeform sugar-rush of Improv Boston. I could add and add to that list. Heather and I get enthusiastic about things, and we want them all to be part of what we do. It’s a fault and we’re working on it. But as we start running shows and jams, this hodge-podge will boil down into something clearer, less cerebral. In time, things should just start to feel AndAlso-ish.

With all this in mind, we are doubling (you heard that right) the length of our courses to twelve weeks, running in line with the school terms (including a week off for half term). We believe staying together for longer periods of time will build group trust and a shared vocabulary. A plan for a six-level system, means a core syllabus of two years, with teams and advanced classes after that. It’s ambitious, but we don’t expect to do it faster than it can be done. At the moment, we are building the ‘how’ and trusting that the ‘what’ will come.

There is, of course, a danger that all this feels like gatekeeping. A Doomsday cult with T-shirts. (Improv and Scientology are very amusingly elided in a few episodes of Bojack Horseman – you should watch them.) But our syllabuses will not be hard-edged prescriptive. Our aim is to be an inspiration, not a straitjacket. Something that creates just enough agreement for us to work together, always with space for what the teacher brings and what the students love. And to make sure our students get a range of points of view, we will be rotating teachers every term and welcoming guest improvisers from across the world. Heather and I will run the company but never assume that we have all the answers. The balance that is the very origin of the AndAlso name.

(For anyone worried about the affordability of longer courses, we are making fees payable in installments and dropping the concessionary rate to half of the full rate. We will also be making scholarship places bookable on the site without any application process. We have to keep the lights on, but we know money is tight for a lot of people. Again, balance.)

It would be easy here to get lost in the decisions and improvements we have made and want to make. I am excited about them and the details are, in the end, the design. But the heart of it all is this: In any art, you have to build your taste. To see and do enough that you can distinguish between what you do not like, and what is not good. It would be naive to pretend that Heather and my taste will not be a big part of how we build the new school. At least at the beginning. But as we grow, it will create an eco-system (as I wrote in my last blog), where improvisers are able to collect their own best-of lists. This (people will say) is the kind of thing they do there. In the end, it will come from everyone.

Below is the first draft of our level flow, clumsy over-precise titles and all. There is more work to be done on it (especially the titles), and a lot more work to be done on the syllabuses themselves. I present it here so you know where we are. This is where we are.

This week, I was lucky enough to attend the 2nd annual edition of Acteon’s ‘Speak to the Human’ conference. Acteon are a consultancy that do all kinds of interesting and innovative things. Like creating a health and safety campaign for Channel 4 which was also a Barry-White-style music video. They contacted Joe and I last year because they had wanted to create a piece of music that would capture the spirit of their conference. I knew immediately that I was going to like these people.

When we explained that we could improvise songs live on the day live in response to what was happening, there was some disbelief and (I think fair to say) distrust. However, after some reassurance that I have done this once or twice before (In the West End with The Showstoppers, concept albums with Fred Deakin of Lemon Jelly, and of course The Maydays’ Happily Never After), Acteon took a leap and let us bring the music. 

As the title of the conference was ‘Speak to the Human’, we wanted to show the power of music to do just that. This is a subject very dear to my heart. From when we were very young, my Dad would record songs intros onto a cassette so we could play ‘Name that tune’ in the car. That love and curiosity have always stayed with me. I see life events through the lense of music; heartbreaks and triumphs have a song attached*. I hear conversations musically, looking for changes in dynamic and rhythm, trying to find my place in the orchestra, not dominating or disappearing. And having done so much musical improv means that I sometimes imagine an underscore in some real-life situations. Music, and the language of music, is everywhere for me. Not just what I do, but in the way I see the world. 

Back to this year’s conference. With the audience, we reimagined the James Bond theme as a Nursery Rhyme and the Shake’n’Vac jingle as thrash metal. Later in the day, we transformed people’s group work into a mini-musical, and then rounded off proceedings with a song based on the delegates’ word cloud of the day. It left me with lots of food for thought about how I might continue to use music to speak to the human and how music speaks to me. 

(It also reminded me that after last year’s conference, I had a conversation with public speaker and improviser Steve Bustin. Steve had the great idea of doing an audio ‘audit’ (an audio-it?) for organisations; what do people hear when they walk into your building? What’s your hold music? What’s the acoustic like in your regular meeting room? We’ll come back to that.)

Part 2 of this blog will explore this year’s conference theme ‘Harnessing Disruption and Navigating Change – which I believe improvisers know one or two things about.

*Below is a short selection from the soundtrack of my life. In no way is this comprehensive (a full list would be weeks long).

Bobby’s Girl – Susan Maughan

Grandma Jean Urquhart singing while cooking. She had a belief that pop music wasn’t real music but made an exception for this song.

Woodpeckers from Space – Videokids

Saturday afternoon Scotland living room dancing and thinking this song was the funniest thing ever.

Captain Dread – Dreadzone

School Camping Trips. Dorset, always Dorset. Once I peed in my tent and didn’t tell anyone.

Teardrop – Massive Attack

Late teen late night after parties from raving in Sussex Fields. Mind altering substances may or may not have been involved.

Pitseleh – Elliott Smith

A painful break up that I thought I’d never recover from. Tried to escape by running off to Japan and this was the only album I had to listen to on my mp3 player.

Wraith Pinned to the Mist and other games – Of Montreal

Living above pub days with my friend Matt. Lord Kitchener also gets an honourable mention here.

One of those days – The Electric Soft Parade

Fondly remember singing on this track and doing a live session for BBC Radio 6 #humblebrag

I hope that I don’t fall in love with you – Tom Waits

The song that I listened to when Jules and I were getting together.

Something Stupid – Trashpour4

The song I listened to after Jules and I got together

Fancy – Iggy Azalea

We listened to this at bathtime every night for the first year of Iggy’s life. I’m pretty good at the rap now.

After our announcement last week, I got quite a few emails. Some were requests, some ideas, some questions. And quite a few were asking me how I approach the slug problem. 

Let me explain. On the patio, I have a little germination greenhouse where, too early and too enthusiastically, I planted trays of kale, herbs, leaves, and lettuces. They came up nicely, got planted out and then almost disappeared to the slugs in a short, distressing week. Walking back up from my evening class in the office, I would pick a fresh crop of slugs, dispose of them, and find the same an hour later. As Iggy would say, “Daddy sad.”

So I went to war. I strimmed the grass, I surrounded the beds with herb plants. I sprayed two litres of strong coffee around. I put down slug pellets and beer traps. A short Google will give you many ways to repel the slimy little beggars. The evidence is thin and contradictory, but the principles seem sound. Give them fewer places to hide, fill the garden with things they dislike, and, where necessary, murder them. Try many things, but never assume you know which one is working. 

Last night as I walked up from the office late, I shone my phone torch onto the raised beds. Not a slug in sight. The Chinese kale is growing pretty high. The rocket is recovering, the mixed leaf ready to harvest. I am feeling more confident about planting out my squashes and cucumbers. It seems I have won.

But neat though that is, it is not the end. I am anticipating a summer of tomato blight, powdery mildew, aphids, drought, and persuading a two-year-old to not eat that. Because a garden will never do exactly what you want it to do. Your carefully researched measure will fail or succeed completely independent of how much work it took. And a new problem will appear just as you master the old. It’s an ecosystem that you are a part of, not a puppet you control. Often the next step will emerge not from your brain, but from what is there. Some things will grow that you never expected to, some things will refuse to. Humbleness must be constantly refreshed. 

And that’s how Heather and I want to approach the expansion of AndAlso’s classes and the new relationship with the Maydays. Both in Brighton and online. With energy, sure, but also with humbleness. Anyone who has ever met us will know that we are not short of ideas. Date night descends into a brainstorming meeting and a beer after class will have us scribbling notes. We’re going to try a bunch of things, see what grows, and accept that some plants just don’t like the climate. So below you will find ten things which we plan to do over the next year. I expect six or seven of them will happen.

1. A new syllabus for Brighton classes
2. Experienced player classes
3. A Brighton scenework drop in 
4. An expansion of online classes
5. More retreats and intensives for people not in Sussex
6. Blogs and podcasts
7. A Brighton venue (more on that very soon)
8. A jam night
9. Weekly themes for drop ins
10. That thing you suggest at our survey right here