This Sunday at 2pm, Hideout wunderkind Tyler Lane is leading a workshop entitled Status Work in Improvisation. If you’re looking to take your scene work to the next level, sign up now because spaces are limited!
We talked with Tyler a little bit about what inspired this workshop and what status in improv means to him.
Hideout: What inspired you to lead this workshop?
Tyler: I use status a lot in my improv, probably more than anyone else I know, because it helps me out so much with understanding what’s going on and what or why things are interesting. In teaching a workshop, I wanted to choose something meaningful to me that I felt I understood well.
Hideout: Why do you think status is so important in improv?
Tyler: Status (as Keith Johnstone describes it in the second chapter of Impro) is something innate to the natural order of things. Things are either acting or being acted upon, and the dynamic shifts of those are intrinsically compelling to humans. We laugh at high-status stupid people when their plans fail and cheer when low-status people go on a difficult journey and succeed. Watching a fight scene, for example, is not fun if it’s just the good guy pummeling the bad guy to death; we want to see a teeter-totter where both hero and villain struggle and edge over each other for dominance until there is a clear winner. Similarly, a scene where the President of the United States falls down a staircase and dies is hilarious, but it wouldn’t be if they were on their way down to comfort their crying child.
Sometimes you’ll see improvisors who tend to play the same way every time, but you can’t really articulate why. People tend towards being either high-status or low-status in real life so they’ll naturally play that way onstage. That means regardless of what voice or physicality their character has, they’ll always have the same kind of relationships and interactions until they’re made aware of it. Acknowledging status means you get a lot more variety in your characters & relationships. This awareness is super important in duos, because if one player is naturally high-status and the other low-status you can really fall into a pattern every scene and not even notice it.
Hideout: What’s your favorite status-centric scene that you’ve seen or done?
Tyler: There’s a wonderful elimination game for Maestro where the players monologue as orphans and the audience chooses which to “adopt”. Recently, Jessica Soos had a leg injury that was near recovery but she had crutches offstage just in case. When it was her turn to come out and speak, she hobbled onstage with them. At that point the winner was clear, and she hadn’t even said anything.
Hideout: What’s your favorite show of status in a movie or TV show?
Tyler: I think It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is a great example of status in comedy; terrible things happen to all the main characters but you laugh instead of feeling bad for them because they’re all very high-status.