On Monday I joined in on a rehearsal of Bilingual Improv Group, or BIG. BIG has improvisers from all over the world, not only from China, but from New Zealand, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and many other nations I’ve not yet been able to pin down accents from. Playing with them has been a blast so far and I’ve been invited to join as a guest performer at one of their next upcoming shows.
Bilingual improv, in a word, is hard. Improvisation as an art requires establishing a total connection with the fellow performers on stage. Good improvisers get out of their own head and into the head of the others on stage, but this gets harder when you’re trying to connect with someone of a different culture. Who knows how they might respond to something? And also, who knows if they have the linguistic fluency to be able to display their reaction?
Onstage, there was still lots of room for improvement from a technique standpoint, but the games were funny, and more than once we found ourselves falling out of our chairs laughing. One of the best parts of the night was during a game called Forward-Reverse, where the host can call “reverse!” to make the actors rewind their actions and repeat all their lines in a backwards order. In one game, a BIG actor named Julian started a scene as a hunched-over nun, and at one point, the scene reversed to before the scene’s starting point. Julian exited the stage from where he’d entered at the beginning, mimed putting on some night clothes, and got into bed. Of course, when the host called “forward!” and the scene reversed again, Julian repeated each of his actions in reverse, meaning instead of putting on clothes at the beginning of the scene he took them off. Which meant, of course, the original scene had all taken place with him completely naked, with none of us any the wiser. Half of the troupe was on the ground laughing.
Practicing improv in Chinese is fabulous practice: by making the easy things hard, it makes the harder things easier by comparison. When I returned to some English scenes, I felt instantly connected to my same-language performer. Performing in Chinese doesn’t feel like being trained to ride a bike by attaching training wheels; rather, it feels like learning how to ride a unicycle and then being shown that a regular bike has two wheels to begin with.
I also had a chance at this rehearsal to confront one of my bilingual improv fears, what I call the “on-the-spot noun nightmare”. What if I’m doing a scene in Chinese, and someone points at something and says, “It’s a _______!” This happened in a Chinese language scene with another BIG performer named Xiao Peng. We were neighbors—robber neighbors actually, according to our inspiration—and Xiao Peng came to my house to ask to borrow some bullets. In the garage, I opened a box that I thought was bullets, when he shouted, “手雷！”
Now, I wasn’t exactly sure what that was… so I yelped, looked right at Xiao Peng, and he grabbed the object and pulled a pin out. We stared at it for a moment and then at then both yelled as he chucked the grenade out the window. A quick survey of the other troupe members showed that only one had suspicions I hadn’t known from the beginning what the word for grenade was. By relying on my fellow performer, the scene worked out all right. Still, despite the fact that I found a grenade in a scene and got away with not knowing it was a grenade until it was seconds from exploding, the stress of wondering whether the next word out of my Chinese partner’s mouth might be one I don’t know hasn’t disappeared completely.
Overall, the quality of the performers is inspiring. The Chinese performers, particularly Xiao Peng and Jie Fu who have both performed Xiangsheng, have a distinctive physicality onstage. Hearing the Chinese performers say their lines loud and clear even when they can’t be one hundred percent sure that what they’re actually saying is what they think they’re saying is also inspiring, and it leaves me no excuse not to do the same when I speak in Chinese. I hope that by practicing with these people, I’ll get better and better and in a month or so when I have my first bilingual show I’ll be able to really put something on stage worth watching!