March/April 2015 Issue
Photography by Cindy Momchilov
Matt DeCample is the founder of Capital C Consulting in Little Rock. He performs with ImprovLittleRock and The Joint Venture and was spokesman for Gov. Mike Beebe.
There you are, standing in front of them, with the materials you’ve spent weeks carefully preparing. You’ve still got 25 minutes worth of details to go through step by step. And that’s all you have to work with in a room where your audience is already disengaged from you. Unless, that is, you know how to improvise. In this situation, and in many others you’ll face in life, improv can save you.
As a form of comedy, improvisation is different from sketch or stand-up, even though many comedians are also fantastic improvisers. Improv is about reaction and creation. There is no script and no pre-written jokes. Performers take a suggestion and build a scene from it. The comedy is spontaneous and disappears when the scenes end. It is entertainment without a net.
While it’s (hopefully) funny, improv often transcends comedy and can help you in business and in daily life as well.
Improvisation conditions your mind to accept the circumstances around you and run with them. The core concept of improv is, “Yes, and ….” That means accepting whatever is presented to you and building on it. What “it” is can change quickly, and the end result is not as important as the journey to that end. Over time, you lose the regimented thought processes that limit your options and often dictate your instinctive reactions to a situation. This changes with the confidence and comfort you build while interacting with others.
If you allow that to happen, you can become more adept in a field that challenges so many of us: public speaking.
For the first half of my life, public speaking terrified and isolated me. This is ironic, since the fear of public speaking unites people as few other subjects can. Jerry Seinfeld joked that surveys show more people fear public speaking than fear death, meaning “… to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.”
In college, a required public-speaking class broke through my shell, then two years of studying broadcast journalism under some great professors further faded the fears. But what made it fun, what still makes it fun many years and two careers later, was improv.
While I had watched improv and even taken a few workshops, I didn’t discover it fully until my first job in television. Two co-workers, a sports anchor and a sales rep, invited me along to play with their improv troupe. Soon I performed in bookstores and coffee shops, doing private shows for everyone from nuclear scientists to ophthalmologists. It helped me immediately at work, since, along with being a reporter, I was a nightly weather anchor. Weather anchors are the only ones on a news set without a script; they have the forecast and graphics and ad-lib from there.
After moving to Arkansas, and after a few years without improv, I found some new friends and helped them start a troupe. By then I worked in government, where ad-libbing can be … frowned upon. However, improv isn’t just about being able to make things up, it’s about being deft on your feet and being able to think more quickly and effectively.
Let’s go back to that conference room where you’ve lost your audience five minutes into a 30-minute presentation. If you can improvise, you can depart from your prepared work and interact with the audience. Ask them questions, and then use the information in your materials to address topics they bring up. Riff a bit, make a small joke, or two, off the top of your head. The more confidence you have in your unrehearsed interactions, the more included others will feel, and the more inclusive your message can be. And that, above all else, is the spirit of improv.
