Okay Let’s Do an Improv Post - ZZ Top’s choreography and making physical choices

When improvisers make and commit to physical choices on stage, the audience payoff is always disproportionately large. Just think about the last time anyone on your ensemble got picked up and carried around during a scene. The audience probably went nuts, even if the improv was shit. If the improv was good too, you were probably blowing the roof off the place.

You don’t need to be a brilliant mime or a natural mover on stage to add this layer to your work. It’s entirely a matter of intention. You choose to do it, and to demonstrate my point I can think of no better example than ZZ Top.

Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill have some extremely basic choreography they incorporate into their songs. It’s so simple, just a few cross-steps, pushing their guitars forward at the same time, c’mon they’re old guys at this point. Literally anyone could do it, and there’s honestly nothing that impressive about the moves in and of itself, but anyone will tell you watching Billy and Dusty click into those moves together is what makes a ZZ Top show.

Could they just stand there and play their instruments and have it be great? Sure. Can you just stand there and talk and maybe (maybe!) hold a glass in your scenes and have it still be fun? Sure, I’ve done probably 98% of my scenes like that. But the fact remains the effort/payoff ratio in those 2% of scenes where physical choices played a big role was much easier than any laugh found by being verbal and clever.

So does this mean if you’re a talky player to abandon your style and start flailing your body around in every scene? Of course not. It just means over a 25-minute set, agree with your ensemble that at least one scene will have a physical focus. Put nothing on it beyond that. On the individual level, commit to taking yourself out of your physical comfort zone at least once.

That’s all ZZ Top is doing. They’re making the choice to add this element to their show. Why an audience goes batshit for improvisers being picked up, or improvisers touching in general, is for another post, but the fact is they do.

So just do it. Have that show where you all collectively form an 8-person dragon and fly around on the stage. The edge-of’-your-seat “holy shit they’re really making this up” audience excitement physical work generates is not only available to the Fred Astaire improvisers out there. I wish I did it more, and there’s no real excuse not to.

If ZZ Top can do it, so can you.